Kenwood couple stitches together new garden after the Nuns fire

Set against the the backdrop of the Mayacamas Mountains beside Chateau St. Jean, the purple fields of Sonoma Lavender Farm in summer offered not only one of the prettiest, but one of the most aromatic selfie ops in the Valley of the Moon.

Four years ago when a social media posting about the farm’s annual Lavender Festival went viral, hoards of people flocked to tiny Kenwood, lured by the prospect of a trip to Provence without a plane ticket. The highway became so backed up that the farm’s shocked owners, Gary and Rebecca Rosenberg, were forced to shut down the event.

The thought that this beloved landmark was among the casualties of the Nuns fire that swept into the upper Sonoma Valley the same night the Tubbs fire ripped through Santa Rosa three years ago was almost unfathomable.

More incredible, however, is the reaction of Rebecca and Gary Rosenberg.

“The wineries will always attract people, and the natural beauty will be back,“ Gary Rosenberg declared optimistically two months after the firestorm laid waste to a property he and his wife had spent a quarter century turning into the showplace and tending with TLC.

The couple was in Colorado the night firestorms, fueled by strong winds, ravaged Wine Country. Friends gave them the bad news that their home, drying barn and fields were destroyed. And because Kenwood and Glen Ellen were evacuated and even residents were barred from entering, they were told not to bother coming home yet.

Rebecca’s first concern the day after the fire was for the 600-year-old Valley Oak that spread over the heart of their land. If the oak survived, she said, they could rebuild. And it did.

“We went to a Deepak Chopra week-long thing, and that just nailed it for us. The positivity,” Rebecca Rosenberg said. “Life is to experience. And honestly, we have had a tremendous time doing this.”

The Rosenbergs are entrepreneurial by nature. For years they had a successful advertising and marketing agency with national accounts like Sharper Image. They launched Sonoma Lavender on their kitchen table, only a couple of years after moving permanently to the second home in Kenwood they purchased in 1987. They built up the company from sachets and eye pillows Rebecca sold to local shops into the largest purveyor of lavender products in the country. Before that, they had produced a line of dolls called Global Friends. They were used to the risk-taking, hard work and patience required to create something from scratch.

Starting again

Now almost three years later, the couple is back in Kenwood in a new home that looks over a grand-scale garden that is both formal and natural and that pays homage to the lavender fields that for so long were the signature piece of the property.

But this time they went for a dramatically different look. Instead of straight rows of lavender planted like a farm crop, they have a striking garden of overlapping circles that resembles a quilt laid over the former fields. It features lavender as a dominant theme. Now there also are perennials stitched into the design.

Rebecca was inspired to do something very different, even a bit daring, after a visit to Lurie Garden, a naturalistic garden by influential Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolph in Chicago’s Millennium Park.

It reminded her of a tapestry. “I’m really into fabrics. That is why I did Sonoma Lavender. I learned about fabrics from my mother. And this was like fabrics with flowers.”

To design the garden she enlisted Christa Moné, who had created a personal garden for the Rosenbergs outside their old home. Moné was familiar with Oudolph’s work and is drawn to unconventional patterns. She’s not afraid to be bold and innovative.

Moné said the idea of flower-dense plantings resonated with her personal style. Oudolph’s signature is a natural look with drifts of color through spring and summer that weave together, then give way in winter to seed heads.

Moné said she has long wanted to create something with large circles and arcs instead of curves alone, and the Rosenbergs gave her a blank canvas. She sketched out the garden as a series of circles and wide arcs, leading to curvaceous pathways of decomposed granite through planting areas.

The half-acre garden has several themes. The first is to serve as “an ode to what was there, an ode to the lavender,” Moné said. She incorporated a nod to agriculture by planting the lavender side by side in rows, but in curves rather than straight lines, and within their own circle. Rather than the Provence and Grosso that the Rosenbergs farmed, the new garden features just a hint of an agriculture with the Hidcote, an English lavender with dark purple spikes set against blue-green foliage that produces that scent that makes lavender so intoxicating.

Contrasting with the more orderly looking lavender plantings is a mixture of perennials, with salvia as one dominant theme, so there are inner circles of purple lavender and outer circles of salvia in purples and pinks. Moné worked in another color scheme of oranges and red with striking plans like Kniphofia and Cuphea in hot colors. Her third theme is a yellow and color scheme, with bright Rudbeckia and big puffs of Shasta daisies, developed by Sonoma County’s own Luther Burbank.

She’s incorporated some of her new discoveries such as the Aster ’Moench,’ a short and spritely plant with cool blue-lavender flowers.

“It’s such an amazing plant,” Moné said on a recent walk through what has the feel if not the form of a labyrinth.

As you wander along the paths, the garden, as Moné describes it, ”shifts from mixed perennial displays to swaths of salvias to pockets of lavender.“

Among the perennials is a carefully curated selection of echinacea or coneflower, penstemon, Ceanothus and Agastache, among others.

She’s worked in seasonal surprises, like swamp sunflowers, or Helianthus angustifolius.

“They are my favorite plant,” Moné said. “They only bloom for two weeks in October. They just glisten around dusk. It’s the most amazing sunflower.”

Lavender dream

To give the garden a solid and nutritious foundation for success, Moné brought in 4,000 yards of compost. That meant 200 truckloads. Part of that was due to the fact that the property is in a flood plain and needed to be built up. But Moné said it is her article of faith that good soil is the most important component of any good garden. Without it, plants won’t thrive and weeds are more likely to take over.

Some of the garden was planted last fall and other parts in the spring. What was so gratifying was to watch nature’s magic take over almost instantly.

“We had two big plantings. The first big planting was in the fall. We had thousands of plants in containers. We started laying everything out at 8 o’clock in the morning,” she recalled. “But there was nothing out there. There were no plants. It was all dead. We started placing the plants and within an hour there were hummingbirds coming to the containers before we’d even got them in the ground. It was beautiful. If you bring it, they will come. Within a week there were all kinds of hummingbirds, birds and bees.”

The whole garden is laid out with the heritage oak so dear to the Rosenbergs serving as a center point. Their new contemporary Mediterranean home was designed by noted Sonoma architect George Bevan and includes an open second-story lookout, like a contemporary bell tower, that offers a sweeping view of the new tapestry garden and Sonoma Mountain on the other side of the valley.

They are calling this new half-acre that is strictly ornamental “Reve de Lavande,” or Lavender Dream. And it is, to the Rosenbergs, something of a dream come true to return to their land and to see it restored and so vibrant with new growth.

When she looked out at the beauty that now has taken over what was, for a tragic and tender time, just a ruin, Rebecca said, “I just feel my heart. It’s just like home, and it’s so great.”

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