Sebastopol gardener trades English country garden for striking succulents

You’ll know the Lowings’ house by the giant White Rabbit scrap sculpture with a pocket watch looming over the front garden. It is, indeed, Alice’s rabbit, perpetually in a hurry and never going anywhere, and not Peter Rabbit, so the garden is safe. But even a hungry bunny might be put off by the nibbles in the landscape.

It is mainly succulents, many with sword-like leaves, serrated edges and spiky tips. Eat here at your own peril.

While the monster rabbit created by neighbor and scrapture artist Patrick Amiot are the first things you see in front of Simon and Anne Lowings’ 1905 Queen Anne cottage in Sebastopol, you need to look forward or down to take in the best part of their garden. Firmly rooted in an enriched soil is an extraordinary eyeful of succulents, in a vast array of colors and textures and sizes, from tall spears to plump chartreuse whorls tinged in red.

When the couple bought the house about six years ago on Florence Avenue - the street famous for its comical Amiot sculptures in front of many of the houses - the landscape was a wreck of asphalt and rock over black plastic that had left the soil hard and dead. The only plants that thrived in this unhappy environment were freeway daisies.

“It was really neglected. The same person had lived here for 37 years,” said Anne Lowings, a retired physical therapist.

The couple set about fixing up the house and building back the soil.

“We brought in piles and piles of compost and didn’t plan anything for a couple of years,” she said. “We were patient. We just kept bringing in compost and soil and looking at where the sun was falling.”

Then the fun part began, filling in the front and back yards with an intriguing array of succulents: aloes, agaves, aeoniums, sempervivums and echeverias, among others, all mixed with low-water-using perennials. She brought in large boulders to provide definition and to warm the soil during Sebastopol’s cool months. Many succulents in their natural environment live among rocky cracks and crevices.

Lowings didn’t always garden this way. In fact, for years she fought mightily against the natural environment in a not-always-successful attempt to recreate her grandmother’s country gardens in the English Midlands. Simon was a mining engineer, and his work took his family to Australia, South Africa and Wyoming. Still, Lowings struggled to grow what she knew - delphiniums, campanulas, geraniums, pelargoniums and other flowering plants.

Then about 10 years ago, she was at the Huntington Library in San Marino, which has one of the world’s largest and oldest collections of cacti and succulents.

“It was the middle of winter. I had an epiphany,” she remembered. “I saw the succulents and they had color and they had form. That was when I got hooked on succulents.”

Lowings said she doesn’t miss traditional flowers.

“There are some succulents that still flower nicely, like the aloes and the ice plants and the sedum. They do give you bonus flowers. But it’s the interesting shapes and color of the leaves that really grab me.”

She collected specimens everywhere she could, from friends and strangers, even rescuing some yuccas from a roadway median.

Lowings is one of five Sonoma County Master Gardeners, specially trained through the University of California Cooperative Extension, who will be showing off their own Sebastopol-area gardens Sunday during the biannual Bloomin’ Backyards Garden Tour.

It’s a garden tour for real green-thumbers. All of the gardens are designed and tended by their owners, who will be on hand, along with other master gardeners, to answer questions about plants, garden maintenance and design.

Lowings’ garden serves as an example of low-water-use gardening with hardy succulents in a landscape that emphasizes foliage in its design. The tour also will include a demonstration of crafts using succulents.

One of the temptations with many of Lowings’ plants is to stroke them. Not all are sharp. She has filled in the areas between major statement plants with delosperma or ice plants, which cascade over a low wall that lines the sidewalk.

“It’s funny. We have a lot of people walk by, and the natural instinct is to touch it,” she said.

Her garden is unique. Most gardeners don’t have the confidence to make succulents a dominant part of their design.

“Her use of color and foliage is outstanding. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a garden that has so many succulents done so well. They’re usually not considered a major plant to base your garden on,” said fellow master gardener Phyllis Turrill, finishing up a morning in the garden with other master gardeners who were giving it a nip-and-tuck treatment prior to the tour.

In the backyard, low-growing dudleyas and the spotted Agave manfredi share space with taller pineapple guava, silk tassel and fragrant osmanthanus. An arbor built by Simon is fragrant with star jasmine, honeysuckle and purple clematis.

Succulents are fairly low maintenance, but Lowings likes hers to look clean and well groomed. Her tools include bonsai forceps, which she uses to pluck out debris. She also uses a paintbrush to sweep and Q-tips to clean in those tiny, hard-to-reach places.

Among her favorite succulents is graptoveria ‘‘Fred Ives.’’

“It changes color depending on whether it’s grown in the shade or full sun. It turns more pink and yellow in full sun and goes blue in the shade. And it’s frost hardy,” she said. “When the leaves fall off, they just root themselves right into the ground. It spreads out but not very quickly.”

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5204.