Sometimes as a garden lover you just want the sight of a beautiful garden -– that sweeping view of plants and space and color and form all working together to create that ephemeral thing we call a beautiful garden. Could be a cottage garden, could be a Japanese garden, could even be a kitchen garden -– doesn’t matter –- it just has to be lovely to look at in your eyes. Yes, we want healthy soil, yes, we want healthy plants, yes, we want sustainable and regionally appropriate gardens, but let’s face it –- what most of us gardeners are after is pure beauty. Which in gardens as in people, is much more than skin deep. Photo: A view down a long Mixed Border at Skylake Gardens in Durham. The border works together as a whole unit with colors and shapes repeated through the trees, shrubs and herbaceous perennials that Christy has chosen. The most noticeable repetitions change throughout the year as different combinations of plants come to the fore, and then fade back. The rounded Carolina Cherry shrubs form the protective and aesthetic backdrop for the border.
One sure way to get that killer Cover-of-a-Glossy-Garden-Magazine effect is with a well-designed Mixed Border. A Mixed Border can be a gardener’s best friend in terms of garden design elements. Done well, it will give you pause for admiration over and over again throughout the gardening year.
Mixed Borders are perhaps a bit more difficult to implement than glossy magazine photos might suggest, but they are also not so difficult that you should not consider one in your next garden, or your next garden makeover. Where an Herbaceous Border relies almost completely on herbaceous perennials (flowering plants that die back to the ground in winter but return again each spring) and is far and away strongest in the peak summer months, and an Annual Bedding relies on fresh annual plantings each summer, or even two or three times a summer, a Mixed Border is just that: a section of the garden that consists of a mix of all kinds of garden plants, including trees, shrubs, sub-shrubs, vines, perennials annuals and bulbs, all designed to work together as a whole. Photo: A small planting combination in the formal White Garden and patio area just off the back of Gail Brown’s house. This garden was planned not only to be predominantly white, featuring white flowers or white foliage, but also to be especially fragrant. The structural backbone trees and shrubs include a white treed-up Wisteria, and white-edged holly leafed Osmanthus, and many, many white roses. Here white Watsonia is center and pops beside the red foliage of a Berberis.
Christy Santos is a gardener, garden designer and owner of One of a Kind Design based in Chico. She has worked with plants and gardens in the Central Valley for over 30 years. Christy is a masterful gardener and designer and wherever possible she uses a Mixed Border in her garden designs. “They are just so interesting –- dramatic even -– the seasonal changes create year-round interest.” Photo: Christy Santos (left) and Gail Brown (right) with Gail’s canine companions Paris and Sky cavorting around. The women stand beside a white rose-covered arbor leading from the White Garden into the rest of the gardens. The white flowering treed-up Wisteria is the blooming focal point to the right behind them.
Christy recently walked me around Gail Brown’s Skylake Gardens in Durham. Christy and Gail met in the early 1990s when Gail moved to the North State from a small lot in Southern California. She had a plan for her new garden from a Bay area designer, and Christy was recommended to her by Bryan Hanson -– then manager of Christian & Johnson Nursery and now of Hanson & Hanson Landscapes. Christy said she would be happy to work with Gail on the project, but that Gail would need to let her adapt the plan and the plants it called for based on her knowledge of what would and wouldn’t work in our area. Christy laughed thinking back about it: “Whoever chose the plants on that original design had never experienced a North State summer,” she told me. Photo: A view to the Upper Garden with its long, semicircular borders embracing the visitor like a floral amphitheater. Its strong trees and undulating pattern of repetitions is planting genius.
The two women have now been collaborating on the 3-acre garden for 15-plus years. The gardens, which consist of more than six distinct garden ‘rooms’ or areas, is almost completely made up of mixed borders, with different color, plant palettes or themes in each room. Photo: Where the Upper Garden invites you to sit and picnic on the grass, watch the breeze play through the border or nap in its peaceful, sheltering space, the winding paths and inability to quite see all around the next corner of the Rose Garden invites movement and an exciting sense of discovery.
Set picturesquely against a man-made water-ski lake that is the focal point of the neighborhood, Skylake Gardens began with intense work by Christy on two areas of the garden: the White Garden, which wraps around a sitting patio off the kitchen, and the Upper Garden, which is an expansive horseshoe shaped mixed border surrounding a Great Lawn area, punctuated by an island bed in the middle. Over time the garden expanded an area at a time to include an enclosed Kitchen Garden, a Rose Garden, a Parterre Garden, and three distinct Knot Gardens, and an Orchard. Lakeside Garden Walk runs down the side of the lake to a neighboring house and the ladies have at least one more space in the works as I write. Photo: The formal Parterre Garden overlooks the water-ski lake and has a very sophisticated, worldly and classic feel to it, as though you might actually be sitting in a small corner of the Jardin Du Luxembourg in Paris.
Christy’s advice on how to go about designing a mixed border: “Well, once you know what space you have to work with, I think the important thing in beginning to think about a mixed border is to first choose your backbone plants – the trees and shrubs that will hold their structure and space all year, for many years. These create a sense of permanence, structure and height to the border. I generally make quite of few of these evergreen so that they form a nice backdrop against which flowering plants will stand out, or vines will crawl up, and they also give a sense of enclosure year-round making the space distinctly its own. In the case of the Skylake Gardens, there was nothing there to start with, and the winds and sun were unrelenting across the open space. So the trees and shrubs I chose were in part for background and enclosure but also in large part for protection.” Photo: A specific flowering combination in the Upper Garden demonstrates how Christy carefully orchestrates trifectas of plant combinations that will bloom at the same time and complement each other in color or form: here the purple-blue of Siberian Iris in the forefront, behind and to the right, cascading over the rocks, are the delicate purple-pink of geranium, and behind these are a tall paler-pink rose.
