Geyserville garden remade into succulent sensation

“I don’t like to talk while you walk in,” Vicki Pate tells a visitor, putting conversation on a brief pause.

Pate wants you to fully experience the wonder of entering her hidden roomful of roses in full May bloom.

“It just feels like ‘The Secret Garden’ to me” she said of the neat parterres of roses almost completely concealed behind high hedges.

But this lovely spot isn’t her destination. She is more excited about what lies beyond, partially visible through a portal in the farthest wall of greenery. This formal English-style garden opens onto a vast terrace overlooking a forested mountainside. The view is stippled with beds of succulents in many colors, shapes and sizes from tiny to tall. It looks out over a panorama of forested hillsides, edged at this time of year by purple irises.

A month ago, this intriguing garden didn’t exist. It was a hodgepodge of flowering plants and bulbs that looked past its prime. It also was a little too formal for Pate’s tastes.

Since moving to this country home from San Francisco full time, the native New Yorker has embraced organic homesteading with greenhouses, chickens and vegetable gardens. Still, she wanted something beautiful and practical for this stunning space for entertaining and enjoying the view.

“It just looked sad, and we weren’t sure what we wanted to do. We are ecologically and environmentally conscious and we didn’t want to use a lot of water,” she said.

Story sparks inspiration

Pate spotted a story in a Healdsburg publication written by Lisa Mattson, reflecting on the garden she and her husband created themselves at their Fountaingrove home, then lost in the Tubbs Fire of 2017.

Mattson, a consultant in wine marketing and winery hospitality design, mourned her lost garden. Then she dug in with her husband to design and plant a dramatically different garden to replace it. They came up with a stunning high-desert landscape of cactus and succulents that reminded them of the hot locations where the two native Midwesterners like to vacation.

Mattson became so enamored of this whole new palette of artistic-looking plants that are also fire- and drought-resilient that she decided to start a side business designing and installing succulent gardens.

Pate thought such a look might be the answer for her heat-drenched terrace that gets full sun, so she called Mattson for a consultation. But the project quickly turned urgent.

A friend had reached out to Pate on behalf of a group from the Garden Clubs of America, who were touring Sonoma County and looking for a special garden in which to have a dinner.

Pate said yes but knew she would either have to install the new succulent garden quickly, before the event, or wait until it was over. Mattson agreed to get it done in a hurry. With the deadline-driven efficiency of one trained in communications, she dove feet-first into the project, thinking about the old HGTV TV show “Yard Crashers,” in which a team would work feverishly to transform a landscape almost overnight.

Hot and cool color

Mattson had little more than a month to design, select and order plants and install the garden.

“It was an exciting challenge to me because there are 10,000 different succulents out there, and I know only a few hundred because I’ve been focusing on succulents for only four years now. So I got to do all this research,” Mattson said.

The designer normally goes for hot colors like yellows and oranges, but Pate wanted more cool blues and pinks. She also wanted an exuberant mixture of plants of different heights, colors, textures and forms rather than uniform rows of the same plant.

“With the timeline we had, it was nearly impossible to source the plants from traditional wholesale nurseries because they require a three- to four-week turnaround time for orders,” Mattson said.

She began working on design in the last week of March, but the garden-group event was May 4. That meant she was limited to whatever stock the nurseries had on hand, which wouldn’t deliver the variety they were looking for.

Instead, Mattson turned to smaller specialty nurseries that sold plants through Etsy. That also meant the plants were delivered by mail in small boxes. Mail-order plants do not arrive in pots like you would buy at a nursery. They arrive as bare-root plants. So you have to be careful to get them in pots quickly to protect the plant.

Mattson ordered a special cactus soil mix in bulk from Wheeler Zamaroni, a landscape and building supplies seller in Santa Rosa. The mix includes loam, perlite, lava rock, organic compost, feather meal and sand.

She likes to mix in some Pay Dirt, a blend of chicken manure, redwood sawdust and mushroom compost. Home gardeners can buy Pay Dirt in bags at garden centers like King’s in Santa Rosa and Prickett’s in Santa Rosa and Healdsburg. She mixes it in a wheelbarrow at a ratio of three parts cactus soil and one part Pay Dirt.

Also, if you’re planning to install a succulent garden, it’s best to do it now, in summer, once the rainy season has passed. That gives the plants time to acclimate and establish roots.

As she talks, Mattson carefully “lifted” a freshly planted echeverria ‘Gorgon’s Grotto,’ with wavy leaves that look almost like curly-leaf lettuce. Succulents should be planted on a slight mound. They don’t like wet feet, she said, and you want to make sure they are high enough and that there isn’t a place for water to pool.

It can be like a treasure hunt if you have your heart set on a particular variety that is hard to find. Mattson’s wish list for Vicki’s garden included a Mangave, a relatively new introduction that is a cross between a Manfreda and an agave. These rare hybrids combine the best of each genus, with the growing behavior of an agave but in much more interesting colors. And they stay fairly small.

“I couldn’t find it locally. The only place I could find it was on Etsy, and they sent a teeny-weeny starter plant. It was so sad,” Mattson said.

But a plant hound’s nose is always attuned, and when shopping at a local nursery in Santa Rosa recently, Mattson spotted a more robust specimen, arranged a swap and triumphantly grabbed it for Vicki’s garden.

Mattson planted the garden in patterns, sometimes portioning off ends of the beds in trapezoidal shapes for interest. The effect is otherworldly because these plants are still relatively unfamiliar to the Northern California landscape.

But with climate change, and a rising awareness about the need to conserve water, succulents are becoming more and more popular.

Mattson miraculously managed to complete the installation before the garden-group party. The modern design, so foreign to many people from the wetter and colder East Coast, intrigued the visitors.

Pate said she appreciates her rose garden and spends more time there than she would have imagined. But roses can be demanding.

“Roses aren’t beautiful all year-round, and they take so much work. They’re kind of high-maintenance, like the fancy woman who wears too much makeup.”

Not so for the succulents. They will require a bit more water as they get established. But once they’ve taken off, they will live largely on what Mother Nature provides, with a bit extra.

If they could offer one bit of advice for anyone inspired to try an all succulent garden, what would it be? Splurge on some larger plants. Having some larger and taller statement plants can make a big difference in the overall look.

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