Garden Guru
Design March 4th, 2010
Power grew up in the tidewater of Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware, went to a finishing school in Italy, and started off her professional life as an interior designer in Manhattan. It wasn’t until she moved to Santa Monica twenty years ago that she had her first garden. Hers was such a success that friends begged her to help them with theirs and she found her true calling. Since then she’s designed gardens at a private vineyard (Moraga Vineyard, a project she considers her best), the sculpture garden at the Norton Simon Museum, a public park in the center of the Beverly Hills shopping district (the Beverly Canon Garden), and countless private gardens in places as far flung as Germany (for a project with frequent collaborator Frank Gehry) and Australia.
Power’s friend Suzanne Rheinstein, the interior designer and owner of Taigan’s own Hollyhock, says the key to Power’s brilliance is that “she knows how to live. Sunday lunches at her own garden, one of my favorites, are delightful.” Power agrees that she does “bring my knowledge of how people like to live in clusters” into her designs. “Look at the chairs after a party,” she says. “They’re always pulled into a tight circle. Or everyone always crowds around the kitchen table. Those are the perfect floor plans!”
The same, she says, applied to public spaces. “Look at the Beverly Canon Gardens. You can’t be intimate when you are more than five feet away, you have to be able to touch, which is why I love to crowd nine or ten people around a table for seven or eight. Giggling always starts when you play sardines!” The Beverly Canon Gardens include a sunken court with movable tables and chairs so “people can move their seats according to the weather,” and four Tipu trees create dappled light over some of the tables.
The Beverly Canon Project also has a lawn for play or special events, trickling water from a fountain “to calm the nerves and slightly mask the sounds of the city,” and lovely fragrance from the blossoms of potted lemon trees. All three elements are in keeping with her theory that public spaces should be designed for a range of experiences. “One simple way to do that,” she says, “is to provide light and dark places—some secluded and mysterious, others for parading around and showing off, and always a place to gather.”
In her book, Power says that travel served as her university education. Her own garden at “Casa Nancina” was inspired by trips to the Alhambra in southern Spain and to Brazil. To get the right color for her cottage’s exterior, she experimented by mixing some saffron she’d brought home from Morocco with water. “I’d seen this color used so exquisitely in Seville, Spain and Ouro Petro, Brazil,” she says. “It looked beautiful against the sky, and also worked equally well with terra cotta pots and the grays and verdant foliage I wanted to plant in my garden.”
Power insists she doesn’t have a favorite plant or flower, though there’s lots of agave at Casa Nancina. “The agave has become my symbol,” she says. “It provides great living sculpture, and of course tequila comes from it as well!” No matter what plants she uses or who she’s designing for, the one constant, she says, is beauty. “Beauty is still very important to me, though lately it is very unfashionable in design. We all need beautiful, natural places in our lives, and become very uncivilized when we don’t have them.”
The Power of Gardens, available at Hollyhock, is aptly named. There is not a single image in the book that won’t inspire. Power says her job designing and nurturing living gardens still brings her “never-ending joy and wonder.” That passion is evident on every page.
Pictured above, left: Native oaks lightly shade California Lilac along a winding path at Moraga Vineyard.
Top right: A free range chicken on “tapis vert” framed by low stone steps and a wisteria covered arbor at Moraga Vineyard.
Bottom right: A garden “room” featuring Kentia palms and a very long pool at a house in Malibu.
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