Deeds & Words

 ”Time began in a garden.”

That saying is etched onto the sundial in the middle of the garden at Filoli, an historic California Bay Area country estate.   I don’t know exactly what it means.  It has an “Adam and Eve” resonance that is not particularly comforting.  Did time suddenly start after they ate the apple of the tree of knowledge?  Perhaps it’s just that gardens take us deliberately through the familiar cycles of nature; the cycle of the seasons, the cycle of the day, and the cycle of birth, death and re-emergence.

Filoli, the estate of William Bowers Bourn and Agnes Bourn, sits just south of Crystal Lake in San Mateo County, California, about half an hour south of San Francisco on Highway 280.  Behind it to the west, oak-clad coastal hills rise to provide a green and backdrop, and probably, in the summer, silvery tendrils of fog drift over those hills in the evenings.  The house and gardens are maintained by the Filoli Foundation, and open to the public from March through October.  The house is impressive; the garden is magnificent.

William Bowers Bourn II inherited his first fortune.  His dad came out to California from New York in 1850.  Dad was one of those smart guys who decided that while gold mining was tedious and dangerous, selling staples to gold miners would be profitable, and made a chunk of change “mining the miners.”  He ended up with a gold mine eventually, though; the Empire Mine in Nevada County.  His son William II was born in 1857.  Will Senior died in a mysterious gun accident when William II was away at college in Cambridge, and William II came home to take over the family business(es).  In 1902 he started the San Francisco Power Company which later became Pacific Gas and Electric; in 1908 he started the San Francisco Water Company.  Bourn joined forces with environmentalist John Muir to fight the building of the Hetch Hetchy reservoir—Muir for nature-based reasons, Bourn, obviously, for profit-based ones. Ultimately he was unsuccessful, but it didn’t seem to have dented the family fortune too badly because in 1915 he and his wife Agnes Moody Bourn began building Filoli.  The house was completed in 1917.

The garden comprises 16 acres.  It is a long rectangular garden running more or less north-south.  Part of this was because William liked to sit at the highest point of the garden, the High Place, and look down the garden toward Crystal Lake. The layout is pretty formal.  Off the drawing room of the house is the sunken garden, with a reflecting pool.  At the north end of the house is the Old Rose garden, facing a meadow and stand of black-trunked California oak trees.  The Bourns were big on Irish stuff, and columnar Irish yew trees are used throughout the garden to guide the eye and create a dramatic backdrop, since they are such a dark green.

My friend and I went there on a Saturday in mid-May.  If you’re a fan of roses, this is a great time to go because many of the more-than-300 varieties of roses are in bloom.  We were afraid it was going to be hot, because where we live it had been over a hundred degrees the previous week.  I was reassured.  It was in the low eighties, clear and sunny but with a light breeze.  I recommend a hat and sun-block to anyone who plans to spend several hours in the garden.

The roses were glorious; tree roses and hybrid teas loosely furled ruffles of color against green hedge backdrops, full buds upright, looking like wine goblets.  A woman said to an older woman I assume was her mother, “That was the tree rose garden, they call this the standard rose garden,” and the mother replied indignantly, “They shouldn’t call it standard!  It’s much better than that.”

A sign explains that no pesticides are used are used on Filoli roses, but that they are bred to be bug and disease resistant.

As you walk south in the garden you come to an area with wide borders in blue and violet; lavenders, salvias, love-in-a-mist and scores of other blue plants and flowers line the edges.  There is a knot garden of red-leafed plants and gray-silver santolina, planted to look like cords looped into a knot.  It is not the most spectacular thing in the garden but it’s my personal favorite.  I’m just a sucker for things like that. 

Facing south, if you look to your right you will see the walls of the aptly named Walled Garden.  I would call it a shade garden (but who asked me?).  Huge magnolias provide shade for rhododendrons, ferns and creepers.  A terrace with a portico at the south end forms the western boundary of this feature.  If you stand at the end of the terrace and look north you see the chimneys of the house just above the yew columns.  There is a swimming pool, a hothouse and potted orange trees.  The swimming pool aligns with the shallow reflecting pool in the sunken garden, which points straight at the clock tower of the old carriage house.  The clock in the tower still chimes the hours; the building is now the gift shop.   Since you can hear the clock chime from anywhere in the garden, it is possible that time actually began here, at Filoli.

There is a cutting garden with various varieties of flowers clustered by color, including peonies, roses and dahlias.  There is a “gentleman’s orchard” next to the High Place.  On our visit, the orchard was off limits unless you signed up for a tour.  The garden has lilies, pansies, iris, California poppies, flowering shrubs, shrubs whose foliage provides the color, an orchid garden and a stained glass garden (which I’ve never seen in bloom) where low shrubbery breaks the bed into patterns which are planted with specific colors, to resemble stained glass.  This is not a coincidence; one of the original garden designers was well known in San Francisco for his stained glass work.

