Occidental garden exploding with fall colors

The calendar says summer is officially past, but Mary and Lew Reid's garden is not looking sleepy. In fact, it is incandescent in the golden glow of autumn, burnished with varying shades of orange and coral, red and amber. It is a garden for all seasons, spreading out over 2 1/2 acres on a hilltop near Occidental.

A former professional garden designer, Mary sees this space as her personal canvas, an expansive living landscape painting conceived to blend in with the natural surroundings and vistas. Now more than 20 years old, the garden is mature and densely planted, framed by the bones of charming rock walls and wide pebbly paths and the architecture of trees that have now grown to maturity and are showing off their fall colors.

While the broad sweep is Mary's vision, the details are very much shared by Lew, a retired attorney and botanical devotee who propagates many of the plants himself.

“Our first date was at a nursery,” Mary remembers. “Actually, he said, ‘I'll take you to the best nursery.' And I said, ‘No, I'll take YOU to the best nursery.' So he took me to Pacifica, to some nursery down there, and I took him to Western Hills.'”

She recounts this with the smile of a victor, figuring the enchanted garden and nursery in the hills above Occidental was definitely the best, drawing plant lovers from around the U.S. and beyond.

One of Mary's dearest friends is Maggie Wych, who for years kept the renowned Western Hills Nursery, a showcase of rare plants The New York Times called “Tiffany's” for plant lovers.

Wych kept it alive and well, even after the deaths of its founders Marshall Olbrich and Lester Hawkins, and it is now experiencing a revival under new ownership.

“Many, many plants she gave us for this garden. She's all over this garden,” said Mary, who had volunteered at Western Hills. Lew at one time propagated plants for the destination nursery.

The Reids don't keep all this horticultural finery to themselves. They enjoy sharing it with others who are as passionate about gardening as they are. The garden has been featured in Fine Gardening, Martha Stewart Living and Pacific Horticulture Magazine, which called it “among the finest gardens in Northern California.”

They have also opened it up for various garden tours and events. The Reid garden is one of the featured attractions of the Pacific Horticulture Society's 2016 summit, an annual event that is being held in Santa Rosa this year on Oct. 15 and 16.

The two-day summit, called “Changing Times, Changing Gardens,” will explore reshaping the garden in the challenging face of climate change.

A line-up of heavy-hitting speakers will give talks at The Luther Burbank Center, with garden tours that include the Reid garden on both days. The summit is open to home gardeners and professionals in the field.

Sinuous swaths

What visitors will see at the Reid garden are a series of straight and arcing paths and sinuous swaths of grasses, perennials and shrubs, a landscape of relaxed formality with a bit of a wild streak.

“In spring everything is pristine and fresh. Now it's just crazy. This time of year everything is overgrown, and I love it this way,” said Mary.

The garden is no less lovely for its raucous autumn wonder. Mary groups plants by color for greatest impact, and everywhere there are stunning fall vignettes like the coppery Sedum ‘Autumn Joy,' rocking with a chorus line of purple stemmed Salix Purpurea, an English willow, flowing behind it.

Everywhere fall beckons, in the orange blooms of Lion's tail and Berberis thumbergii ‘Golden Ring,' and the tall yellow trumpets of Cestrum orientacum.

Here a persimmon, there a bright chartreuse show of a Robinia pseudoacacia ‘Frisia' or Golden Locust, everywhere Japanese maples; it is a garden glittering with jewel tones.

Each plant manages to stand out, even within a space packed with multifarious plant life.

The garden's story begins in 1989, when the Reids first bought the hilltop property at the end of a dirt road for peace and quiet from Lew's stressful work as an attorney.

“We wanted to be at the end of a private road where no one could get us. And that's what happened,” Mary said.

Kew Gardens

They first built a house, with a nod to Bay Area architect Bernard Maybeck.

“In 1990, I went to Kew Gardens in England and studied under a landscape architect,” she said. “I brought back more skills than I used to have and then set about designing this garden.”

Mary sketched out the whole plan in the winter of 1992-93, driven by a feeling that the garden would be like a painting with plants.

They first built a double deer fence. No use going to all that effort if it's going to be devoured. They installed dual irrigation systems - overhead sprinklers as well as drip valves for maximum flexibility.

Mary got precious help with the layout from her father-in-law, Ernest Reid, a retired aerospace engineer for McDonnell-Douglas who worked on the first Mercury rocket. He came with surveying tools.

“It would have been a lot more precise till I talked Ernie out of getting it to the hundredths of an inch,” Mary laughs.

“In fact, he wanted me to use the metric system, and I couldn't do it. But he was great. It was really a family endeavor.”

Aside from the irrigation system, everything was installed by Manuel Flores, who now works in the medical field. He brought an uncle up from Mexico, and they pulled all the rocks out of a nearby field to build the walls. Meanwhile, Lew was busy propagating. Working from Mary's list of 7,000 plants, he propagated a majority of the initial plantings. He continues to work out of a large greenhouse.

She was greatly influenced at the time by Wolfgang Oehme and James van Sweden, who were just introducing the idea of huge sweeps of grasses in the American landscape. Mary's garden incorporates large drifts of the same species.

“I wanted a garden with texture rather than flowers,” she said. “That's what this garden is about.”

Keep list of plants

Although they maintain it is not a collector's garden, the couple have brought back many plants and seeds from their travels, and Mary, who has an import license, maintains a near complete list of every plant in the garden.

They built in protection from the get-go. In addition to the deer fence, every plant is encaged to protect it from gophers. Two cats are on constant patrol for rodent thieves.

While the overall design remains largely intact, it is not static. As they walk along their paths, the Reids' conversation centers around what they see. Is it time for that chestnut tree to go? Should this be cut back?

Mary tended the garden largely herself for years, but stepped back as she became more involved as a watercolorist.

She now has a groundskeeper and gardener who comes in three days a week to tend the garden and the couple's other 140 acres, freeing her to paint and to fine tune the design.

“I'm still involved,” she said. “But I'm really enjoying not being involved in that way.”

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