Making Room for Edibles

Palo Alto, California

The goal of this garden was to reduce the size of the large, wall-to-wall lawn to allow for more space for vegetables and colorful, drought-tolerant perennials.

The solution was to reduce the lawn by half and create a series of raised vegetable beds made of low, stacked Napa fieldstone. The rustic and beautiful stone beds carry the garden through the winter months, providing year-round interest and structure. Winding throughout the beds are wide paths of pea gravel and flagstone which lead from one end of the garden to the next.

At the heart of the garden is an impressive Pineapple Guava tree (Feijoa sellowiana). To help it blend with the rest of the garden, an organically shaped planting bed now surrounds the tree, filled with the same colorful perennials and evergreen shrubs found elsewhere in the garden.