Photograph by Kathy De La Torre

This bird of paradise is in the garden of Lynn and George Rossman.

Green Party

Annual garden tour invites a celebration of landscape design

By Leigh Ann Maze

As all passionate gardeners know, gardening is good exercise, good therapy, good for the soul--and once a year in Los Gatos, it's good charity. Community members will have a chance to tour five local gardens during the fourth annual Los Gatos Spring Garden Tour on May 13, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. The tour, organized by St. Luke's Episcopal Church, raises funds for local and countywide organizations that help the homeless, unemployed and elderly, as well as those in need of medical attention. In years past more than 500 people have taken the tour, raising more than $10,000.

This year the tour will benefit A Place for Teens and the Live Oak Nutrition Center in Los Gatos, as well as the Georgia Travis/Inn Vision Women's Shelter and the Santa Maria Urban Mission, both in San Jose.

A light lunch, dessert, lemonade and tea will be catered at the church, which offers a Spanish courtyard and sanctuary as part of the tour. There will also be a drawing for prizes at St. Luke's.

The idea for the tour came from Steve and Julia Conway several years ago. It was inspired by similar tours they used to enjoy elsewhere in California. They also realized there were no local garden tours, only home tours. They pitched the idea to St. Luke's rector, the Rev. David Breuer, who liked the idea, as did many parishioners. And the tour has been a success ever since.

"It's a pleasure to be able to do this bit of charity and have it be so successful in the town," Steve Conway said.

The garden tour will include a stop at St. Luke's where visitors will enjoy the serenity of the courtyard garden while partaking in a light lunch.

Photograph by Kathy De La Torre







Saint Luke's Courtyard

St. Luke's own Spanish-style courtyard, a walled-in garden sanctuary reminiscent of the children's book, The Secret Garden, becomes one of the gardens on the tour while serving as a resting place for a light lunch. Although a busy shopping center is just on the other side of the stucco and tile walls, one can easily forget it is there.

The sounds of traffic and slamming car doors are softened by chirping birds and the trickling of water in the two-tiered fountain.

In the garden one can stroll the brick pathway lined with neatly trimmed hedges or wander through a wisteria-covered pergola. Or sit at one of several picnic tables and benches to reflect and relax. Much of the garden is shaded by several immense oak trees.

"I tried to create kind of an oasis where people can come and rest and relax for a little bit in the middle of a busy day," said Layne Sanda, St. Luke's groundskeeper who is responsible for the beautiful courtyard garden. Sanda was baptized on Easter Sunday at the church about 10 years ago, and has since been creating the garden.

A green carpet of lawn is shaded by a large tree. Down a hedge-lined brick pathway one can see many small headstones in the columbarium among beds of creeping strawberry vines. Along the garden walls, too, are memorial plaques. In one sunny corner of the courtyard is a large wooden cross surrounded by red roses and petunias, with jasmine climbing up the wall.

The arched doorways in the courtyard walls always have open doors, inviting anyone into the garden who wants to escape from the busy street outside.

In the 4 1/2 years they've been in their home, Jeanne and Steve Lyons have transformed a steep, dry slope into a Tuscan fantasy, complete with vineyard.

Photograph by Kathy De La Torre







The Lyon's Garden

When Steve and Jeanne Lyon bought their Los Gatos home 4 1/2 years ago, it was high on a hot, dry slope with no landscaping to speak of. Over the years they have transformed the slope, which angles down at a very steep grade from their backyard, into stepped gardens and a tiny vineyard from which they produce their estate wine, Lyon's Pride.

Their back deck commands a beautiful view of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Trelliswork on the deck provides some protection from the sun. Potted flowers attract several bold and feisty hummingbirds that noisily chase each other around the yard and often bathe in one of several fountains in the garden. A spiral staircase leads from the deck to the slate walkway below.

One can stroll along the walkway past flowering plants of all varieties and a small fountain and pond full of lily pads and black-widow irises.

A few steps down the hill--there are lots of steps in this garden--is a large almond tree producing a bountiful crop that the Lyons inevitably share with the resident squirrel who lives in a nearby oak.

An herb garden is in the midst of being planted just above the tiers of cabernet and merlot grapes which will be harvested for wine later this year. On the opposite side of the garden several tiers of chardonnay grapes are also beginning to bear fruit.

Down a few more steps and across a wooden footbridge, a greenhouse is in the works where the Lyons plan to grow orchids and an assortment of tropical plants.

Along the shady side of the house is an English-style garden with cool trees and a carpet of shade-loving plants covering the ground.

In front of the house is another fountain and tiny pond with lily pads and blooming water plants guarded by egret statues. If you are lucky enough to go by the Lyon's home in the evening you can't miss the chorus of frogs singing in the pond.

Paul and Kay Fireman's strolling and touring garden includes a dry creek bed and pond.

Photograph by Kathy De La Torre







The Fireman's Garden

Paul and Kay Fireman's garden in Saratoga can best be described as a glass of aged wine or a piece of fine art--inspiring, unique and graceful. A masterpiece.

