Garden Tour 2019

The Art of Pruning Garden Tour:
East Bay Gardens (2019)

The 4th biennial garden tour was held on Sunday, October 6, 2019. Gardens of the East Bay were featured, all beautifully and expertly pruned by APA Certified Aesthetic Pruners Dina Blackwell, Peter Bowyer, Jocelyn Cohen, Grant Foerster, Melissa Hyams, and Randall Lee. This year’s garden tour included an inspiring mix of gardens whose design and plant material range from Mediterranean dry summer and California natives to tropical palms to temperate climate deciduous trees and cottage style perennials. These gardens showcased the universality of aesthetic pruning’s basic principles.

APA Certified Aesthetic Pruner, Eric King, demonstrated his pruning technique twice during the tour day on two container trees at the Fairchild garden. Free raffle tickets for the pruned specimens give-away were handed out during the demonstrations.

SCHOLARSHIPS

A percentage of the garden tour ticket proceeds went to the APA Sachiko Umehara memorial scholarship fund.

As owner of Momiji Nursery in Santa Rosa in partnership with her husband, Mike Umehara, Sachiko was a great advocate of the Aesthetic Pruners Association and had special relationships with many of its pruners. Her spirit lives on in the beautiful maples she grew and nurtured, and are now treasured by many people

Fairchild Garden

Peter’s garden combines tropical plant species, arid succulent species and summer dry Mediterranean species. Textures abound and the way the light plays in his garden, especially at sunset, is a defining feature. The original garden was designed by Planet Horticulture.

APA Certified Aesthetic Pruner, founding member, and past President Grant Foerster has been pruning in Peter’s garden for 6 years, offering him an unusual pruning opportunity. As Grant says, “Peter has several plants that are the only ones of that variety that I work on. I enjoy the fresh challenges the unique material provides me.” In aesthetic pruning, bringing out the essence of a tree, that element that makes the tree unique and of interest, is part of a process made even more special working with something new and unfamiliar. In the front garden, Grant prunes bottle brush, she oak, pineapple guava, redbud, acacia, and the Persian ironwood. And, in the back garden, he prunes the citrus and acacia, espaliers a magnolia grandiflora and a camellia, and has skillfully pruned a Japanese maple to accent a small space in the garden. Grant is a teacher of pruning and bonsai, and specializes in pruning Japanese pines, maples, and small plants in containers.

Interesting specimens in this garden are Chinese banana, beschorneria, aloes, echeveria, bromeliads, leucospermum, grevillea and cussonia, to name a few. For several years now, Grand Lake Ace Garden Center has suggested and supplied many of the plants, and Eduardo Roman and his crew have moved them back and forth around the garden. Along with Grant, they deserve, we are told, full credit for how everything looks today.

Hyams Garden

Melissa is the owner, designer and pruner of her California native and Mediterranean garden. Because most of her prior experience was gardening in temperate climates, including England where she didn’t even own a hose, her challenge for this garden was to create a summer dry garden to conserve water, learn about native and Mediterranean plants and still indulge her plant addiction.

Melissa is also among the newest of the APA’s Certified Aesthetic Pruners and her garden has given her an opportunity to prune California natives and train young trees. With the exception of the flannelbush ‘tree’ in the front garden, the back garden mayten tree which is pruned by APA Certified Aesthetic Pruner, Eric King, the climbing roses and Japanese weeping maple, the garden’s plantings are only 4 years old. Aesthetic pruning necessitates considering the garden context and ‘reading’ a garden. This garden was designed and is pruned to frame the natural environment of hills and open sky and screen the surrounding built environment. Melissa regularly prunes the various manzanita, ceanothus, coffeeberry, and silk tassel, among others. And the “dreadful” flannelbush which, as she explains, “I spend weeks working up the enthusiasm each year to prune the flannelbush. With its nasty fuzz it can only be approached in a hazmat suit and face mask.” Her favorite native plants, California buckwheat, need no pruning.

Take notice of the depression in the middle of the back garden. It is a rain garden. The depression and surrounding small berms allowed for a bit of topography in this otherwise flat landscape, but its purpose is to receive rain water from the garage roof gutter where it is absorbed by the soil and percolated back down into the ground water.

Minicozzi Garden

Jim is a lifelong gardener and has had lots of opportunities and challenges since moving here two years ago. The Arts and Crafts house architecture has inspired Jim to maintain formal gardens on part of the property while taking up the challenge of cultivating an English cottage perennial garden in a summer dry Mediterranean setting. Many of the trees, shrubs and vines have been under the care of APA Certified Aesthetic Pruners Peter Bowyer and Katrine Thomas for many years. Peter is now the sole pruner. Landscape designer, Robert Trachtenberg contributed structure, hardscape, and, notably, transitions from core Mediterranean to peripheral California native plantings, to the garden design.

