Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Landscape designer Alrie Middlebrook created the healing garden at the Women's Cancer Center at Community Hospital of Los Gatos.

Butterflies Are Free

It took Middlebrook five years to convince a hospital CEO on the merits of her healing garden

By Suzanne Cristallo

What makes landscape designer Alrie Middlebrook different from other horticulturists is her ability to convince people of the merits of a garden that appeals to all the senses, sometimes in spite of its maintenance and cost.

She is an artist. Her company, Middlebrook Gardens, provides her with a major avenue of expression. "In the 17th century, gardening was considered one of the high art forms along with poetry, dance, cooking and painting," she explains.

These days, however, she finds too many people are "just tuned out." For her, these people present a challenge. "My purpose is to help people reconnect with nature," she says.

But a fact of doing business in a competitive world is that she is often faced with people who are interested in a low-maintenance, token planting around a building, not high art form or even one that appeals to most of the senses. Their intent is to simply cover the bare earth while respecting the bottom line.

"There are too many things some people are valuing over nature," she notes. "There are so many dominant messages driving them--money things, need for approval by the clan." Her wish is to bring nature closer to each of us by letting us hear the calls of birds, see the colors of native plants, feel the softness of leaves, smell and taste the freshness of herbs.

One of her biggest triumpths is the Healing Garden at the Community Hospital of Los Gatos.

Located within the Women's Cancer Center, the garden is divided into three parts. The approach to the center is over a raised cement walkway surrounded by the Woodland Garden. Mature redwood trees shade rhododendrons, azaleas, Pacific Coast iris, native ferns, California bush poppy, primrose and foxglove. A dry creekbed meanders beside the walkway. Stones and protruding rocks are softened by natural grasses.

An iron gate with butterflies painted by Los Gatos artist Amy Konsterlie swings open to the Hummingbird Garden, an inner garden of California buckwheat and butterfly bush--flowering plants that attract hummingbirds. A third garden, the Butterfly Garden, can be seen by patients from their beds in the Women's Cancer Center. Through the drooping boughs of the Australian paperbark tree, they can see garden sculpture and a shaded, curving path. Each room opens to its own small patio with flowering vines to create a feeling of privacy.

"It makes you think positive thoughts," says Rebecca Reese, who visits her mother, Ruth, at the hospital every day. Ruth is being treated for ovarian cancer. "She walks in the garden almost every day. It helps to forget the bad things."

Life for a cancer patient can be filled with treatment procedures. "The garden gives respite from the poking and probing and IVs of hospital life," says Joni Benton, an oncology social worker at the center. "Patients are dealing with their mortality all of the time. To sit in the garden and see the evolution of life in the cycle of a flower from bud to wilt is to realize there is more to life than being a cancer patient. I tell patients they are someone beyond the diagnosis. ... Walking in the garden reminds them of this. It allows a reconnection that helps them get through it all."

The garden did not evolve quickly. "I worked on the CEO for five years," laughs Middlebrook, referring to Truman Gates, who headed the hospital in the early '90s. It took time because it meant changing the thinking and priorities of an administration that did not view a garden as important to the bottom line.

Middlebrook, however, had become aware of how important a garden can be when she read about the work of Roger Ulrich of the University of Texas who had conducted a study of gallbladder patients. Half the hospitalized group in the study looked from their beds at a brick wall. The other half viewed a simple garden. The study showed that the patients who saw the garden had a faster recovery and a shorter hospital stay.

A foot in the hospital door came for Middlebrook when she was asked to design the hospital's main-entry garden. "This opportunity came only because Mrs. Gates--who believes in gardens as I do-- prevailed upon the CEO," Middlebrook says with a chuckle.

The first chore was to remove the plantings that have gained favor with institutions everywhere--lawn, ivy, privots, oleander and junipers. "It's true those plants can stand pests and undisturbed soil, but they're so boring!"

She replaced them with colorful annuals, ferns and plants with a softening, warm and inviting effect. "Maybe people couldn't pinpoint what it was that affected them, but I hoped the garden would make them feel more comfortable."

With the creation of a new wing for the Women's Cancer Center came the opportunity for Middlebrook to do the three center gardens. She was given an $18,000 budget and the CEO's approval.

It's not a low-maintenance garden. The annuals that provide the constant changing color must be replanted every year. It requires special plants that attract insects and birds. But it appeals to all of the senses and is as unique as the Women's Cancer Center it surrounds.

"At first, just the smokers used it," Middlebrook recalls, "but gradually others found their way there." Among them was the marketing staff. "Because patients liked it so much, they used it in their promotions to successfully attract pregnant women to the hospital, who chose to have their babies there--a fact that did not go unnoticed by the CEO."

Others on the staff found their own reasons for going there.

"It's always restful and green," says Gail Machin, a registered nurse in the cancer wing. Machin has been at the hospital for seven years. "We used to look at lots of ugliness--blank walls or parking lots. Now I can see something always blooming. There are doves and a mockingbird, hummingbirds and butterflies. I always wondered how they knew which was their garden, but the butterflies do seem to stay in the butterfly garden."

Middlebrook, of course, knows the secret. She has been discovering nature's secrets for the past 20 years, the time it has taken her to identify and focus her passion.

A Michigan native, she remembers gardening with her mother in the four months of the year when the weather allowed it. "My mother had grown up one of 16 kids, and her father was a truck gardener. He mainly grew--as we did--the gooseberries, rhubarb, raspberries and okra the family ate the whole year. We didn't have any money, so everything we grew was necessary. The heirloom veggies we raised came from the seeds Mom got from her mom."

Tall, blonde and expressive, Middlebrook wanted to be a performer. Instead, right after college, she married David, whom she had known since eighth grade. He went into art and graduate school. She got pregnant. They separated in their 30s, he moving to California and she remaining in Kentucky with two boys, needing a job and wondering what to do with the rest of her life.

Her choices were a nursery job or TV news. An orchid grower gave her a job. "There was nothing on TV, so the die was cast," she laughs. Her life had taken its direction.

She and David reunited in California, moving to Lexington Hills above Los Gatos in 1976. "That was a transitional time for establishing Mediterranean plants in California," she recalls. Her timing was such that she connected with the avant garde professionals in the landscaping field who were making big changes.

Prior to that, gardens were landscaped with plants brought here by the dominant Anglo-Saxon groups of Northern Europe. "They never did well in this climate," she says. But the Mediterranean plants thrived and, along with them, Middlebrook's business, which she then called Interior Plantscape Design, capitalizing on the house-plant craze of the hippie era.

Today, Middlebrook is divorced but remains good friends with ex-husband, David, who is an established stone sculptor. "This family is really into the senses and how they dominate," she says. Eldest son Jason, is a New York artist; son Aaron revels in photography and landscaping. Daughter Tess is into music and comedy.

Even Middlebrook's French bulldog exhibits his sensual proclevity. "Just watch him!" she exclaims, as the small black-and-white pooch presses his nose solidly against the ankle of a visitor, like a magnet to metal. "He's got a lot going for him. When he gets a good smell, he really works at it."

And Middlebrook really works at her beliefs. About her work she says, "We like to think people are moved by what we do, but the real truth is, we're so passionate about what we do, we'd do it anyway."

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