Harmony in Design with Music in the Gardens - Spring Tour 2009
Friday, April 24 and Saturday, April 25, 10AM
to 4PM
Luncheon served at Gamble Garden from 11
AM to 2PM each day
Buy tickets
| Buy tickets or volunteer by mail
Harmony in Design with Music in the Gardens, our 24th Annual Spring Tour,
features five wonderful private gardens in the historic Professorville and Crescent Park areas in Palo Alto.
Our garden tour starts in Professorville, a part of University South known for its old-style history, inviting streets, and charming gardens.
It continues into Crescent Park, known for secluded lots, tree-lined streets, brilliant gardens, streams,
and magnificent old trees.
During the tour, live music will be performed in several of the gardens to enhance your enjoyment of the surroundings.
Harmony in design, as in music, encompasses elements of artistic creativity, composition, and often the staccato of surprise.
The designs of our five gardens on the tour are diverse. They feature California native and low-water use plants,
organic vegetables, foliages of many textures and colors, and artistic and custom-made garden accessories.
You will see a flowing sail-like canvas covering a patio, antique chimes dangling in trees, old stone walls,
a rambling pool, creative ironwork, a mosaic wall, and a dancing fountain that will make you smile.
And don’t miss the children’s playhouse that is carefully integrated into a flower garden.
The breadth of flowers in the gardens is amazing. There is a breathtaking trellis seeping with roses, and hollyhocks and digitalis
in abundance. There are vibrant fresh cutting beds of flowers, Italian cypress, grape vines, iris, roses, hydrangea, succulents, ferns,
grasses, water lilies, orange and lemon trees, and espaliered fruit trees.
Please join us this year for a superb tour of these distinctive gardens. Afterwards, return
to Gamble Garden for the silent auction and plant sale; click
here for a list of sale plants in pdf format.
Unusual plantings, pots and espaliered fruits offer architectural texture. Layers and repeats of color throughout,
form a mélange with metal sculptures, boulders and meandering taffy and desert rose gravel paths.
Indoor/outdoor living was designed for these world travelers and their “finds”. Calming water fountains
add balance to the garden of deep reds and chocolate hues in true feng shui manner. Unique sun sails hover over the
Zen Den and a custom water wall was designed for its space in the Den.
A forest floor with fruits and flowers, hand crafted metal and customized touches everywhere await you in this family-friendly garden.
Wanting a water element safe for young children, the owners selected a dancing, enticing, magical ground fountain.
Five cycles of “songs” are programmed to make spurts and shoots and streams into almost audible melodies.
Charming and whimsical touches are throughout this delightful garden.
Antique roses are plentiful along with loads of white impatiens and white crab apple trees dropping petals like snowflakes in spring.
Grapevines stand in foxglove beds as high as the eye along the sidewalk lawn. Victorian sensibility preserved the arbor
and borders around the grounds. Room after room appears through the stone archway of this large garden.
A pool, children’s play area with stream, a sunken sitting room for antiquities, an outdoor kitchen, fruits and vegetables; it has it all.
An old casa and an old Mediterranean garden with unusual water features needed a major update.
A hot tub at the top of the back garden appears to flow into the stream running downhill, which appears to be connected
to the pool below. The extra boulders of this installation were strewn around the garden about 25 years ago.
Large tree ferns needed repositioning along with spectacular, deep-red rhododendrons and the massive rocks.
With many years of overgrowth removed, the exhaustive repositioning and beautiful new low-water-use native plantings,
this Mediterranean garden has vibrancy once again.
This stately Birge Clark home has a very welcoming garden. The front courtyard garden has native plantings with seasonal color.
Entering the inner sanctum of the main garden you will find old Japanese maples, an Akebono cherry tree and an enormous hedge
of camellias in different colors, hybridized and grown by the first owner. A central fountain was built in ground and filled with lotus
and water lilies. Many other touches are to be enjoyed in this mature, redesigned garden and home.
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