Last year Kevin and I remodeled the cottage behind our house. Seth Boor and Kevin collaborated on the design, and I got to help with the outdoor spaces. The final inspection happened on my due date.

These beautiful photos were taken by Marion Brenner and styled by Caitlin Atkinson.

This is the front of the cottage. The intention for this garden is that the Azara microphylla will grow up to about 20-feet and have a nice canopy that will be lovely from the street level as well as from the rooftop. The garden is designed to be ultra-low maintenance. The bright yellow shrubs are Choisya ternata ‘Sundance’, which are performing well. The Philodendron ‘Xanadu’ is a workhorse of a plant, looking lovely in all seasons. I just can’t seem to design a garden without Astelia nivicola ‘Red Gem, the silver grass-like plant that you can see just peeking over the curb. The Ceanothus griseus ‘Diamond Heights’ will someday pop up  over the little curb and soften the line a bit.

This is the front door. The sign above the front door is left over from when the cottage was a dance studio — Betty May’s School of Tap — for many years, from the 1940s until the 1980s.

The courtyard is my favorite part.  We packed a lot of garden into this tiny little courtyard. This  is a vertical succulent garden planted with sempervivum and a little horizontal bed with Myers asparagus and echeveria. I absolutely love this little garden.

This is the fantastically deep concrete soaking tub by our friend Mark Rogero at Concreteworks. When you sit in this tub you are in water up to your neck and all you can see is the garden and the sky. It is the ultimate luxury for such a small garden.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 at 7:15 am and is filed under Collaborations, Collaborations with Seth Boor, Garden Design, Vertical Garden, Vertical Succulent Garden. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.