perennial pleasures
Intimate vignettes complement long views in a Santa Fe garden that balances nature and carefully designed outdoor living spaces.
A brick drive and airy entry pergola ease the transition from road to residence at the Sherman home in Santa Fe.
Purple coneflower
Lavender lines a stone path.
The house seems to nestle into the dahlias.
Judy Sherman keeps the entry pergola free of plants for an open, sun-striped effect that maximizes light and establishes a pleasing tension between the geometry of the structure and the exuberance of the plantings.
Lamb’s ears contribute to the lush surroundings.
Wide doors ease the transition from indoors to the outdoor living areas.
A kiva fireplace and cooking facilities ensure multiseason appreciation of Santa Fe’s climate.
The longer views around the house encompass distant mountains and nearby hills of piñon and juniper.
In addition to its longer views, the Sherman garden overlooks the golf course fairway over a bed of yellow yarrow.
A deep, flagstone-paved portal provides shade and protection from the elements.
This article first appeared in Spring 2008 Su Casa.
For Judy Sherman, spending time outdoors is all about what she happily calls the three Bs: birds, butterflies, and beauty.
“I’ll be digging in the garden and hear a bird and look up, and I’ll just stop and stare at the sky and clouds. It’s very peaceful,” she reflects, referring to the gardens and views surrounding the Santa Fe home she shares with her husband, Bob Sherman.
The Shermans, who have been visiting Santa Fe since the mid-1980s, purchased the home in 2000 after Bob retired as national sales manager for Merrill Lynch. In the years since then, Judy has worked closely with Santa Fe landscaper Dodie Dean, owner of Artemisia Native Gardens.
Their collaboration has resulted in a lush garden environment that combines serene, almost monochromatic hues—the grays and soft purples of catmint (nepeta), lavender, and blue mist spirea—with areas of cheerful, fiesta-like floral color. Other highlights include accents of eye-catching form, provided by a bonsai-like dwarf Scotch pine and spiky hesperaloe (a type of yucca) for example, against a “foundation” of rounded shrubs and bushes that echo the outlines of distant mountains.
The Shermans’ property sits on the edge of a ridge overlooking a golf course fairway. Open spaces surround the home, while the south side—the predominant orientation of most of the rooms and outdoor living areas—offers Bob a daily view of his favorite activity. “He golfs often, but according to him, not often enough,” Judy laughs.
The Shermans’ home, designed by architect David Milburn and built in the mid-1990s by Wolf Corporation, is an unusual design consisting of three adjoining circles. The largest, in the center, contains the great room, kitchen, living area, and dining room. The circular space to the west is divided between the master suite and Bob’s office, while the other circle—separated from the rest of the house by a longer corridor—is the guest suite. Gardens completely encircle the house in a relatively narrow band, with plants such as buffalo juniper and santolina forming a transitional border between the cultivated areas and native vegetation beyond.
Entrance to the home is gained by a walkway framed in a dramatic wooden pergola. In summer and fall, garden beds on both sides of the walk are filled with annuals in bright colors, while the pergola itself has been left without the usual draping of vines to let in the most sunlight. As a result the area is open to the sky yet accented by the pergola’s striking lines and shadows.
Once inside, the eye moves directly across from the entrance to large windows on either side of the great room’s fireplace, where an effusion of summer color spills from the south-side gardens. Also on the golf course side of the home is a spacious portal-covered patio and fireplace for outdoor dining and entertaining. And just outside the master suite’s south-facing windows sits a sunny rose garden, surrounded by a hedge of lavender and blue mist spirea.
A cooler microclimate prevails on the northeast side, where a floor-to-ceiling window between two of the home’s circular sections looks out into a narrow strip of garden shaded by the curved walls. That’s where a small iron statue of St. Francis of Assisi stands. Dodie, whose landscaping philosophy is grounded in the appropriate matching of vegetation and environment, encourages clients to add sculpture and rockwork to carry visual interest through times of drought and in areas where heavy planting is not practical.
The property’s initial installation of rockwork, drip irrigation, and shrubbery was done by Santa Fe landscaper Barbara Vadurro when the home was built by previous owners. Dodie took over landscaping, including weekly maintenance, more than 10 years ago. With the Shermans she has initiated a few major changes and has integrated Judy and Bob’s personal aesthetics into the rough sketch of established plantings and design.
“The bones were there. There were wonderful stone outlying walls and a lot of woody shrubs but not a lot of color at certain times of the year,” Judy explains. “We wanted more color and interest in areas that were blank. We wanted vistas not only of the mountains and golf course but also up close.”
With this in mind, Dodie and Judy chose plants for their flowers, textures, and shapes to fill the gardens close to the house. Set among a base of low-lying, rounded bushes, this foreground vegetation gives way to spacious mountain and sky vistas farther out. It’s a version of the Japanese notion of nearby and longer views complementing each other, Dodie notes. “It’s a Southwest twist to the Japanese concept. In Japan the rocks are more formally placed, whereas here the rockwork and plantings are more naturalistic. We’re mimicking the natural landscape around us but also embellishing it with flowers, with some supplemental watering.”
Water conservation is a key element in Dodie’s approach. She has helped the Shermans, who lived primarily in the Midwest and Connecticut before coming to Santa Fe, appreciate the value of drought-resistant plants and not overwatering in New Mexico’s climate. Sections of dry-creek rockwork built into the ground on the property’s uphill northeast side capture and guide rainwater, which feeds trees as it percolates into the earth. The Shermans also have installed rain barrels for additional water storage.
Among the biggest landscaping changes Dodie and the Shermans undertook was the relocation and pruning of several juniper and piñon trees. In particular, a large piñon near the kitchen window obscured the view and made the space feel dark and enclosed. That venerable tree found a new home on the north side of the house, while others were pruned or moved to reveal the Sangre de Cristo Mountains beyond.
Although all the landscaping’s main elements are in place now, Dodie and Judy continue to try out new plantings, including native flora and other “adaptables,” as Dodie describes them. “A garden is a constant work in progress,” adds Judy, who has had extensive training and experience in gardening and garden clubs. “You put something in and say, ‘No, that doesn’t work, we won’t do that next year.’ And some things work out very well.”
Gussie Fauntleroy, a longtime Santa Fe resident, writes about homes, art, and architecture for national and regional magazines, among them Art & Antiques, Southwest Art, New Mexico Magazine, and Native Peoples Magazine. She is the author of three books on visual artists.
Resources
Unless otherwise noted, businesses below are in Santa Fe, the area code is 505, and the prefix for websites is www.
Landscaping contractor: Dodie Dean, Artemisia Native Gardens, 989-1769. Landscape: original installations, rockwork, and irrigation by Barbara Vadurro, 984-8699. Materials: perennials and trees from local nurseries. Agua Fria Nursery, 983-4831; Payne’s Nurseries & Greenhouses, 988-9626, paynes.com; Plants of the Southwest, 438-8888, plantsofthesouthwest.com; Santa Fe Greenhouses, 473-2700, santafegreenhouses.com. Builder: John Wolf; John Jones, project manager; Wolf Corporation, 983-5511, wolf-corp.com. Architect: David Milburn.