![]() “I eventually just gave up trying to amend it,” Diana concedes. No amount of trucked-in topsoil or compost ever turned the heavy clay into friable loam. The soil, however, presented a challenge. Roses, magnolias, and wisteria were among the first plants to go in, all adhering to a palette of soft pink, peach, blue, purple, and white, with pops of magenta. “I wanted to see every plant from inside the house and while sitting on the deck,” she explains. So she regraded the level area into a slope, terracing it with low, dry-stacked rock walls, to put the entire garden on display. The ground behind the wall was level-until it reached another retaining wall farther uphill, that is. Diana replaced a 4-foot retaining wall bordering that deck with one just under 2 feet. Rebuilding the back deck came next, then installing a French drain beneath it to improve stormwater drainage. “He wasn’t kidding.” As luck would have it, just three days after closing on the property, an earthquake struck, prompting Diana to start upgrading the house sooner than planned.įollowing the advice of engineers, she reinforced the foundation and replaced a rotting redwood retaining wall along the parking area with one made of reinforced concrete-”mudslides do happen here,” she points out. “The prior owner told me I’d need heavy-duty muck boots if I wanted to garden here,” she says. The house was a typical 1970s California Contemporary-clad in vertical plywood siding with awkwardly placed windows-built into a steep hillside of clay soil prone to puddling. The scenery was quite different back when Diana purchased the property 30 years ago. “From every window you can see something green.” “It’s like living in a tree house,” she says. Perched on a terraced hillside in Santa Cruz, California, with sweeping views of Monterey Bay, her house defies its suburban setting, its garden enclosed by mature trees and packed with fragrant flowers handpicked to lure birds and other pollinators. ![]() Now retired, her scientific observations take place much closer to home-oftentimes in her own backyard, where all but the deer and gophers are made welcome.įrom the start, Diana set out to create a serene natural setting-”a house inside a garden,” as she describes it. A zoologist by training and profession, Diana spent her younger years studying manatees in the Amazon, Puerto Rico, and Belize. Her garden is as much a sanctuary for her as it is for the wildlife that take refuge there. A Garden Sanctuaryīut Diana Magor is the exception. Nor do many make a habit of eating lunch while watching monarch butterflies lay eggs in potted milkweed plants. Not every homeowner welcomes backyard sightings of bobcats and gray foxes. Dense plantings along the sides of the one-third-acre property provide privacy. Cut into a steep hillside, homeowner Diana Magor’s house in Santa Cruz, CA, overlooks a Japanese-inspired front garden and Monterey Bay, while the back offers views of a colorful terraced flower garden.
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