David C. Streatfield The Arts and Crafts Garden in California, Architecture California, 14, no. 2, November 1992, p. 31
[p. 31] "The garden was one of the most important contributions of the Arts and Crafts movement to the creation of natural, unpretentious and harmonious environments. Gardens were intended to express regional character, to be built from local materials and simple plants. They were meant to be used as outdoor rooms and places to grow productive plants. The influence of these ideas were considerable, with regional variations appearing in the Eastern and Midwestern states, as well as in California. Because of the extraordinary variety of the physical landscape, California garden makers achieved a diversity of gardens that explored arts and crafts themes, exemplified by the hillside gardens of San Francisco Bay Area and San Diego; by the open-landscape garden, primarily in the Los Angeles Basin; and by the patio garden found throughout the Southland.
"The Arts and Crafts garden emerged in the first decade of the twentieth century as part of a strong reaction against nineteenth-century gardens, which had embraced a wide variety of styles and a heterogeneous array of plants. These collectively represented a set of cultural ideas that had little to do with the landscape itself. Such floristic and stylistic diversity thrived in California, where it was possible to create any kind of garden. The benign climate, the long growing season, and the apparent abundance of water for irrigation led to the importation of plants from many other regions. In this way, the landscape had already been substantially changed before the introduction of the Arts and Crafts ideals.
"When the prodigality of this floral abundance came into question at the turn of the century, Arts and Crafts gardens provided a new set of choices relative to regional "appropriateness." Outwardly oriented to frame views of the landscape, the various garden types provided places in which a domestic space could be settled into the outer landscape. California's mild climate made it possible to spend more time out-of-doors, in the outdoor room, than in other parts of America.
The Physical Regions of California
[p. 31] "California's visually dramatic physical setting is defined by a series of mountain ranges. The Coastal Mountains rise directly from the waters of the Pacific [p. 32] Ocean along the north-south axis from the Oregon border to the Tehachapi Mountains, below which runs the Transverse Range along the east-west axis. This range includes the Santa Ynez, San Gabriel, and San Bernardino Mountains. To the south is the lower plateau known as the Peninsular Range, the western edge of which follows the crescent-shaped shore-line south to the Mexican border. The Los Angeles Basin is a roughly triangular plain lying between these ranges and open to the ocean.
[p. 32] "This rugged yet fragile topography has been and is still being created by earthquakes; in addition, wildfires have recurring impacts on naive plants and human settlements. These dramatic processes were largely ignored by settlers, who were preoccupied with the admirable climate . . .
[Picture caption: "Italian cypresses, banana trees and eucalyptus were used as specimens to provide vertical contrast to the predominantly horizontal shrubs on the terraced slope in the garden Kate O. Sessions created for the B.F. Chase House, designed by Irving Gill in 1911. Photo, San Diego Historical Society.]
[p. 33] Arts and Crafts Sources
"Prior to 1870, California garden designs attempted to replicate either the forms of gardens that were typical where settlers had come from or garden styles that were popular elsewhere at the time. such cultural imposition was made possible by the unusually extensive range of plants available from other regions of the United States, Europe and Australia, plus an unlimited supply of irrigation water: Plants cultivated in California could be grown in the rest of the country only under glass. Formal gardens and beds of mosaic culture-a European technique for growing closely cropped succulents in mosaic like designs-juxtaposed with broad lawns fringed by groves of an extraordinarily large range of trees and shrubs. In 1874, a writer suggested that the ideal mood for California was the "tropical." [In practice, this involved the lavish use of palms and many subtropical species that had to be imported.
"These typically Victorian gardens were largely plant collections, and they had a markedly introverted, self-contained character: only later did gardens begin to take full advantage of outward views. As Arts and Crafts theory and practice became an alternative to these styles, it was taken up by communities such as Berkeley and Pasadena, which had active, civic-improvement societies, as well as individual architects and designers who sought to achieve regional appropriateness.
"The conceptual origins of Arts and Crafts gardens in the United States were loosely derived from the ideas of English theorists, most notably John Ruskin's insistence on looking to nature for the development of aesthetic principles and on handcraftmanship in which the artisan-craftsman maintained autonomy. Other English writers extolled the virtues of the independent artist-gardener.
"Americans quickly absorbed these ideas, published in new magazines such as House and Garden, House Beautiful, Country Life in America, and especially, Craftsman, the main organ of the Arts and Craft movement. Regional differences developed. In California there were general fidelity to Ruskin's principles, but the influence of English writers and designers were not particularly strong. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the Swedenborgian minister Joseph Worcester's reverence for the holiness of nature was close to Ruskin's, and both influenced Bernard Maybeck. Worcester also appears to have been attracted by Japanese gardens and their symbolism. The existence of a competing Hispanic tradition also provided new challenges to the designers of California gardens. In 1888 Frederick Law Olmsted, working on a plan for Stanford University, proposed a set of design principles appropriate for a new California design tradition, which he based on the Spanish missions and on Mediterranean courtyard gardens, using little water. Charles Augustus Keeler advocated a mixture of Mediterranean and oriental imagery to provide an ordered harmony. He called for gardens that would combine aspects of the mission and the Japanese garden to create places for repose, study, and domestic leisure. Both traditions emphasized order and the control of nature, and both could be brought together so that "the charm of the wilderness [would be] tamed and diversified for convenience and accessibility."
