Jane Merryman

I once saw a performance of Mozart’s opera Cosi fan tutte in which the six characters—two sisters of apparently independent means, their scheming boyfriends, an older man of the world, and the sassy chambermaid—romped through what appeared to be an abandoned villa. The walls were a peeling burnt sienna backdrop for a few shabby Empire couches. Diaphanous white curtains drifted in breezes from an invisible sea and French doors stood open to glimpses of an untidy garden.

That bit of scenery beyond the blowing curtains has become my inspiration for the kind of garden I want to have. The abandoned villa look is for me, even though my real garden is at the back of a very lived-in tract house in Northern California. Like the opera’s characters, I live in a Mediterranean climate of cool, wet winters and warm, dry summers, so my fantasy has possibilities.

“Why do you want to create a garden based on a stage set?” asked my friend Barbara. I had to agree that it seemed unnatural, but what garden isn’t an artificial setting?

“That opera set,” I said, “embodied all the images I’ve accumulated over the years, from novels, films, and paintings, of quiet, mysterious places. That’s the mood I’m looking for, not so much lonely as—apart.”

This conceit is not altogether successful because I can’t bring myself to actually desert my garden. . Like a stage designer, I am unwilling to let the players arrange the set to fit their drama. But I have gleaned a few ideas that work. True to my abandoned villa notion, I welcome self-sowers that send out their children where they will, and I go looking for spillers and scramblers like Calibrachoa hybrids and ‘Ann Folkard’ and ‘Frances Grate’ geraniums. I encourage my plants to creep into and around each other.

As early as December, forget-me-nots nose up unchallenged through the thyme and squeeze between the brick pavers. I love the intense electric blue of their tiny flowers in the gray light of winter. Although it’s too early, I begin checking nurseries for my favorite lobelias with the darkest blue flowers. Tucked around the garden, these will be the basso continuo of the summer performance, the background notes for the other shapes and colors that will play their parts. Counterpoints to the lobelias are the carefree pink and white Santa Barbara daisies. Like opera “supers” who create the crowd scenes, these little daisies spill exuberantly over the edges of the paths and boxes, softening straight lines.

Putting aside my pruning shears, I decide to let the rangy lavatera’s soft green leaves flop over the path. I resist the compulsion to sweep away the washed-out lavender flowers that litter the walkway—they are the right touch of faded, forgotten elegance.

Bronze fennel begins to shoot up at the beginning March. A cousin of the “vulgar” Foeniculum I see along country roads in summer, this billow of feathery leaves washed with dark red adds a dash of wildness. Its daughters begin to show up in other parts of the garden. Some are allowed to stay.

On a visit to a winery in April, I come across two long rows of guava trees, gray green leaves arching over an ochre path bordered with gray blue spiky fescue—I can almost see the two sisters strolling there with the boyfriends in their Albanian disguises. Too large a setting for my garden—but I can find a place to use these colors and textures.

I rescue an ageing full-length mirror and place it against the back wall, partly hidden by a chorus of viburnum. It makes my eye see a garden that extends much farther away from the house, into an unbelievable space that my mind knows to be a busy street. Visitors are intrigued by this illusive landscape, and more than a few of the bushtits that troop through the shrubbery have been smitten with the lovely birds that live in the mirror.

Bamboos, which I keep for their graceful, exotic shadows, must live in containers lest the neighbors complain of their wandering habit. Salvias make up for the tamed bamboos. The new Salvia gesneraeflora ‘Tequila’ is becoming suitably unkempt, stalks growing every which way to ten feet or more, its lipstick-red tubular flowers as saucy as a chambermaid.

Summer evenings I enjoy sitting in my garden, a worthy setting for the two sisters in love. In a moment Don Alfonso will enter stage right with a message . . . .

(This essay first appeared in Fine Gardening, June 2003.)