IN CONVERSATION WITH: ANNA EDMONDSON
June 2025
This month, I talked with my client Anna Edmondson about everything gardening. Anna is the true definition of a Renaissance woman. She is a miraculous open-water swimmer who on more than one occasion has swum from Alcatraz to San Francisco, an incredible cook (I’ve been the lucky recipient of many a meal of hers at our site meetings), and most notably, she is an incredibly experimental and instinctual gardener.
In our interview, Anna walks us through the evolution of her Oakland Hills garden since she started stewarding it 30 years ago, and loops us in to the most current iteration of her private paradise and how we transformed a neglected quadrant of her garden into a tranquil eden.
5 minute read
Anna in her garden, April 2025
What is the story of your Oakland Hills garden?
“My garden has gone through so many iterations. Originally it was filled with crabgrass and a hillside that totally invited terracing. We started with mulching and putting down cardboard to suppress the weeds which took a year. My parents would come from the East Coast and every time they came we would do something in the garden together. They bought me the oak tree that's now in the eastern most part of my garden. My mother and I chose the weeping crabapple. So a lot of my plants have sentimental value for me. The garden hides so many people's hands in its creation.”
What was your approach to design?
“I didn’t have formal training in landscape design and didn’t know the botanical names of anything, so I learned by practical experience and following my intuition about shapes and colors. I kind of follow the rule of threes. We eventually hired a guy named Hugo Larman, a British landscape architect, who added a little bit of formality and structure to the garden both through plant choices and layout. He picked out the maples, the tree ferns, and the Sierra Redbuds- all of which I never would have thought of on my own. Having an expert really helped us understand it was a real project, seeing the tangible sketches and to be more goal-oriented and see the whole picture. We were young parents at the time and couldn’t afford his install cost or to do it all in one season, so we just went plant by plant and did the install all ourselves. So it was really helpful to have a designer, and then after that, my gardening again became more intuitive. Trial and error for sure.”
Where is your garden now and what were you looking to do when we started working together?
“The northwestern section of my garden had, at one point, housed a beautiful oak- it must have been about 80 years old and was taking up the whole back section. I remember the day the expert came in and said the tree was dying. As you know, not a lot of things grow under oaks so for years after the removal, we just had a stump and some not great soil. My vision was to have a tropical oasis with a seating area, it's what I had been dreaming about all those years. But I didn’t know how it would look, and what plants to choose, or what was realistic for us financially and if it would require irrigation- lots of questions. But you came in to help us and I can’t overstate how important it is to have an expert come in to help with hardscaping and plant choices.”
When Anna and I started work on the section of her garden that once housed that oak, it was overgrown with vines, grasses, and dodonea. Anna had expressed her interest in creating an intimate space for seating that protected her from her neighbors’ eye-line. We picked a select few of the more mature screening plants to keep so that the garden immediately had a lived-in and developed feel. Among them was the baby of a camellia tree that Anna has said had been on the property when the purchased the house. It was important to both of us to pay respect to the history of the space before her and help nurture the continued story of her land. We then added fast-growing screening plants in between the few existing to vary texture & height.
The next task was to figure out a hardscaping material that would pair well with the worn brick path, but bring the more modern feel she was looking for. We opted for French country gravel with corten steel edging for a patinated, lived-in feel that would complement the brick but distinguish the seating area as its own separate section of the garden. We decided on a teardrop shape for the seating area to mimic the curvilinear shapes of the rest of her garden and create a sense of depth from both entries to the seating area.
The garden before Fen redesign, April 2024
Then, and most importantly, came the plant selection. Anna’s dream was to have a tropical garden, but the challenge was to create a plant palette that satisfied her interest in tropical plants but felt cohesive with the English-Californian style of the rest of her garden and house. We pulled in native Heuchera, Japanese anemone, and Oakleaf Hydrangea to mimic the cut-flower style in the rest of her garden, and then added more textural, modern plants like Cousin Itt Acacia, and Westringia as a bridge to her most tropical, showcase specimens like Farfugium and a Chamerops palm.
We then created a low-flow water fountain with a gorgeous semi-polished rock we found at the stoneyard. I think Anna would agree that finding the fountain stone was the most fun day of the project. There’s always one day in the lifetime of a project that feels like it weaves together all the components of the design, and for us- running around the stoneyard and coming across this stunning rock, was it.
What’s something you’ve learned recently from your garden? Or any new garden obsessions?
“Oh my gosh, I mean the plants that you picked, I particularly love that one- the Farfugium- I love that thing, it’s really phenomenal. It looks like it should be in water, kind of like a lily pad. And the Heuchera is so wispy and lovely with their flowers. Their seeds are all over the kitchen counter because I kept cutting them and making bouquets out of their stems. That’s for the observant person to notice how beautiful those flowers are.”
In just one summer, Anna’s newly planted garden went supersized and grew in to look like a garden that has been there for years. I am a staunch believer that plants pick up the energy of the people taking care of them, and Anna’s garden is a true testament to her nurturing spirit- she brings so much love & presence, and the plants respond in turn. She is currently enjoying the blooms of her Heuchera maxima.
It’s such an incredible privilege to get to design and collaborate with clients as smart and creative as Anna and I feel lucky to get to do another project with her, designing her garden in Inverness in West Marin in the coming year.