Gardens of color on display

Penney Magrane greets a visitor, wound up with energy but lamenting that her garden in September won’t be at its best.

“It’s already peaked,” she apologizes, all but wringing her hands at the prospect of those shuttle buses arriving on Sept. 18 laden with ticket holders for the annual Quarryhill Fall Garden Tour, visitors she fears will be disappointed.

Her fears are unfounded. It’s only the needless worry of a landscape architect who has spent 14 years creating a perfectly sculpted garden mindful of a small English estate reinterpreted for the Wine Country. In places it appears almost wild, in others pristinely manicured. And even though it already appears impossibly unblemished, particularly for a year of hard drought, she still calls it “a work in progress.”

While much of the spring and summer color has faded for the season there are still bright orange cannas, dahlias, late-blooming roses and a crape myrtle that is still a cloud of pink. But this garden is so much more than flowers.

There is deep color in the foliage, like the Acer Nungundo with white and green variegated leaves that, set next to a Royal Purple Smoke Bush, “pops like a white beacon.”

Hidden behind a deep mass of grasses and perennials is Mulberry House, the architecturally ordinary home she and her wife Joan Howley bought as a second home 14 years ago and moved in to full time three years ago.

It was named for a an old mulberry tree in the back that, along with a 10-foot palm and fig, were the only features in an otherwise dull expanse that made up the yard all those years ago. It was not a lovely tree, but it provided critical shade and now bears a charming antique French tree swing. The leftover concrete foundations of some old turkey coops in the far edge of the yard may have dissuaded other buyers. But Magrane knew that was not a permanent impediment.

This garden, a veritable mansion of distinctive rooms, is one of two open to visitors as part of a fall tour that is a chief fund-raiser for Quarryhill Botanical Garden, a preserve for rare and unusual plants from Asia collected as seed in the wild.

The tour will also stop at Jubaea Estate, a lavish Mediterranean garden with signature Moroccan elements. Broad paths lead to tiled and stone mosaic courtyards. The garden features a pageant of palm trees, 14 different species, an allé e of century-old olives, as well as collections of succulents mixed with exotic broadleaf shrubs and perennials form all five Mediterranean climate regions.

For all its classical elements, including espaliered persimmons and pleached olive trees, Magrane and Howley’s garden is designed for casual use, from the bocce court to a playhouse for their niece to a sparkling pool that Magrane is not ashamed to say is made of fiberglass rather than gunnite, a compromise that saved some $50,000.

“We have a lot of guests, a lot of people who want to play games,” Magrane says, explaining the broad lawn that she would not plant today given the drought. The property is blessed with a deep well that allows them to preserve their oasis while also conserving.

One of the first things Magrane did when she purchased the property in east Sonoma was to enclose it with green walls for privacy. While the Photinia in front makes for a nice full hedge, she probably wouldn’t plant it again given its vulnerability to Phytophthora, a disease fungus that leads to root rot caused by soggy soil.

But she loves the 8-foot-tall dwarf yew hedge that serves as one entrance to her front courtyard and the fast growing Thuja hedge in back that grows in close pillars that Magrane likens to “Stonehenge.” She also brought in mature sycamores to border the property. The effect is a sense of insulation from the world whenever the two of them are at home.

“This garden has been very calming. It’s just such a reward to look out any window or any door and to come out and have all these garden rooms. It’s very soulful,” said Magrane, who apprenticed first under the Emily Brown, a renowned horticulturist who founded the braille garden at the San Francisco Botanical Garden. She later went on to get her master’s degree in landscape architecture and has been designing gardens now in the Bay Area for some 35 years.

The Sonoma garden is distinctively her own, reflecting her many loves, particularly roses and dahlias, which she grows for cutting to adorn the home and give away to her mother and her friends.

She laments that this was a bad year for dahlias. She has blooms, but nothing like the dinner plates of year’s past. But many of her roses are still showing, and she will continue to have cuttings from some into December. Her favorites are ‘Fragrant Cloud,’ a deep orange red hybrid tea that she says is the most fragrant rose she’s every grown, and ‘Gold Medal,’ a golden yellow grandiflora that was a favorite of famed rosarian Ray Redell, the former owner of Petaluma’s Garden Valley Ranch.

Howley, a retired doctor, is her “partner in crime” when it comes to gardening. But her passion is the vegetable garden, a spectacle of tomatoes, some 8 feet high growing up rebar towers, 18 kinds of basil, giant eggplants and pumpkins galore.

Among the pair’s special garden secrets is the use of grape seed compost, which repels gophers, lots of foliage for year round color and architecture, and repeated plants like carpets of verbena.

“It’s all about the structure and the scale,” said Magrane. “You can make small spaces look so much bigger if you put in uniform and repeated elements versus a whole bunch of different stuff.”

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