[p. 33] "These varying points of view confirm the fact that in California the Arts and Crafts movement embraced diverse forms that were not limited to any one style. This range reflected social differences among the garden owners and specific design responses to the distinct physical regions. The one element shared by all of these approaches (with the conspicuous exception of the work [p. 34] of Kate O. Sessions in San Diego) was dependence on profligate use of water.
[p. 34] Arts and Crafts Exemplars
[p. 34] "A coordinated set of principles for private gardens and the entire landscape of the Berkeley hills was developed by the Hillside Club, an improvement society founded in 1898 by Keeler and Bernard Maybeck. Under the guidance of this organization, members completely transformed the grassland hills into a wooded hillside of variegated, exotic trees, within which a variety of carefully sited shingled houses commanded sweeping views of the San Francisco Bay . . .
". . .
[p. 35] "Santa Barbara was the only part of coastal California that had extensive, open groves of indigenous oak trees. Charles Frederick Eaton-a landscape gardener, architect, and craftsman-embellished his estate for twenty years . . . "nature under control" . . . ''
[p. 35] "A most successful form of natural hillside gardening was practiced in the Ojai Valley by the architects Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey in their gardens for C.W. Robertson and E.D. Libbey . . .
[p. 35] "A completely different form of hillside garden was created in San Diego by the horticulturist Kate O. Sessions, working with such architects as Irving Gill, Frank Mead and Richard S. Requa. San Diego's mesa-like landscape with its steep-sided canyons lacked native trees, and, despite the extensive planting of trees in Balboa Park and on Point Loma, the city never developed a forested character like Berkeley's. Session's plantings sought a new ecological order derived more from a sense of what would grow in the specific climate conditions than from a predetermined set of visual ordering principles.
[p. 35] ". . . the open-landscape garden of the Arts and Crafts movement . . . in the Southland. Houses were placed in the center or on the edge of large lawns, looking out toward the mountains, or a nearby arroyo . . .
[p. 36] ". . . the garden spaces were completely open to the street. The garden space functioned as both a foreground to the views of the distant landscape and an extension of the house.
[p. 36] "The most important exponents of this garden type were Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene, who were particularly fascinated by the aesthetic qualities of Japanese gardens . . .
[p. 36] "Arts and Crafts designers favored patio gardens because of their association with Spanish California and Italy. The patio provided space that could be used for a variety of purposes; some patios were covered with retractable glazed roofs or removable canvas panels to become an additional enclosed room, others housed swimming pools. A number of Irving Gill's houses were designed around a patio defined on three sides by colonnades and on the fourth by a wall with glazed openings to a walled garden beyond. These paved patios-furnished with vines, a banana tree, or a small palm, wicker furniture, and rugs-were used as rooms.
[p. 36] [Picture caption: In the Annie Darst garden in San Diego by Irving Gill (1908) the living room opened on to a large pergola covered space, which in turn gave on to a walled garden." San Diego Historical Society]
[p. 36] "In larger gardens a detached pergola would provide a place in the shade to sew, read, converse, or enjoy the view of the garden and the mountains. This created a spatial transition from full enclosure in the patio to partial shade to full sunlight in the garden. Gill's houses represent a form of regional appropriateness derived from Hispanic precedents. But they were also progressive. His concrete houses united advanced building technology with simplified and abstracted references to mission buildings and a romantic delight in the color and wildness of the landscape. The abstract forms were anchored to their settings by pergolas-sometimes open and sometimes covered with creepers and vines that created a delicate tracery on the walls . . .
[p. 36] "Meadow gardening was an unusual garden type, the earliest recorded example of which is Charles Fletcher Lummis's own garden of 1898 at his home El Alisal in Highland Park . . .
[p. 37] Importance to California
"The Arts and Crafts garden in California was a distinct regionalist expression. It shared in the general ideals of garden design elsewhere in the country by creating unpretentious designs out of local materials, in relating buildings to the broader landscape, and in treating garden space as an outdoor room. But it was unique in a number of ways, including the distinctive use of color, the value placed on views, the range of sources and styles, the unique use of the garden room and with extensive impact, the reappearance of a number of professional design features in the gardens of that popular California housing type, the bungalow. In these various ways the Arts and Crafts garden in California established a memorable alternative regional identity. However, like all other attempts to settle this volatile and fragile landscape it depended on the imposition of cultural order and of imported water.