I began my career as a gardener's helper in my teens, working for older people - I was their muscle, they were my mentors. They loved gardening and plants and I liked learning from them and working outside. They were careful about what they did, and what they did produced results. Baby lettuce from the rows we thinned grew into table serving heads of buttery, beautiful leaves. Young plants matured and blossomed, reliably. Gardening was not just a job or a hobby, it was an interface with the laws of nature and an endless source of information and revelation. (Have you ever seen snails mate? Do you know what happens? Have you ever noticed that the weeds around a cultivated plant often look a lot like the cultivated plant?)

By and by and interspersed with college, I bought a truck and began my own gardening business. In those days, and that place, Carmel, California, gardening wasn't lawn mowing and leaf blowing, but learning about plants and soils, insects, diseases, about pH and how and when different trees and shrubs need to be pruned.

When working with a new plant - and then, they were mostly all new - I would take a sprig to the nursery for identification. I would then go to the books and study about the plant - what type of soil and what pH it needed, to what was it susceptible. When you work with what you study, the knowledge becomes your own. I remember the first time I identified a problem a Rhododendron was having in one of my people's gardens. It was doing poorly so I looked the plant up and found it was susceptible to a borer. I checked the base of the trunk and by god, there was the beetle's hole.  Recommended treatments were followed and the plant was rescued.

So I became a gardener.  I gradually became a good gardener. I learned the plants and I learned and practiced their care. I came to know how to make them, not just survive, but thrive and I created a thriving business and took on a helper. Then I began redesigning my clients' gardens, (usually with their permission.) I began thinking about gardens as vignettes, little scenes that could be more beautiful. So I bought plants and created beds and began to find the spaces in which I was working; the bed to the left of a walkway, at the base of a shrub hedge, or the back border of Mrs.' Simonds' rear yard, to be themselves unfortunately designed.

I realized that outdoor spaces could be modified, made better through such concepts as dimension  and line and structure. I began to work with stone, to visit other nurseries than my usual two and I began to draw plans -garden designs. I began to study landscape design and I began to offer my services as a garden designer. I'd offer a design plan (at first simply a colored drawing on tracing paper), the client would like the design and then the question became, so, who is going to make this happen?

I very soon found myself neck deep in building gardens. I found myself interacting with stone yards and quarries and made the acquaintance of people who could bring large stone from the quarries and place them on my site. I learned how to build stone walls and walkways. I learned brick work. These garden elements were needed and building them seemed as nothing less or more than an extension of designing them - a necessity for bringing them into being. I probably did not ever realize that I could find people to do the work for me. So I built my gardens, my people's gardens, myself.

One of my first gardens is shown in my portfolio. I built it thirty years ago, photographed it only recently. The Thompsons wanted an English garden. They had lived for a time in England, he was retiring from an international contracting firm and this was to be their paradise.  They weren't quite sure what sort of English garden they wanted but it needed to remind them of England.

 

I had done a little stone work at this point and had looked at a lot of brick work but had never done any. Nor had I operated large machinery. I ordered the machine, a 'Bobcat' skid-steer with a bucket front. They dropped if off, showed me the controls and left. It was beautiful, clear morning, about 9:am, two blocks from the ocean. (The lagoon, actually, where the Carmel River flows into the Pacific.) I didn't know if it would work. I jumped on, charged the machine into the hillside, hoping to be able to cut the tiers and lo and behold, it worked like magic. Dirt came away willingly, I created my terraces, hand dug the trenches for the walls and ordered stone and brick. The walls still stand. So do the walkway, patio and my mosaic morning seating area, all hand-built by myself, viewable in the portfolio. 

 

Not in the portfolio are these shots of me, then; working with King City stone.

 

Stone work became a part of my repertoire, as did many other aspects of garden building, including the ability to operate various pieces of heavy equipment, most serviceably, the backhoe in its many variations. Knowing trades and having abilities has proven useful, both for being able to get a job done when quality help can't be found, and in communicating with professionals when they are on the job.