Portola stop:
District highlighted by fall garden tour.
Ruth Wallace remembers knocking on doors in her Portola district neighborhood, asking strangers about their gardens, to organize a tour as a fundraiser for a new branch library. That was five years ago; this year the tour, which takes place Saturday, has 22 stops and gardeners are calling her to volunteer.
Residents, attracted to this southeast corner of San Francisco in part by its large backyards and sunny climate, are turning the Portola into San Francisco’s new garden district, with McLaren Park as a sprawling public centerpiece.
The district’s gardens have wildly various slopes, exposures and sizes but are mostly invisible from the street. That last fact makes for a tour full of surprises. We previewed a handsomely hardscaped and creatively planted hillside lot, a sustainable child- and dogfriendly space and a plant collector’s paradise.
Vestiges of the Portola’s past are everywhere. In the last century it boasted 19 nurseries, most owned by Italian families. The remains of the Garibaldi family’s University Mound Nursery are still there, with
die-hard roses growing through the broken panes of the greenhouses. There’s still a Maltese contingent, and at least one Maltese cross incised into a sidewalk.
Retiree Robert Henderson and Department of Public Works staffer Mindy Linetzky have a view that includes the greenhouse ruins from their personal Hanging Garden: a steep, narrow slope terraced for ornamentals, herb and vegetable plots; seating that includes an antique porch swing; and, on the lowest level, pear and plum trees: “We wanted to be able to stand on the terrace and pick the fruit.”
‘Windy location’
“It’s a very windy location,” Linetzky said. “That’s why we have a lot of grasses on the patio — to catch the movement of the wind.” There is, however, enough sun for sizable tomatoes, succulents, even the odd orchid tucked in with the veggies: “It’s a matter of what’s achievable — what you can do with your space and your finances. You don’t have to be Dwell magazine.”
A few blocks away, Michael and Cheryl Olinger designed for their relatively flat space, two young sons, two golden retrievers and sustainability: a modest, rompable lawn of droughttolerant grass, raised beds for edibles and ornamentals, and a rainwater-harvesting system.
Cheryl Olinger, a Sears Holding Corp. executive, is finishing a handsome mosaic mural along the raised bed for fingerling potatoes, strawberries, sometimes pumpkins. There’s an outdoor
“The landlord said he was selling, and I realized I was married to the garden.”
Randy Holman
screen for movie nights.
Michael, a general contractor who comes from a family of avid gardeners, cherishes the canna lilies that his mother brought from upstate New York. He salvaged a couple of 300-gallon galvanized tanks; they’re under the deck, with downspouts feeding them; a drip system irrigates the plants. Another tank is next to Jack and Henry’s “clubhouse,” which will next get a living roof.
Designer Randy Holman has another of those long, narrow lots, but a level one. He started working on his intense, colorful garden as a tenant before he bought the house: “The landlord said he was selling, and I realized I was married to the garden.” Holman is a collector and an experimenter: “I look for obscure things — plants a little on the edge.”
Gardening gene
Ornamental grasses dance with standard pruned roses and lots of variegated foliage. One favorite grass is a bronze stipa whose threadlike flower heads catch the sun like tinsel. A windbreak of three smallish eucalypts keeps the space warmer and, interestingly, so does the strip of synthetic turf replacing a too-demanding tiny lawn. “My nextdoor neighbor gets frost, but I don’t,” Holman said.
Like Michael Olinger, Holman has the gardening gene. In the shade of his patio are begonias he got from his grandmother and an epiphyllum that originated with his great-grandmother. The latter must be a vegetable Rasputin: “It’s survived a lot of moves. Once I found it stuffed in a box.”
“The garden tour is a community-building effort,” Mindy Linetzky said. “You meet your neighbors, discover you have things in common, and they begin giving you cuttings.” The tour long since hit its target for the library, but, said Wallace, “no one wanted to give it up.” This year’s proceeds are going to San Francisco City College’s environmental horticulture department.