When Marisa Bragoni and Dan Schnoll sit around their backyard fire pit, they feel like they’re camping, an activity they wish they could do more of.
“It’s really a kind of letting-go-and-relaxing place,” Bragoni says of the fire feature behind the married couple’s home near East Grant Road and North Campbell Avenue.
“The fire is so important to us,” she explains in describing their 2015 landscape redesign. “It added to that feeling of hanging out and being with friends and family.”
Schnoll gets the same feeling. “It’s when everyone gathers around the fire and you look at it and you get mesmerized by it,” he says. Stories are told, drinks are imbibed. “It’s the community gathering around the fire and talking,” he adds.
This idea that a backyard ought to provide deep personal connection is something Tucson landscape designer Scott Calhoun has been talking about lately in public presentations. He describes this idea as creating real landscapes by tapping into “introspective gardens.”
These are gardens in our mind, made up of feelings and places and memories that make us feel good.
Calhoun believes that people too often hire landscape designers and give them total control. They create something that may be pretty and useful, but not personally meaningful.
Calhoun recalls a landscape designer friend in Rhode Island who was burning out on doing designs of rustic rock with peonies. “He told me everybody said they wanted to have a ‘garden like my neighbor has, only a little bit nicer,’” he says.
Instead, Calhoun suggests that people be encouraged to design their own outdoor spaces. “The best gardens say something about the people that live there,” says Calhoun. “They tell a story, in a way.”
Calhoun’s stories that are reflected in his and his wife’s own backyard are about the fun he had as a child visiting meadows on the Mogollon Rim, the vegetable gardens their parents had and the recycled objects that “express a little bit of who we are and what our values are,” he says.
BACKYARD OF MEMORIES
For Bragoni and Schnoll, camping isn’t the only personal expression in the yard, which Calhoun designed.
Two raised beds allow the couple to grow vegetables and herbs. Schnoll says it’s his way of continuing the legacy of gardeners in his family. “My mom’s side has always had a green thumb,” he says. Bragoni’s father also is a big veggie grower.
Schnoll is ready to grow table grapes on the steel arbor that was added in the redesign.
“I love wine,” he says. “I’m not growing wine grapes, but it’s the romantic notion of growing grapes.”
The arbor itself, though not of Asian design, reminds the couple of their delight in architecture they saw during a trip to Japan, Bragoni says.
ADDING PERSONALITY
Sometimes an introspective garden evolves over time as “savvy” home gardeners customize a designed landscape, Calhoun says.
Barbie Adler did just that at the northwest-side home she shares with her husband, John Nemo.
In 2000, they worked with personal friend Carrie Nimmer, who is a landscape designer in Phoenix, to open up their backyard space.
When it came to the plants, “I wanted things a little bit fluffy,” Adler recalls. “I didn’t want a lot of harsh shapes.”
To her, that meant perennials like sunflower, echinacea, gaillardia and rudbeckia among the desert Baja fairy duster, aloe, agave colorata and salvia.
Trimming back plants that sucked up a lot of water eventually took its toll on the couple.
“We were trying to be more and more conscious of water,” Adler says. “I love to garden, but I was hacking back, trimming, all the time.”
Adler continued to tinker with the landscape, which now has a more desert look. Today’s view combines ornamental grasses, verbena, penstemon and blanket flower; potted coral fountain, blackfoot daisy, dwarf pomegranate and succulents; and lady slipper and white-blooming Anacacho orchid trees.
Adler tries to replicate the feeling she gets while working as a docent at Tohono Chul Park. In particular, she loves the area where palo verde trees shade plots of salvia greggii.
It’s this activity of changes that Calhoun wishes more homeowners would do to their landscapes, even when it’s been designed by a professional.
“Barbie has crafted the mix of plants to her tastes over the years,” he says. “There is no way contractors would be able to create such a space ... that only a savvy home gardener could have dreamed up.”
Adler admits that for a time she felt some guilt over the many changes the couple has made in the garden, until she spoke to Nimmer about it.
“‘I’ve wrecked your garden,’” Adler remembers telling her. “What she said to me was, ‘Barbie, it’s not my garden. It’s your garden and it always had been.’”