Peter has more than 30 years of experience as a pruner, climbing arborist and landscape designer. Peter built three wire trellises and trained upon them a Lady Banks’ Rose and two wisteria. The three-story tall wisteria is a masterpiece, showcasing Peter’s aesthetic and technical pruning skills; a vine’s verticality is an essential quality which pruners often have to fight against but here Peter has let it flourish. Opposite the wisteria, on the eastern side of the terrace garden, Peter has achieved a layering effect suggesting foothill, cliff and mountain topography using three ranks of plants. They include the rose gate, lemon, hornbeam, English laurel, and three Tobira pittosporum, in clockwise order, enclosing the courtyard. Peter prunes two persimmon trees for short, tapered, scaffold branches, and thins fruit to ensure against breakage. He handles the east courtyard bougainvillea, west courtyard orange, olive and other large hedges in the garden.

The back garden is set in the borrowed landscape of eucalyptus trees and live oak. The foreground floral meadow, centered on the focal point fountain, showcases Jim’s flair with full value primary colors. While strolling around Jim and Karen’s gardens, sit and enjoy the gardens from any of the many seating areas and benches tucked away here and there.

Morishita Garden

Barbara and Leroy Morishita hired landscape designer Shigeru Namba of Berkeley CA in 2011 to work with them on creating a Japanese garden in their Montclair corner property. Mr. Namba is well known for his rock work and rock placement, and with 130 boulders quarried from Mt. Shasta, he created a dry stream with two waterfalls that meanders around and down, producing a serene and verdant landscape.

A garden can tell a story and aesthetic pruning can give each plant a part in the narrative. In Barbara and Leroy’s garden, APA Certified Aesthetic Pruner and current APA President Dina Blackwell prunes each and every plant in this garden to tell the story of a meandering stream; in a wooded landscape, trees and shrubs at the water’s edge reach for sunlight while their roots keep a tenuous hold on eroding soil, and sunlight filtering through foliage casts shadows on stones and the water’s surface. Like all stories and streams, you are compelled to follow around each bend to see where they lead. And so it is with this garden.

From the front door entry gate the viewer is at the bottom of the creek looking upstream toward the small dry waterfall and the bend in the stream framed by plantings of pieris, camellia, loropetalum, and a lion’s head Japanese maple. Upon entering the back gate to the garden, the viewer is treated to the view downstream. The stream’s entry to the garden, symbolized by the weeping red laceleaf maple, spills over the large boulder then flows under the stone bridge. The view downstream is framed by a cherry tree, blue juniper trees, a Japanese black pine, and another weeping red laceleaf maple. Can you hear the stream? The sound you hear at the stream’s origin is a tsukubai washbasin. Walk the path alongside the stream to the bend and admire Dina’s handiwork as you go.

Neary Garden

Bet loves the Japanese garden aesthetic. Her garden was initially designed in the 1990s by Mark Miyasato and later expanded by Mas Imazumi and more recently, Bill Castellon. Randall Lee, APA Certified Aesthetic Pruner, past President and founding member, is a master of pruning conifers and maple trees and other specimens that you will enjoy in this garden. Built into the hillside topography of Bet’s garden is a rich texture of skillfully pruned conifers and maples arrayed along a dry stream and waterfall created by Bill, nestled in a live oak woodland created by nature.

Randall has pruned Bet’s garden for over 20 years. In its earliest days, the garden was pruned by Michael Alliger and Dennis Makishima. Part of the art and craft of aesthetic pruning is anticipating how pruning in the present will influence the development of a tree years into the future. One of Randall’s favorite aspects of Bet’s garden is having had the opportunity to “observe the plants develop and mature into the overall design of the garden.”

There are many beautifully pruned specimens in Bet’s garden. Some of the trees that you will see in this Oakland Hills garden are Japanese black pine, juniper, Japanese maple, hinoki cypress, pieris, loropetalum, apple, plum, thread leaf cypress, camellia, manzanita, and elaeagnus. Note that a few, in particular, draw and hold your eye. These are the focal point trees, one of which is a bottlebrush tree, kept in scale and beautifully pruned by Randall to bring out its essence: its graceful weeping and furrowed bark. When touring Bet’s garden you will also see many of her bonsai. Bet is a bonsai enthusiast and member of the East Bay Bonsai Society, a vocation she shares with Randall.

Schino Garden

Gail enjoys hiking in the nearby East Bay hills and wanted to bring nature and native plants into her garden. Working with Michael Thilgen of Four Dimensions Landscape company, in 2007 she transformed a temperate plant landscape into a California native landscape weaving naturally into the surrounding creekside oak woodland. Except for the mature Japanese maples, the juniper, lawn, and camellias gave way to indigenous plants that would have co-evolved with the earlier pre-existing ecology.

Jocelyn Cohen, APA Certified Aesthetic Pruner with an expertise in California natives, has been pruning in Gail’s garden since 2013. Jocelyn restored the canopy of existing, topped coral bark and laceleaf Japanese maples and prunes all the native trees and shrubs. Although this garden setting is naturalistic and is a habitat for native plants and wildlife, it exists in an urban context where aesthetically pruning for scale and proportion as well as privacy from the street is a key aesthetic pruning principle guiding Jocelyn’s work.

On your stroll through this garden, manzanita species line the pathway to the back garden which brings you to a pond and garden enveloped by California buckeye, live oak, redwood and continues around to redwood and native rhododendron, Garrya elliptica and other native trees and shrubs. The garden contains native ground cover plantings as well as a collection of fruit trees: citrus, apple, persimmon, apricot and plum. Gail’s garden provides habitat for native wildlife and humans alike.