Berkeley couple rescues Occidental’s famed Western Hills Garden

As Hadley Dynak sees it, Western Hills Garden “just came to us,” like the stray dog that once wandered into her life and heart.

She and her husband Kent Strader, committed Berkeleyites, were not looking for rural acreage when an email arrived with a forwarded real estate listing for a house in the hills above Occidental. But something compelled the couple to get a wild hair to check it out, just for the heck of it.

The property featured a 1,600-square-foot house built in 1961, a small converted barn with a sleeping loft and something identified as “an octagon house” set amid nearly 3 acres of gardens.

Strader, in jest, called first dibs on the octagon house, which he would later discover was already inhabited by a determined rat and termites. He has since vanquished those residents, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

It wasn’t until they walked the property with listing agent Doug Bohling that they realized what a special place it was.

To horticulturists, Western Hills is hallowed ground, with a history going back more than 60 years. The jewel of the property is not the house, but the garden, a magical community of wildly diverse plants from Australia, South America and South Africa collected many years ago by the late Lester Hawkins and Marshall Olbrich, who laid it out in a storybook setting of winding paths and bridges circumnavigating a large pond.

For decades, Western Hills Rare Plant Nursery was a destination for plant geeks, serious collectors and hobby gardeners with a taste for the unusual.

“You walk through the gate and it’s like a wonderland,” Dynak said. “It’s magical and it’s beautiful and it’s peaceful.”

A half-hour into the walk, her usually more restrained tax attorney husband declared, “We’re buying this.”

Dream to reality

It wasn’t just the natural beauty of a garden that appeared half wild, a vision of “organized chaos,” as Dynak remembered it, that attracted them. The property offered the possibility of fulfilling a dream Dynak, who describes herself as a “creative producer,” had held for half her life.

“I connect art and culture and social issues to help people think about things differently or solve problems or draw people’s attention to important actions,” she said.

Ever since she left graduate school, the Michigan native had dreamed of developing a physical space where she could bring together constituent groups from those various worlds for programs, projects and partnerships. But it had been only a concept until she saw Western Hills and realized her dream was meeting opportunity, ready or not.

“It hit so many different checks based on what we had been talking about for a long time, just the aesthetics of it, the history behind it and the beauty of it,” Strader said of the property, a secret garden hidden behind gates off Coleman Valley Road. “But it also seemed to need somebody who could come in and continue the legacy and build on it.”

The property, listed for $1.79 million, had been on the market for three months when it came to the attention of the couple in August. Even in an overheated housing market and during the pandemic, when a lot of people were looking for rural retreats, it was a challenging sell.

The previous owners Chris and Tim Szybalski were ready to retire after a decade of hard work and stewardship. But the garden has such a reverential significance for so many people, they were holding out for a buyer who would commit to preserving it.

That could prove daunting or just impossible to many potential buyers. The annual cost of upkeep is at least $100,000, even with a faithful team of volunteer gardeners.

Many friends of Western Hills were fearful a new steward wouldn’t be found and it would fall into the hands of someone who might turn it into a vacation rental or prefer a pool and cabana to a wild garden with a renowned collection of plants.

“You do worry someone is going to buy it who is either ill-equipped or underfunded or not interested in the vision so many people have for the garden,” said Helen Kallenbach, a longtime volunteer who lives about a mile and half away.

Fortuitous timing

At the time they came across the listing, Dynak and Strader were in the process of selling a property in Park City, Utah, where they had lived before resettling in the Bay Area three and a half years ago with their two daughters. Dynak had led the local arts council in Park City.

With the sale, the couple suddenly found themselves with capital to invest. Some close friends helped out by kicking in a small investment. They put in an offer for $1.75 million for Western Hills and it was accepted.

“I think the pandemic allowed us to rethink things,” said Strader, a natural handyman who relishes a good project. “It allowed us to open up a little more to the possibilities, even with the risk and all the work. What we saw, especially as we got deeper into the possible transition, was there was so much support out there in the community.”

Dynak said they negotiated a lengthy due diligence period to give them time to go over the property infrastructure thoroughly. There were some issues, but fortunately the Szybalskis had done a lot of upgrades, including remodeling the main house.

Dynak and Strader, both in their early 50s, are not professional horticulturists, but they are committed to preserving the garden and reopening it to the public so others can continue to enjoy it. They’re still formulating their vision but they hope it will include not just self-guided and docent tours, but partnerships with area artists, educational programs and an artist-in-residency program.

“Kent and I like to describe ourselves as deep garden enthusiasts with a passion for learning,” Dynak said, chuckling. But, she added, they are approaching the challenge in the spirit of Olbrich and Hawkins, who were beginners when they first planted their stake.