The High Place is simply a lawn with a row of yew trees forming a crescent-shaped wall behind it.  It does give you a good view of the garden.  Tall Roman-like columns alternate with the trees.  They are supposed to be the ballast columns off the gold ships.  The reason they are there is because in English gardens, there was always a place with a view and columns, or so I heard.

In short, to quote a twenty-something guy who was walking ahead of us in the sunken garden, “Whoa.  This is pretty nice.”

The house is made of red brick and sets off the yew trees and the lawns beautifully.  After we had walked in the garden for a few hours, we were pretty warm, so it seemed like a good time to go through the house.  You can take a “self-guided” tour, and there is a docent in every major room who is eager to tell you about the family, or about the house itself.  Very few of the furnishings in the house belonged to the Bourns, but the Roths who owned it after them and lived there until the 1970’s did donate some items.  In most cases, the foundation located period pieces and used then to re-create the flavor of the house in the 1910s and ‘20’s. 

A band of olive trees separates the house and grounds from the visitor center.  I don’t know if they harvested the olives back in the 1920’s.  The trees have been lovingly pruned and form a shade canopy. The ground beneath them is dotted with benches for foot-weary visitors.  The day we were there, they were hosting an artist reception for artists from a juried show who submitted paintings inspired by the garden.

One garden manager, twelve gardeners and over one hundred volunteers maintain the garden’s beauty. The garden doesn’t feel like “nature;” it is too formal and shaped.  It feels like art.  It is an opposite/complement to the ghostly wheat-gold wild oats and the gnarled black and green oaks that surround it. A few yards away from the garden or the house, the visitor hears the wind soughing through those oak branches.  She hears quail, occasionally the three-note call of a woodpecker or the high-pitched scree of a hawk. Did time begin here?  Perhaps, after all, it did.

The big red finish–La Fibi dance group.  La Fibi applauding, left.

 Flamenco dancer.

La Fibi herself (Phoebe

Guitarist (this might be the player who coined “flametal”)

For the last few years, in early spring, I’ve seen signs around my neighborhood for the Roma Festival.  I thought it was about the tomato of the same name and wondered why the event was held before the fruit it celebrated was even ripe.  Of course it’s not about the tomato at all.  Roma, in this case, means gypsy.

            I don’t think of gypsies as a large part of California culture. The organization behind this day-and-a-half music festival, the Voice of Roma (voiceofroma.com), based in San Francisco, is interested in educating people about the gypsies and stopping human rights abuses in middle Europe, notably Kosovo and other war zones.

            The Voice of Roma also wants to stop people from employing stereotypes of gypsies and also stop “romanticizing” them—so there goes my best story about gypsy magic and why my camera stopped working as soon as I got my hand stamped and stepped through the gate.  Oh, well.

            The timing for the Roma Festival is based on Herdeljezi, a traditional gypsy event acknowledging the coming of the warmer months.

            When I first started seeing Roma Festival signs, the event was held in Forestville, California, a small town about an hour north of San Francisco.  This year, however, it was in Ives Park, Sebastopol, which is. . .a small town about an hour north of San Francisco. The evening program was held at the French Garden, a restaurant on Highway 12 just west of town, which is developing a reputation for good organic meals with produce from their own kitchen farm.  The French Garden is working very hard to establish itself as a music venue so this seemed like a good match.

            At first I thought the festival was pricy; it’s $15 general admission, $12 for seniors.  You get a hand-stamp and I assume, although I didn’t check, that this is also good for the evening events.  Then I realized that the festival is 90% music and dance.  So, for a day-and-a-half live music festival, I suppose $15 isn’t bad.  There were food booths and one booth selling gypsy embroidery and some jewelry, and music CDs.  That booth also had a couple of book on the Roma and some posters about the Kosovo gypsies in particular. There was also face-painting and henna tattooing going on, but mostly music and dance.

