BEAUTY AND MEMORIES
Novato man manages Marin Art and Garden Center's garden
While on the job as Marin Art and Garden Center’s garden manager, Steven Schwager often hears from passerbys about their memories tied to the place. It’s where they walk their dog every day, had their wedding, took their child to preschool, or watched and danced along to a concert on the lawn.
When the Novato resident took the job in 2018, he wanted to help build upon that and its beauty throughout its 11 acres, as well as connect to the greater community. Although the pandemic has haltered some of the center’s in-person programming, he still maintains the property for the future.
Before landing at the Ross center, Schwager, a certified horticulturist, worked as a showroom manager and designer at Living Green Design and a landscape designer and project manager at Katharine Webster Inc. in San Francisco.
Q
What are you proud of since taking the job at the center?
A
I have created some harmony with the plantings and feel like the plantings are more intentional and make more sense. I have also done educational videos and a few workshops, which is fun. I’ve made the gardens more beautiful and also been slowly changing
the palette to make it more fire-resistant and drought-tolerant, and making them horticulturally significant, introducing plant species and plant varieties that somebody might not know about or don’t see often. Not only have it be beautiful, but educational.
Q
You started gardening at a young age. Tell me about that.
A
My mother was a gardener. I started helping my mom and she gave me this little patch to create my own garden. We would go to Wisconsin and I would dig up — which I don’t recommend — things in the forest and plant them. Some of them worked
and some of them didn’t, and gradually the garden started growing. My other duties were to take care of weeding, composting, the vegetable garden and rose care, and this is where I started learning the science of gardening, and reading about gardening. Then, everywhere I lived as an adult, I would create a little garden.
Q
What inspired you to make it a career?
A
I moved to Germany at the end of 1999. There was a woman there who was a master gardener and needed an assistant, and I became her apprentice. That’s when I really got into gardening as a job and learned a lot from her. When
I moved back to the States, I decided this is what I wanted to do and started taking all these classes. My original college major was in theater design, so I started looking at the garden as little stage sets; it’s the same thing, where you are layering, creating a feeling. I never expected this. I never said, “When I grow up, I want to manage a public garden,” and here I am. I think about it sometimes — I am doing something that combines all the things I love about gardening. I get to design. I get to work in the garden and also, because of the nature of what I do and what I want to achieve here, I get to do a lot of research and I am learning. I want people to feel the beauty and the passion that I have and that my three gardeners have for the garden. Gardening is not all science and not all art. It’s both.
Q What’s inspired your work at the center?
A
When I first started here, there was something in my mind and I couldn’t identify it. Then I saw a movie called “Five Seasons,” about landscape designer Piet Oudolf. What I know about his style of garden is that when you visit his garden, you are immersed in the garden, for me, that was what was missing … and bring back its more historical feeling, back to its original and mid-century intentions.