In Burlingame, a shade garden to lift the soul

For The Union-Tribune

In San Diego, what we want are the rays, right? We joke about paying a sunshine tax for living here. When it comes to gardens, we’re as fixated on light exposure as we are about where to buy the best tacos.

But San Diego has its iconoclasts, and Rachel Smith is among them. I met Smith, a retired high school English teacher who lives in a two-story 1912 Craftsman bungalow in Burlingame, at this year’s San Diego Floral Association Garden Tour in May, themed “Urban Havens: Gardens of Historic North Park and Burlingame.”

Smith’s garden was the final stop, and it was a rare, magical shade garden. She created it after moving into the house in 2008. It wasn’t because she didn’t have enough sun; in fact, her backyard has a southern exposure and the front yard, even with its northern exposure, still gets plenty of light.

No, it was a deliberate choice.

“We live in a desert. I wanted shade,” Smith said. “It’s my version of taking advantage of the sun because the trees are so happy,” she explained. “I want to be outside, but I don’t sit in the sun. I’m 80.”

The other predominant design component is that her outdoor space is divided into multiple functional private spaces around the house. It starts with a broad, comfy front porch that stretches across the length of the house, then circles around to a side entrance that opens to what she describes as a sandbox area. Smith built it for her young granddaughters.

The side garden flows into the back, which is the gem of the garden: It features a dining space, a large set of steps leading up to the house, and planting beds filled with shade trees on either side, along with a contemplative seating area. The garden continues with a turn to the other side of the house, past an art studio that was converted from a small garage, to a zen garden space, followed by a conversation area under a massive pergola.

Smith not only enjoys entertaining, especially her daughter and granddaughters, she lives with her younger brother and a housemate. Having separate spaces allows them the choice of gathering together — say, for a meal or late afternoon conversation over her favorite iced tea — or have quiet time on their own or with a friend.

“I grew up with this idea of Jane Austen and those big manor houses where lots of people live. And there was the movie ‘Gosford Park,’ where a whole bunch of people come with their own servants, and there are areas inside the house and out so that various people can be in the garden or in the house, and have their own separate private spaces.”

The outdoor spaces are dominated by canopies of trees you wouldn’t necessarily plant together, but they create a beautiful, calming palette. In the front yard are chunky ponytail palms — what Smith jokingly calls “big foot” — along with ginko trees, a sweeping palo verde tree, an acacia, a pine, and bristly bottlebrush. One of her treasures is a purple smoketree that, for the first time this year, had a proliferation of blooms, which look like dark-pink fuzzy clouds. The trees sit interspersed with clumps of colorful succulents like aeonium, grasses, agaves and sages, among streams of river rock.

“My neighbor Galen Sherwood did all of the original planting front and back,” said Smith. “He has years of gardening experience. In the front there were gray rocks straight across and he said, ‘Let’s create an island with the river runs through it.’ And that one decision just created all the magic you see out here.”

There are also bromeliads, which bloom in pinks and purples and red, and a very mature, thick wisteria that climbs up a column at the front right corner of Smith’s broad front porch.

Then you head to the back, following the river rock path, but it’s not just a passageway. Every foot is deliberately designed. On the left is that large sandbox, shaded by an orchid tree. Then there are clumps of bamboo, ferns, a giant crinum lily and a large fig tree, loaded with fruit. Smith also has an eye for art. Just beyond the bamboo, she leaned against the fence a door equally as tall that she found at the now-closed Genghis Kahn furniture store on Morena Boulevard. It’s a triptych of Asian scenes of men traveling on an elephant and a stag painted in brilliant greens and reds. Smith also has a couple of pieces by metal sculpture artist Nichole Condon, whom she met years ago back when she was a rower. One of them is in that side garden surrounded by a traveler’s palm and a clump of snake plants. It’s a funky giraffe head with colorful bristle brushes down the back of its long neck.

Once you hit the fig tree, you’ve reached the backyard. Under a mimosa tree is a spacious dining area with a long glass-top table and brown metal legs that Smith bought with intention — the table would “disappear” when people aren’t sitting around it, she said. Under the fig tree is a grill embedded in stacked stone.

