On one hand, Damon and Lisa Mattson were among the lucky ones. Though their Fountaingrove home suffered significant damage in the catastrophic 2017 wildfires, it was not completely lost. Instead, the fire scorched the couple’s formerly tree-studded property, destroying the restful backyard retreat the pair had created.

The high cost of rebuilding their garage and fixing the home (they had to take the house “pretty much down to the studs” because of smoke and water damage, Lisa says), meant the couple put their skills and sweat equity to work.

Lisa and Damon went for a radically different look for the garden rebuild. It’s become a stunning, high-desert landscape of cactus and succulents that bloom from beds of finely-ground decomposed granite. They say the style makes them feel like they’re on vacation: Both are originally from the Midwest, and, at this point in their lives, they’re confirmed heat-seekers.

“We like to go to Vegas for vacations. We like to go to Mexico—anywhere that is a tropical or desert climate,” says Lisa, who works in marketing at Jordan Vineyard & Winery.

A changed landscape

Before the fire, Lisa and Damon lived in a shady site, protected from wind and tucked below grade at the top of the ridge, with a landscape of mature oaks, native grasses, and New Zealand flax. But very little of that made it through the firestorm. The couple lost over 50 trees, including many heritage oaks and bays. Only three cordylines, woody flowering plants native to Australia and New Zealand, and a few lowgrowing succulents called chalksticks remained. Coming back to the property for the first time two weeks after the fire moved through, Lisa says the yard, “looked like a moonscape.”

Rebuilding with succulents offered the couple the chance to be more water-wise — and to build a stronger defense against future fires. A firefighter from Geyserville who helped save the home in 2017, and whom Lisa later tracked down to thank, told them that during the firefight, the original wood mulch had caught on fire. “He said the mulch was like lighter fluid, and that was what caused a lot of our damage. So it was, like, ‘I’m never putting mulch back down,’” says Lisa.

The sand-like decomposed granite Lisa sourced for the new yard was a more expensive choice for ground covering, but also helps resist fire. So does the colorful plant palette of aeoniums, agaves, yuccas, euphorbias, and other succulents. Once established, succulents need much less irrigation and are resistant to heat, sun, and wind.

Santa Barbara inspiration

Starting pretty much from scratch wasn’t easy. And it was emotionally painful, too. The couple bought the home in 2011, and over time, Damon, who works at a medical device company, had built a beautiful firepit and gazebo—even an outdoor bed for napping. The process of designing and rebuilding what was lost took about two years.

Lisa had never designed a landscape before. But she was able to harness a strong creative aesthetic and a longtime love of plants, a passion she developed while in hospitality school in Florida in her early 20s. She started by drawing up outlines of the front and back yards on graph paper and marking any plants that remained. “I’d just get a piece of paper and draw out the aerial version, start with my focal points, and go from there,” she explains.

Lisa knew she wanted to base the design around succulents after walking through an old mission garden in Santa Barbara five years ago, and seeing an aeonium specimen the size of a person’s head. “I fell in love with the plants in Santa Barbara on that trip, and that’s what inspired me—that, and knowing I was going to have a full-sun yard,” she explains. “I just had this hope and vision that it could work.”

Containing costs

The garden was a ton of work, the majority of it squeezed into off-hours over a period of six months. “We would come and work here before work, lunch hours, after work, weekends,” Damon says. “It was ridiculous,” Lisa adds, laughing.

At one point, Lisa injured her shoulder digging out a walkway. But the couple persisted. Damon installed an underground drip system with multiple zones to deliver just the right amount of water to diverse plants, from the succulent beds and fruit trees to the grasses and African fern pines planted along one side of the property.

The couple was always looking for ways to shave costs without cutting quality. Before the fire, the home’s walkways were flagstone. The second time around, Lisa and Damon opted for preformed cement blocks that cost only a few dollars apiece. They planted hardy turf grass between the blocks, which provide a soft resting place for the eye. (They used the grass sparingly, because of water demands.) They had their hearts set on using Cor-Ten, a weathered steel, for a garden feature near their hot tub. But it would have cost $2,000 to custom order a Cor-Ten planter box. Instead, Lisa found rustic firewood log racks online for less than $200 each, which they cut up, turned on their side, and dug into the ground in tiers.

