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Over the weekend of May 20-22, a small number of garden enthusiasts joined Bernard Trainor and his compadres to visit gardens in the Monterey area and talk about what makes landscape design sustainable and reflective of the Monterey region. Friday's tour was limited to fifty people and included visits to the Trainor-designed Wind and Sea garden, Esalen, and Post Ranch Inn. Saturday morning featured talks by Dave Fross of Native Sons Nursery, Bernard, and architect Jonathan Feldman, then we visited gardens in the Santa Lucia Preserve in the afternoon before returning together for a lively panel discussion. On Sunday, David LeRoy, Michael Bliss and Casey Lyon of bernard trainor + associates discussed the landscape history of the Monterey peninsula and the process they used to design and build Wind and Sea, then Michele Comeau talked about gardens she has designed and built in the region. After lunch, we returned to the busses for garden visits in Pebble Beach and the Carmel Valley.
The garden is profoundly comfortable, human-scaled, and entirely at home in its place. We learned on the tour and in the lectures that the design process included nights spent camping on the site and even hauling dogs up a rickety ladder from the cliff-face below the garden, that the installation was staged (mostly successfully) to prevent having to get equipment downslope once boulders and steps were put in place, and how the red edges of Aeonium canariensis catch the light and match the red new leaves of Arctostaphylos pajaroensis 'Warren Roberts'.
The weekend was full of lectures and garden tours that meshed together--the lectures informed us about what we were to see, and the tours provided a way to learn more from the garden and house creators at the sites we visited. The organizing team--Dick Turner and Margot Sheffner at Pac Hort along with volunteers Leslie Dean, Andrea Testa-Vought, Bracey Tiede and Susan Bouchez (our MGS-NC branch heads)--kept everything running smoothly throughout the weekend. It was an extraordinary collection of bright minds and creative thinkers, both on stage and in the audience; I felt privileged to take part. Thank you to all who participated.
All of this can be discovered from reading the program listed at Pacific Horticulture's website; what can't be gleaned from the program is what a transformative experience it is to walk in these gardens and to talk with like-minded designers and garden buffs about what make them special. Wind and Sea, for instance, is a garden built on the edge of the world between Highway 1 and the Pacific, clinging to its steep slope, with stone and timber steps snaking up and down the hill. Yet to walk around it is not laborious; there are many spots to stop where the visitor could admire the view, sit in an amphitheater, soak in a tub, or warm herself by a stone firepit (though firepit doesn't seem quite the right term for a flaming boulder like this).
-- Cheryl Renshaw
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