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Landscape Designer Uses Bold Colors to Create Unique Fitch Mountain Retreat
by Meg McCohnahey Photos by Mark Aronoff (August 23, 2003)

light in garden Tropical Retreat
In a poem that has become an anthem for women of a certain age, British writer Jenny Joseph declares, "When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple." Along a hillside on Healdsburg's Fitch Mountain, Diana Stratton practices the same principal of defying convention. After sticking to the safe whites and soft pastels Stratton, a professional landscape designer and owner of Diana Stratton Design, decided she'd reached a point in life where she wanted to please herself. She dressed in her snug third of an acre in a new mantle of deep purple, cobalt blue and chartreuse, scattered with a confetti bright blooms. The result is a terraced garden that is as refreshing and inviting as a clear bowl of tropical fruit salad on a bed of greens. It's made all the more lively with lots of whimsical lighting, all low voltage and energy-efficient, and the creative recycling of materials. Framing the entrance of the garden is a red-leaf banana tree and a spreading Angel's Trumpet, towering 15 feet tall, with prodigious pink blooms. The garden winds along a narrow path under a gazebo, past a brightly colored greenhouse and cool corners and eventually uphill, moving among six different terraces.

Rustic Greenhouse
with furniture The central "jewel," as Stratton calls it, is a rustic greenhouse, constructed from the old wood frame windows removed from the house during a remodel. It is painted - of course- in purple and chartreuse, surrounded by bright blooms in red, pink, and purple. Stratton was so taken with the rainbow outside her window that she decided to pain her 1,200 square-foot cottage in a similar palette of periwinkle blue and chartreuse. "I was afraid my neighbors would think I had lost my mind," she admits. "But everyone, including perfect strangers on the hiking trail next to us, this it's wonderful." But gaining the confidence to go with color did not come easily.

"Before, I was sort of creating the garden for what I thought everyone else wanted to see," says Stratton, seated under a gazebo and wrapped in a Polynesian sarong in the same hues as the garden. "I had this one friend who would come over and go through the garden and if I had any bright colors she'd go 'Oh. Not my color.' It was like I was trying to do something for everyone else. I though about it and decided this garden is really my own private garden. I want to create what I like, and what I want to see."

Photo of Diana She decided what she really wanted to see outside her home office door was a splash of Kauai, the Hawaiian island to which she has been escaping for 40 years. "It's a spiritual thing for me. I can't explain it. It's someplace where I feel like I belong and where I really connect when I go there," she says. Stratton's deep link to Hawaii goes back more than 30 years, when she started "The Leaf," one of the first interior landscape businesses in Sonoma County. From her 2,000 square-foot greenhouse, she supplied plants for restaurants and commercial businesses and designed interior landscapes. "I have always loved tropicals and on my first visit to Hawaii about this same time period I was truly amazed that the plants I grew in my greenhouse could become so magnificent in their native setting," she recalls. "It was on this first visit that I truly developed this lifelong love affair with these marvelous plants.

But Stratton was also faced with the challenge of growing tropicals in a climate that was less than ideal for their welfare. So she set about selecting hardy varieties that could adapt. "My plants are my kids and I have to go to great lengths to ensure their happiness, " she says.

Wrapped, Warmed Plant
white flowers One particularly cold winter she wrapped the Angel's Trumpet with a mattress pad and put a 40-watt light bulb in the pad. The top froze back, she said but the trunk was unharmed. Other more delicate plants like bougainvillea and certain varieties of orchids are kept in pots and brought inside for the winter.

Conversely, she keeps things cool and moist over Healdsburg's hot summers with a drip system and watering by hand, which consumes about five hours a week. Yet her water bill is only about $90 a month, not necessarily a lot more than what it costs to keep a large lawn, she notes.

Among the tropicals are taro, datura, variegated ginger, grasses and a variety of plants with leaves of bronze and bright green. There are also hydrangeas, geraniums, fuchsias and other colorful blooms, pouring everywhere out of pots.

Another recurring color in the landscape in cobalt blue, seen in many of the little glass elements and plants. This too, brings back soothing memories of another place that captured her imagination: Casablanca, Morocco, where she lived as a child. "It was here that I feel my connection and fascination with the color indigo began. I remember doors, walls and interior tile courtyards colored in this brilliant color. To this day it reminds me of this strange and beautiful place from my childhood."

Stratton's mother Bernice Crane, a sculptor and avid gardener who owned the former Crane's Nursery in Larkfield for many years, also influenced Stratton's infatuation with tropical colors. "She loves color," Stratton recalls. "She used to paint our bathroom flamingo pink."

Stratton's work as a landscape designer is often high end, with budgets that can exceed $1 million and installation done quickly by large crews of workers. In addition to residential work, she's done landscape design for wineries such as J., Seghesio and Michel-Schlumberger.

Lanterns Tamed Hillside
But like any working-class homeowner, she had limited time and budget to fulfill the vision for her own garden. Stratton purchased her modest 1949 cabin about 20 years ago, taking years to double the size of the house and slowly tame a hillside choked with blackberries, poison oak and scotch broom.

She's managed to evoke a tropical feeling in an area heavy with native oak and madrone by using plants that adapt to cool winters and hot, dry summers: thinks like canna lilies, two types of taro, Japanese maples, Creeping Jenny in pots, Staghorn Ferns and a lot of sedge grass, from 'Frosted curls,' to variegated 'Japanese curls.'

Stratton also maintained economy by using recycled materials. Husband Paul Radford, a sheet-metal worker, helped with the architectural elements that give the garden its character. The deck is all recycled, supported with a steel frame from old warehouse racks. A Victorian slated for demolition in San Francisco yielded further treasure-an antique metal railing with weather green patina. Discarded tiles from an old bakery break oven are now gracing the area around a small pond created from a concrete laundry sink.

Stratton concedes that her garden is always evolving, with a far brighter face that when it was selected to be featured in the 1998 Smith and Hawken Secret Gardens Calendar. Many of her most colorful plants are in pots, which makes it easy to change the look and the palette without alter the fundamental structure. But Stratton right now loves to share her garden with any homeowner feeling a wee bit timid about color.

"A lot of people see this and realize, 'Hey, it's okay. I can do color.' Its only paint and if you don't like it you can always paint over it." For now, however, Stratton is content to happily inhabit her world of bright purple.