This Sunday, Altadena Heritage celebrates the outstanding gardens and gardeners in Altadena with the Golden Poppy Awards.
The annual awards ceremony will be held this Sun., May 22, starting at 4 PM. RSVP at 626-798-9687 or go to altadenaheritage.org. Admission is $15 for members of Altadena Heritage, and $25 for nonmenbers. You can also purchase a membership at the ceremony. This year's ceremony will be held at the home and garden of Altadena artist Nancy Romero.
Pictured: Nancy Romero's home --
a 1909 farmhouse on N. Fair Oaks
-- and her garden.
"Cream Tea" with cucumber sandwiches, desserts, tea, wine, etc, will be served, and guitarist/pianist Dan West will entertain.
Altadena Heritage's Michele Zack described the process of choosing gardens this way:
Board members cruise all over the community to find nominees (generally not knowing who lives in nominated houses), then we have a jury meeting to choose favorites. Then the fun begins of finding who the owners are, contacting, and finally convincing them we are not trying to sell them something!
Our main criteria, as always, are gardens that are visible and give to the street, ones that use at least some drought-tolerant plantings and/or reduce lawns, edible landscapes — and just in general make their neighborhoods more beautiful.
This year's winners are:
Lovely roses and profuse plantings are the work of Daniel and Jeylayne Haight, who took the cottage garden to new heights at their home on Catherine. According to Jeylayne, the garden has been a process of trial, error, and improvisation: "I never met a plant I didn't like," she said. "I wish I had more knowledge of gardening -- we just went with it."
Winners David Mispagel on Harriet says this is a work in progress, but it is already adding great beauty to the neighborhood.
This house on Morada joined the garden next door's and took out one driveway when owners Dmitri Bovaird and Margaret Edmonson, both musicians, bought the adjacent property and decided to maximize garden space.
This house on Windfall is the garden of Walter Huber (owner of Silver Birches in Pasadena) and Mark Salzman. It is called "Rolling Rock" because that huge boulder was unearthed and excavated in the building of their home. It rolled to that spot, where thankfully it stopped and didn't crush the car which was parked right next to it!
Huber said that they went so far as to build the house around the garden -- they built the house around an existing grove of eucalyptus trees, had the housepaint mixed to match the decomposed granite on the ground, and matched the trim with the color of the eucalyptus leaves. Huber says that what motivated their garden was "really growing up in Altadena and living my whole life here. There's sort of a mix of things that stir a sense of the romance of old California."
Evoking that romance is why they've cultivated a garden with roses, eucalyptus, cypress trees, agaves, and drought-tolerant native materials and grasses.
As for winning a Golden Poppy, Huber said "It's great that the community acknowledges people who do care for their garden." In a town with a lot of great architecture, he said, "the thing that frames the uniqueness of the architecture is what people do with the garden." A fine house without a compimentary garden is like "having a great picture without a great frame," Huber said.
(Note: we've been making minor corrections all day on this story -- blame Altadena Heritage!)