“Then move to your color palette -– which in Skylake Gardens is predominantly pink and blue, with some accents of purple or plants with burgundy foliage which make pink and blue pop out.” A mixed border can be as high- or low-maintenance as you want it to be, depending on what kinds of under-story plants you choose. While Christy’s designs look high-maintenance, they really need two big clean-ups or cutbacks a year and intermittent tweaking/weeding/deadheading to stay looking good. “Although,” she says not without humor, “you could work in them all day every day if you wanted to!” Photo: Coming around a corner of the Rose Garden, the entrance to the hedge-enclosed Kitchen Garden is seen ahead.
“Repetition of plant color, plant shapes –- such as spiky or mounded –- and varying heights and depths to the border as you move along it, will help the whole border work together as a unit.” When deciding on her plants, Christy almost always includes grasses for summer texture and movement as well as winter form in her borders, and she likes masses of spring flowering bulbs. Gail Brown likes roses, so Skylake Gardens has many, many roses. Christy also looks for “high performing plants,” those that have more than one season of interest –- so spring or summer flower and fall color, or spring or summer flower and winter berries or winter branch patterns, etc. Mapping out the seasonal timing of when a plant flowers or is most interesting also helps to make sure that there is good color and interest throughout the year, she points out. “One of the most exciting things for me is to choose one plant and then choose a different plant that flowers at the same time so that they complement one another in triplets or more. For instance, a yellow yarrow with a blue salvia and a peachy colored rose all blooming at the same time make for a stunning combination running throughout a border. In this way, different combinations come forward throughout the seasons.” Photo: One of the design aspects I like about Skylake Gardens is the interplay between very formal elements, such as the rose-covered arbor, and standard rose forms, seen here center, which are then softened, relaxed and enlivened by the mounding, creeping naturalistic plantings dancing around their feet.
Finally, Christy talks about determining what feel you want in the space you have –- she and Gail point out that the large, rounded open space of the Upper Garden is peaceful partly because you can take in almost the whole garden in one view and yet you are embraced by the large trees and shrubs that form the background of the borders, while in the narrower winding pathways of the Rose Garden there is a sense of discovery and excitement as you move along. Color palettes also work on the “feel,” with hot reds and oranges and yellows being more exciting, and pinks and blues and purples generally being more “peaceful and serene.” Photo: A soft planting combination of blue and white along the lake’s edge.
Once you’ve gotten the conceptual ideas in mind, then get down to individual plant combinations, grouping plants by similar water and soil requirements. Christy and Gail work hard to minimize the resources required by such a large garden. While one of Christy’s signatures is the use of interesting and unusual perennials in her gardens, she uses good drought tolerant Mediterranean-climate plants as well as California natives extensively in her designs. Even with the higher maintenance plants like roses, she carefully designs the drip irrigation system and the placement of the plants to reduce the need for more water than necessary. Christy is also strong advocate for all natural/organic compost — which they create on-site with the tons of yard waste produced annually by the gardens mixed with manure from the ranch’s horses. Christy and Head Gardener Leo Bottello use the compost as a good soil supplement and plant food — top dressing the borders once or twice a year. At Skylake Gardens they have rarely (maybe twice in all the years of the garden) needed to use any systemic pesticides or fungicides, preferring instead to take good care of the soil, plants and garden hygiene and let the garden bugs and microorganisms balance themselves.
“Any garden is a work in progress,” Christy points out, “But this is perhaps especially true of Mixed Borders – each year as they come out of winter dormancy you look at them fresh and you see you have lost something over there, or that something has gotten too big and interrupts the flow, or you might like a little more of that color just there to balance things out. It’s fun to just play around a little each season. It’s a process.” Photo: A view through an arbor looking from the Kitchen Garden back to the house.
For many years Christy provided most of the long, hot gardening hours of maintenance at Skylake Gardens but now works as a seasonal consultant and adviser with Leo Botello. Skylake Gardens has been featured on the St. John’s Annual Garden tour at least two times and multiple other garden tours as well. Photo: Christy likes the strength and movement provided by ornamental grasses. Here a Miscanthus holds the center with movement and light, while a Japanese Blood Grass’ red tips reach up at the bottom of the photo – the steady green of Rosemary mediates between them and a pink flowering rose adds soft color to vignette.
Over the years, the gardens have hosted many a wedding and party, and this year, Skylake Gardens officially became a special-occasion event center. For more information go to: skylakegardens.com, email skylakeranch@aol.com or call: 530-898-8759.
To contact Christy Santos at One of a Kind Design call: 530-342-8797
Some good books on Mixed Border design and maintenance include:
A Pattern Garden, Valerie Easton; Timber Press, 2007 (One of Christy’s favorite gardening books, btw).
Succession Planting for Year-Round Pleasure, Christopher Lloyd; Timber Press, 2005
The Well-Tended Perennial Garden, Tracy Di Sabato-Aust; Timber Press, 1998
The Border in Bloom, Ann Lovejoy; Sasquatch Press, 1990
In a North State Garden is a radio- and web-based educational outreach program of the Gateway Science Museum – Exploring the Natural History of the North State, based in Chico, California. In a North State Garden celebrates the art, craft and science of home gardening in California’s North State region. The program is conceived, written, photographed and hosted by Jennifer Jewell – all rights reserved jewellgarden.com. In A North State Garden airs on Northstate Public Radio KCHO/KFPR radio, Saturday mornings at 7:34 AM Pacific time and Sunday morning at 8:34 AM Pacific time. Podcasts of past shows are available here.