Lisa stockpiled plants for over a year, buying them small and bringing them up to planting size in her own little nursery. Now that the backyard has grown in, she continues to take cuttings and propagate additional plants. “That’s the thing with succulents— the way the root systems are, it’s really easy to move them,” Lisa explains. This past spring, after they finished rebuilding the garage, they were able to populate the front garden entirely with offshoots from more established plants in back.

Coming home

After relocating while damaged sections of the house were rebuilt, the couple is thrilled to be back and enjoy their revamped outdoor space, in all different seasons and at all different times of the day. For all its seeming aridity, the garden is now a lush, year-round magnet for birds, particularly hummingbirds. Crows, yellow warblers, and white-throated swifts have returned, and Lisa and Damon even installed a new birdbath.

They orchestrated the design so there is something in bloom all through spring and summer. From February through April there are the coral and blue elf aloe, Echeveria, and kangaroo paws, followed in May and June by lady’s slippers, cannas, and red yucca. By July and August, there are fewer blooms, but the garden retains interest with a variety of shapes and colors.

“I loved doing it, and I love the plants and how everything turned out,” says Lisa. “We’re happy. We love the house more than before the fire—the colors, the yard and all of that—but, you know, it’s just what it took to get there.” With the hard tasks behind them, Damon and Lisa can take time to relax. “It’s turned out great considering what we were given,” says Damon. “It’s not something I ever wanted to do, but now that it’s done, it’s really nice. It turned out way better than I thought.”

Keys to Succulent Success

Lisa Mattson has a clear passion for succulents. She propagates young offshoots, called pups, and uses them to fill in new areas of her garden or to give to friends and neighbors. “I have rooting powder, and I root my own succulents,” she says. “And it’s cool because they become gifts you can take to people.” Here are a few of her best tips.

Seek out local sources. Lisa’s go-to spots in Santa Rosa include King’s Nursery (they recently expanded their succulent selection, she notes), Urban Tree Farm, and Friedman’s. She has also ordered specimens from PlantsExpress.com and from Etsy.

Order a special soil. Cactus and succulents need well-draining soil. Lisa orders cactus planting mix from Santa Rosa landscape supply company Wheeler Zamaroni. They also carry the decomposed granite Lisa and Damon used as a fire-resistant groundcover.

Work with focal points. A tree, a grouping of boulders, or a planter provides structure. Then, sketch your design from above and the side, to plan for different heights, shapes, and colors. “I’m a visual person, so drawing it out works for me,” says Lisa.

Mix textures and forms. Lisa likes to vary spiky plants (agave, blue elf aloe, flax) with non-spiky ones like chalkstick, Echeveria, fan aloe, Euphorbia, and ice plant. Her favorite trees to mix with succulents include Dracaena draco (dragon tree), Cordyline australis ‘Red Star,’ ponytail palm, yucca, and Podocarpus (fern pine).

For architect Gustave Carlson and and his wife, artist Caroline Seckinger, the past eight years have meant a series of transformations.

In 2012, the couple bought a modest plot of land in a rural neighborhood near downtown Sonoma, envisioning a home where the family could make art together and their two children could spend more time in the outdoors. Because the family had a home in Berkeley, where the kids attended school, plans for the Sonoma home evolved in stages. Building took two and a half years.

“It was kind of like, gather the money up and put in the doors, gather money up and put in the deck, put in the windows—bit by bit,” explains Gustave.

Gustave, whose family has roots in Sweden, says the modest design was inspired by a Swedish longhouse—a simple gabled structure, pared down to essentials, with one main room and bedrooms off a single corridor. Large windows on both sides of the home connect the living area to large decks, and smaller bedrooms, each with a door to the outside, emphasize the connection to nature. “You see through the house; it’s a bit like an observatory,” explains Gustave. “It feels like we’re floating in the landscape.”

Gustave designed both the kitchen and the main bedroom with windows on three sides. The bedroom windows look out to oak trees and a grove of Monterey cypress that frame a small meadow. Nearby is one of two owl boxes the couple installed, from which baby owls fledge in spring.