The two men bought the property in 1959, fleeing San Francisco with the idea of homesteading. They were at the leading edge of the back-to-the-land movement of the ’60s and ’70s that brought many to Sonoma County where property was inexpensive and abundant.

Both at one time had been academics. Olbrich specialized in comparative literature and Hawkins in economics. Western Hills would be their refuge. They named it after an early Chinese philosopher’s retreat near Beijing, and the name proved appropriate — geographically, it’s in the hills of western Sonoma County, and it also became a salon of sorts, where people gathered not just to talk horticulture but to discuss ideas and culture.

At first they planted food crops. But visits to what is now the San Francisco Botanical Garden sparked an interest in unusual ornamentals that turned into a passion. They developed their display garden, with Hawkins assuming the role of designer — he went on to design many other gardens, including the Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek. Olbrich, for his part, became a respected plant expert.

To support their efforts they opened Western Hills Rare Plant Nursery in 1972, which over 30 years attracted horticultural enthusiasts from throughout the U.S. and beyond.

“All hell broke loose,” Olbrich, told The Press Democrat of their opening during an interview in the 1970s. At the time there was nothing like it. The pair had collected plants rarely seen in the U.S., in the era of prosaic green lawns, juniper and oleander.

“Pacific Horticulture” magazine said Olbrich and Hawkins “inspired a community of horticulturists and landscape designers that profoundly changed the look of West Coast gardens.”

Olbrich in a book, “The American Man’s Garden” by Rosemary Verey, acknowledged that his garden was not conventional in either plant material or design.

“Because of its somewhat accidental history, however, and the wide range of plants grown on it, our garden seems to me more like a rather disorganized novel or drama in which characters come and go, with the good pining away and the wicked sometimes flourishing.”

Series of stewards

The garden continues to flourish thanks to the efforts of a succession of owners and volunteers who have taken care of it since the founders died, Hawkins in 1985 and Olbrich in 1991.

They left the property to their longtime garden manager Maggie Wych, who worked it tirelessly and maintained their legacy. Wych, who died last year, sold the garden in 2006 to Robert Stansel and Joseph Gatta, who paid close to $1.5 million and fought hard to keep it up but ultimately lost it to foreclosure.

The Szybalskis, engineers who owned a nursery in Berkeley, picked it up for only $430,000 in 2010 and poured money, love and time into revitalizing it.

With each ownership change, Western Hills’ many supporters sweated it out, fearing it would fall into unappreciative hands. Meanwhile, they have continued to take care of it. Mary Zovich, who is serving as a consultant to Dynak and Strader, has been helping out for more than a decade. And while the garden has been closed to the public during the pandemic, she has come over from her nearby home to maintain it.

Zovich is excited about the future. With Dynak’s blessing, she has added more native plants in a sunny spot, part of a commitment to both maintain the original garden and evolve it in a more sustainable way that recognizes climate change and water conservation. But what is there is mature and lush and semi-wild, a biodiverse collection that has grown together for decades.

“There are plants here you don’t find in the (horticulture) trade, and the fact they’re all here together on 3 acres — that doesn’t exist anywhere,” Zovich said.

Some specimens are also remarkable because of their size, like a majestic Acer pentaphyllum with five-lobed leaves that is endangered in the wilds of its native China.

Reopening in May

Dynak and Strader are still developing their vision. They will reopen to visitors in May by appointment through a new website, westernhillsgarden.com. They will have some plants for sale. Dynak also would like to offer a small selection of art and crafts.

“The programming is still developing, but in general we want to marry some horticultural programming with creative programming,” Dynak said.

“I really think nature inspires art and art inspires nature,” she added. “How can we encourage creative development inspired by this place that maybe also is helping to solve big issues of our time, like climate change?”

The garden will be set up as a nonprofit, she said. Environmental sensitivity will be an important consideration in reaching out to donors, applying for grants and building an endowment to secure Western Hills’ future.

Dynak and Strader do plan to hold events — small ones because parking is limited and out of respect for the fragility of the site, Dynak said. They want to reach out to underserved communities, too.

“We definitely want to have this be some place that is open to everybody, not just people who are in love with gardens,” she said.

Veteran volunteer Ray Goodenough, who has been visiting Western Hills since the 1980s and is a retired gardener for the city of San Francisco, is heartened by the commitment of Dynak and Strader to honoring the legacy of Hawkins and Olbrich, not only by keeping up the garden, but by fostering a sense of community within it.

“They seem to want to make the garden thrive,” he said. “And in this day and age, with what is going on in the world, that kind of spirit, people passionate about making something that is beautiful in the world and nurturing, is exactly what we need. ”

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