A garden spot for every desire
Cultivated gardens can serve a multitude of purposes, whether they’re designed for viewing, strolling, learning, harvesting or simply an everyday escape.
John Thompson’s garden in Corte Madera manages to check off all those boxes.
It wasn’t his first garden in the Madera Gardens neighborhood, though. For years, he had lived across the street and admired the large hillside lot for years.
When the owner was thinking of moving, Thompson wrote him a letter asking to be considered if the house was ever for sale.
“A week later, he knocked on my door and we eventually struck a deal for the purchase of his house,” Thompson says. “We moved in on my wife’s birthday, and within a couple of months, I had lost my job in the Great Recession.”
Unfazed, Thompson took the opportunity to turn his attention full-time to his garden that takes up most of the 15,000-square-foot lot.
“Several months and 3,000 retaining blocks later, the garden ‘canvas’ was built,” he says.
At the time, the existing garden consisted of a swimming pool, some turf, scrub brush, weeds and a stump where the previous owner used to enjoy a cigar in the evenings.
Initially, Thompson’s “canvas,” or layout, was built to create an outdoors space for his children.
After his wife’s death and once his children were grown and on their own, Thompson once again turned his attention to his garden.
This time, he did it with his romantic partner, Sara Kroeger, with the goal of turning it into a sanctuary.
“We wanted to create a place where we could go and escape the modern world by focusing on tending to the land,” he says.
Growing up in Stockton, Thompson lived on a large lot in a subdivision that occupied the site of a former walnut orchard.
“We had veggie gardens and walnuts to harvest each year from the dozen or so trees still on the lot,” he says.
Kroeger grew up on a redwood-shaded hillside lot in Larkspur and had more experience with gardening thanks to her dad,
Chuck Kroeger, a principal in the Marin landscape management company Forster & Kroeger.
“He was a lifelong gardener and at home he had success growing veggies in containers in the shade,” Thompson says. “That passion is something that Sara got from her dad and it’s carried over to our yard.”
While Thompson modestly takes credit for creating the garden layout over several years, he credits Kroeger for taking it to the next level. “She is the brains and I am the brawn of our yard management team.”
Kroeger “ran with the idea of creating individual settings in the yard, which we call vignettes, and now we have many great spot to enjoy the yard, and each has its own personality,” he says.
The first destination is the porch just outside the back door.
“We like to take it all in from the porch,” he says. “It’s a classic place to sit in the shade during the summer, and to sit and listen to the rain in the winter.”
During the holidays, they enjoy a Christmas tree on the porch. The rest of the year it’s where they make future plans for the garden. But it’s at the bungalow where they sit “and come up with our best gardening ideas.”
Behind the bungalow is the azalea garden that is interplanted with rhododendrons generally purchased from Sonoma Horticultural Nursery in Sebastopol.
Nearby is the couple’s metal art yard, a garden spot where “we improvise with items found at garage sales and salvage yards,” he says. “It’s mostly shaded and we experiment with shade plants from Annie’s Annuals and Perennials in Richmond.”
There are at least five varieties of lavender growing on “Lavender Hill” and they are trying to figure out which plants have the prettiest blooms.
“We prefer a long stem and thin flower but we’ve never met a lavender that we didn’t like,” says Thompson, adding that they love the bees that the plant attracts. “We’ve planted white lavender, along with the traditional purple and some variegated ones, but they haven’t bloomed yet.”
Here, they can relax in a hammock strung between two pine trees or hit whiffle balls into the pool below from an informal driving range made of artificial turf.
Trellised kiwi vines that provided their first harvest (five kiwis) are near a seating area and a fire pit for yet another garden destination.
Finally, there is the vegetable garden. Because the garden is in a cool area with lots of springtime shade, Thompson has found that starts work better than seeds, and cuttings and dividing of the ornamental plants keep the garden full.
The garden is still a work in progress and probably always will be, he notes. “We are currently ruminating about how we’ll make the upper levels more accessible in our old age, even though that’s still years away.”