MARCIA DONAHUE:A Generous Gardener in Berkeley

摘要

It is hard to overestimate the influence that Marcia Donahue's small (60- by 100-foot) garden has had on gardens up and down San Francisco Bay. Her sculptures and adventurous attitude toward plants turns up in gardens from Santa Cruz to Napa. Donahuewas an art school graduate focused on textiles when she moved to this two-story Victorian house almost forty years ago. Even as she was renovating the dilapidated house, she plunged into what has been her life's work—creating gardens and art. In one ofthe many interviews she has given over the years, she said of her garden, "It is not intended to be a tasteful setting for the house; it is a setting for personal expression and experience." And she has shared this personal expression with a constant stream of visitors who are welcomed to the garden every Sunday afternoon. Her philosophy, along with her stunningly diverse plant palette and her weirdly compelling sculpture, has given countless gardeners from the Bay Area and further afield permission towalk a little way on the wild side as they create their own gardens.