The garden, which takes up the better portion of an acre, is not your typical garden. It was designed by landscape architect Richard McPherson as a strolling and viewing garden, focusing around wild grasses instead of flowers or vegetables.

"I wanted to create a network of destinations that offer constant and unfolding views of the garden," said McPherson, who specializes in residential garden design. He began designing the garden about seven years ago as, "an adult garden for quiet conversation and contemplation."

This pond, with waterfall, is a feature of the Paul and Kay Fireman garden.

Photograph by Kathy De La Torre







One can stroll the path that winds its way by the large pond and even larger cascading waterfall where, Paul Fireman says, egrets come and eat the fish. And if you are lucky you may catch a glimpse of the shy turtle that lives in the pond. The path winds through a 70-foot-long redwood pergola covered in wisteria with a teak bench-swing. A dry creek bed flows under the path and broadens into a "dry pond", taking the place of a conventional lawn.

The nearly 30 types of grasses offer dramatic and contrasting textures, colors, heights and shapes, each with their individual flowers.

The Paul and Kay Fireman yard was designed as a strolling and viewing garden.

Photograph by Kathy De La Torre







Flowering perennials are also planted throughout in shades of blue, purple, lavender, magenta and a few touches of white and orange.

About one seventh of the acre was planted to look like a natural meadow with grasses and a peppering of wildflowers. A ring of poplars at the edge of the meadow surround a stone bench with views across the garden.

The garden has been featured in several UC Extension classes and magazine articles, including the upcoming September-October issue of Fine Gardening.


Photograph by Kathy De La Torre

Lynn and George Rossman have a small garden, but after 27 years in the making, it is picture perfect. Among the features are this backyard pond.




The Rossman's Garden

You don't need to have a huge yard to have a beautiful garden, and after 27 years in the making, Lynn and George Rossman's garden is proof of that.

Visitors arriving at the house are greeted by more than 30 rose bushes blooming in all different colors. A blue stone walkway leads to the front door, where a stucco wall creates a Mediterranean-style courtyard with a fountain and a large, old olive tree providing shade. But this is only the introduction. In the backyard the Rossman's garden has a little bit of everything from fruit trees to vegetables to flowers to a rock garden and a pond, all beautifully tied together.

The large koi pond has a waterfall and wooden bridge and blooms of handmaiden iris, papyrus, horsetail, fortnight lily, cast-iron plant and umbrella palm. Surrounding the pond are blue spruce, ornamental asparagus, fatsia japonica, Japanese maples, red flowering maples, kaffir lilies and ferns.

A stone bench under a large cedar offers a pleasing vantage point to view the pond and enjoy the sounds of the waterfall.

There is a blue stone patio, a lawn, a rock garden and many varieties of trees in the garden as well. Straddling one corner of the yard is a huge old persimmon tree that delivers a bright, orange bounty of fruit every fall, according to Lynn Rossman.

Take a left at the huge bird of paradise to the side of the house and find several varieties of fruit trees, dahlias, gladiola and pair of towering white birch trees that the Rossmans planted years ago when the trees were only saplings.

There seems to be at least one of every kind of fruit tree throughout the Rossman's yard--apple, plum, cherry, orange, apricot, tangerine and pear.

The garden is a testament to the great variety and diversity that can found in one that is relatively small in size.


Photograph by Kathy De La Torre

Lana Malloy's cottage includes a garden where one can sit on a chair and enjoy the view.




The Malloy Garden

The roses and columbines in Lana Malloy's colorful cottage garden spill over the white picket fence around her yard, visible to those passing on the busy Los Gatos-Saratoga Road. Those stray flowers attracted the eye of Steve Conway, who approached Malloy as she sat on the front porch of her 105-year-old Victorian home one day to ask if she would show her garden in the Los Gatos Spring Garden Tour.

Malloy is now busy preparing her garden to share with the community. "It is typical with a cottage garden to try and plant every square inch of dirt, to crowd everything in as close as possible," Malloy says.

She has accomplished that goal, by the looks of her crowded flower beds surrounding the front lawn. They spill over with snapdragons, pansies, English daisies, hollyhocks, and monkshood among many other colorful varieties.


Photograph by Kathy De La Torre

In the tradition of the cottage garden, the Malloy yard boasts an abundance of colorful blooms crowded close together.




Around the side and back of the house, more flowers cover the edges of an island of lawn that Malloy would cover with a thick carpet of flowers if not for her husband Dennis', insistence on keeping it. Beds of dahlias, a wall of trumpet vine, sweet peas, calla lilies and hydrangea. A recently remodeled pergola supports the burden of a 50- to 60-year-old climbing rose in bloom. The pergola shades a brick patio with a wicker chair, Malloy's "Tea Garden."

For Malloy, who says that for some people gardening is just in their blood, gardening itself is peaceful. "I'll look at my watch thinking I've been in the garden 15 minutes and two hours have gone by," she said.

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Tickets for the Los Gatos Spring Garden tour are $20 in advance and $25 on the May 13 tour date. For tickets or further information, call 408.376.0609. Tickets are color-coded to indicate the starting place for the tour, so participants will not all land in the same garden at the same time.

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