The heart of the garden is at the back of the house. The entrance is several feet higher than ground level. When Smith bought the house, there was a little wooden deck with a staircase straight down to the ground level from the door and strips of grass on three sides.

“Within weeks of moving in, I ripped out the deck and there was a pile of dirt,” she recalled. “I sat back squinting at it with Galen and he said, ‘Why don’t we build it up since the property slopes down?’ He came up with the design.”

The design is a dramatic entrance of wide stone steps that lead up from the flagstone patio to the house with a landing that looks like a small proscenium stage. Along the house on either side of the landing are also stone stairs with handrails. Between the main steps and the side stairs are a pair of curvaceous, built-up beds filled with soil Smith had brought over from the Miramar landfill. They are filled with what creates the shade garden: mighty yellow bells with tall graceful trunks dripping with brilliant orange flowers. At the base, they’re surrounded by more ferns and aeonium, coleus, and another giant crinum lily.

Across from the main stairs to the house on the patio is a small seating area for two. It’s a peaceful space that makes you want to curl up with a Jane Austen novel, enjoying the breeze and filtered light and the saturation of colors from the many, many plants.

If you’re in a contemplative mood, just turn the corner and there — surrounded by river rock, of course — is a large zen garden, the center of which is an enclosed bed of decomposed gravel with a small boulder in the center. At the far end, more boulders are in front of a raised mound of snake plants and ferns with a shady magnolia hovering over it.

“I designed it — or actually copied the design from a book on Japanese rock gardens,” said Smith, “and a company called Mooch built it.”

From there, you can continue your contemplation or enjoy a conversation with friends on a set of dark rattan furniture that sits under a huge sturdy pergola, built to complement the mission-style qualities of the house. Early on, Smith had a renter, Christian Bachofer, a structural engineer who was between jobs. She gave him free rent for a room for a couple of months in exchange for him designing and building the pergola. One of her favorite ways to spend time now is to sit on the couch facing the zen garden and get lost in the moment. That view also includes a window she built into the art studio, one that also mimics the design of the home’s windows. Behind the pergola, the garden is enclosed by a wall that’s half stacked stone topped by a wood fence in the same mission style.

The garden, said Smith, was really a community effort — a community she built. She readily admits she isn’t a gardener, but she befriended people who brought her vision to life.

“Each person has a story, including their lives and how we met,” she explained. “The only person I hired to work on the garden was [landscape contractor] Steve Gold because I was having issues with erosion. We could write a whole story about how people come together over a period of time to create a garden.”

A local handyman/gardener, Lucas Cruz, built the flagstone patio on the west side and the back patio, including the stairs and barbecue, back in 2009, she said. There was Sherwood, who created the original design of the backyard, including the stone stairs and mounds on either side of the steps, as well as doing all the original planting, both front and back. As the garden matured, Smith befriended artist Jacqueline Gold, who added plants to create balance, dimension and color. She also introduced Smith to her brother Steve Gold, who in 2021 rebuilt the steps to code to prevent erosion. And there was artist Nichole Condon, of course.

“Perhaps the person who helped me the most in the early years was Tori Penick,” said Smith. “She was a large-site construction management major from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo who took time off to start a family while looking for something to do where she could bring her kids to work. She supervised all the construction projects. Tori’s husband Jeff installed all the lights: hanging bulbs over the dining table, the beautiful craftsman lights in the zen garden and the mushroom lights along the pathways.”

Planning suggestions from Rachel Smith

Smith has some tips for others who want to create a shade garden. In her words:

• Plant trees as soon as possible. They will be beautiful on their way up.

• There are ways to create shade in a desert (which is what Southern California is): awnings, canvas shades, pergolas.

• Spend time looking at books for ideas. There are brilliant professional landscapers who have faced similar challenges beautifully. I did that and, in fact, gave my friend Christian pictures of Greene & Greene structure (in the arts and crafts style) for guidance for the pergola.

• My friend Galen Sherwood said early on that it’s better to find plants that will thrive in the soil you have rather than constantly trying to create the perfect soil for plants that you want. The soil I have was perfect for succulents and grasses. They’re thriving.

• I checked out all the nurseries in the San Diego area, but it was only recently when I invited Jacqueline Gold to go with me that I really started thinking about color and texture and balance. She moved plants around my garden, which made such a difference.