In the kitchen, the window over the sink centers on a mature walnut tree, which, for Caroline, has become a way of marking the seasons and the wildlife. “The years that there’s a big harvest of walnuts on the ground, there are more ground squirrels, which means we have more coyotes, which means a fox comes, and then the mountain lion or the bobcat,” Caroline explains. “So we watch this full cycle — and I love being able to witness that.”

Broad decks on both sides of the house connect to Caroline’s adjacent art studio and allow space for yoga and meditation, for relaxing and eating, for painting projects and displaying collections—even for sleeping outdoors.

“When our son was younger, he and his friends would just bring their sleeping bags and sleep under the stars, have that whole experience,” says Gustave. “They’d set up a slip-and- slide outside by the pool and run back and forth from their skate ramp to the water all day… And it was crazy, but it worked. We always were like, ‘as long as you’re outside.’”

These days, the home that nurtured the kids and their friends as teenagers has become a full-time home for Gustave and Caroline. The couple are recent empty nesters—their son, now 19 years old, is away this summer and off to college soon to study art, while their 24-year-old daughter is working as a photographer in New York.

Earlier this spring, the couple made the choice to move Gustave’s architecture practice and Caroline’s art studio to Sonoma permanently. “The time here just became more and more precious. The more we were here, we became more resonant with it. It’s like our understanding of the web of life just really expanded and grounded us here. And now we’re so lucky that we’re staying here,” says Caroline.

The couple has made changes inside the house to accommodate the next stage of life. “I think what’s really fascinating in all my projects is that you really do grow,” explains Gustave. “When your kids are little, you have a kitchen island with stools, but you might not necessarily sit there anymore when your kids are gone.”

This past spring, to adapt the house to full-time living, the couple added a new mudroom and pantry off the kitchen, with a durable tile floor and a Dutch door to close off the space but keep it connected to the main room.

It’s a practical room with space for big bags of dog food, a charging station for a laptop, and cubbies for work boots and tools and all the other things that accumulate when a part-time home becomes a full-time one. In a way, explains Gustave, the mudroom functions like a lock for a boat moving through a channel—a place to stop and put things away before transitioning to the main part of the house.

Plans are in the works, too, for a small barn where the couple can preserve more of the food they grow and store tools for outdoor projects, maybe even park a small tractor. And they’d like to expand the vegetable garden, grow a few cut flowers, and make cider from the fruit of the apple trees they planted. The apples — Granny Smith, Fuji, and Pink Lady — are good for baking, and Gustave invested in a new cider press last fall, which they are eager to put to use.

Caroline, who previously worked as an art director for films, has been inspired to work on a series of cast brass talismans meant to be carried or worn as symbols of strength and connection.

“The repetitiveness of women’s craft and labor is a form of meditation. And then when we’re practicing these things—canning, knitting, crocheting—we’re in communication with our ancestors, our grandmothers who did those same tasks,” she explains.

Her studio is filled with turkey feathers, stones, and other objects she’s collected on the property, along with tools for working with fiber and metal. “My art practice right now is to remind people that there are other systems, ways, beings that are older than what we’re witnessing right now, that are holding us up,” she says.

Gustave is spending more time painting in a small prefab studio they added this spring. “Caroline and the kids are such makers—the kids would be stitching, embroidering, taking photos—and it was like ‘please, join the gang,’” he says.

Last year, for his birthday, Caroline gave Gustave a red toolbox to hold paints and supplies, and he’s been working on a series depicting local barns and farmhouses. The couple remain inspired by their surroundings, by the evolving look of the seasonal landscape and the themes of change and sustainability that form the core of life here. Caroline explains their art is buoyed by the resilience of the land: “Even the things we can’t see are sustaining us, and that’s truly comforting,” she says.

And the draw of the memories the couple made with their two children continues to inform their days. They anticipate their son and daughter will still come to Sonoma—“circling back home,” as Caroline puts it. “Even though your kids go, there are layers of them all about. So it becomes about how you transition with the layers of the life that was, and what’s becoming.”

Resources

Architect: Gustave Carlson Design, Sonoma, gustavecarlsondesign.com

Art: Caroline Seckinger, Sonoma, carolineseckinger.com

Builder: Finn-Port Construction, Mill Valley, 415-819-4730

Landscape: David Sawyer Landscapes, Santa Rosa, sawyerlandscapes.com