            When I arrived, Edessa was playing and leading a dance lesson in the grassy meadow between two crescents of redwood trees.  Edessa has been playing Balkan music since about 1991.  They had a clarinetist, a woman playing an accordion, a guitar and a couple of drums.  The woman who sang a couple of songs had a great voice.  The music sounded. . .well, like gypsy music.  The dances were mostly line dances and looked as much Greek as anything, but people were enthusiastically joining in. They could not have had better weather; clear, sunny, warm but not hot. Edessa played for about forty minutes while I was there.  The act after them was a local flamenco group who had an awesome guitarist, another woman vocalist with a great voice, and four excellent female dancers including the instructor, La Fibi.  They were great.  It may just be my imagination that their flamenco seemed to borrow a little more from belly dancing than I remembered.  They had no castanets, but the hand and head gestures were angular and imperious, so that seemed right.  The shoes seemed right also, banging out a rhythm in time with the music. Are castanets passé in flamenco now?  Or were they non-traditional to begin with? While I was there, the guitarist had one solo, and it was fast, intricate, fiery and everything you would hope for in a flamenco guitar solo.  La Fibi said he has coined a musical mash-up of styles he calls “flametal;” flamenco and metal.  Hmm.

            Eugene Hutz, who fronts a crazy gypsy punk band called Gogol Bordello, was scheduled to play later in the afternoon but I didn’t get to stay to hear him. I heard rumors the next day, however, that things got a little wild during his French Garden performance.  They call themselves gypsy punks for a reason.

            About busting those stereotypes; no fortune-telling at this festival.

            To my untutored ear, the music seems to borrow a lot from Middle Eastern music, which is no surprise, I think.  I like the swirling energy, the haunting, minor key riffs, the way the music pulls on your body and makes you want to sway and dance. I like the passion the music communicates.  Like zydeco, like the blues, like Appalachian music, this is true folk music; rooted in history, loaded with heart, in no way to be mistaken for a tomato.

Chocoholics Chocolate Factory is located in Clements, California.  If you are driving east on Highway 12 as if you were headed to the Sierras, you would come through Victor and Lockeford before you came to Clements.  You drive through a lot of flat land covered with vineyards or olive orchards.  Some hills are left grass-covered and used as pastureland.  When you reach Clements you are about to start the climb into the foothills even though it doesn’t feel like it yet.

Clements is the tiny town with the chocolate factory on your left.

I think I remember the two story brick building being there before the Schenones converted it, but memory may be playing me false.  The company added a factory that runs at right angles to the old building, forming an L shape.  In the space between they have developed a grassy area with picnic tables, and along the outer edge, a vivid rose garden.  Even if you don’t love chocolate, the lush furled explosions of pink, yellow and creamy peace roses with shiny green leaves against the rust-colored brick is reason enough to stop.

But let’s face it.  You love chocolate and that’s why you’re really going to stop.

The old brick building is the retail store, with a deli/coffee/candy counter at the back.  They inherited an old chalkboard from a local one-room school and have it mounted on one wall, where they list the daily specials.  The hardwood floor creaks occasionally in a friendly, historical way as you walk among the shelves studying the specialty chocolates.

It looks like they do specialize in the unusual and novelty products.  They had chocolate voodoo dolls, (eating chocolate is the best revenge?), various board games that had chocolate themes or pieces or something.  There are some sensual or “naughty” items. They also sell, for about $2.50 apiece, decorated chocolate-dipped spoons.  It seems to me that a nice coffee mug and a Tuxedo chocolate spoon would make a special and inexpensive gift for someone. 

In addition to voodoo dolls, the Chocolate Diet and hot chocolate mixes, you can get Wine Country truffles, mixed chocolate candies, toffee and chocolate pasta.  Yes, that’s right, chocolate pasta.

The chocolate pasta is not candy.  It is actually fusilli pasta made of wheat flour with cocoa powder added.  The color is black and does not bleach when you boil it, and when you open the bag the aroma of chocolate is powerful. That aroma lasts, too, even after cooking.  The pasta isn’t particularly sweet, which makes it even better.  They recommend it with chicken mole, or as an unusual dessert.  We tried it with fresh raspberries and a raspberry cream sauce and it wasn’t bad (I chilled the pasta after I cooked it).

 Once you’ve purchased your chocolates and gotten a coffee drink or a treat from the counter, you can walk over to the chocolate factory and take a self-directed tour.  I was there on a Sunday so no one was working in the factory, but they leave it set up so that it is still instructional to the tourist.  This is a working chocolate factory with long glass panels set into one side.  A wide corridor leaves lots of room for gawkers.  Two TV screens play a continuous-loop video presentation about the Schenones and the company, while along the wall the viewer can follow an interpretive display of the geography of chocolate and details of some of the processes.           

The day I was there the grassy picnic area was filled with lean, Lycra-clad, 2% body fat bike-riders.  It made me think that I might even get motivated for a ten or twenty mile bike ride, if there was chocolate at the end of it.

These are dairy cattle from Ferndale, California.  The two main breeds in Ferndale are Jersey cattle, the smaller, mocha-brown cows with the big soft eyes, and Guernseys, which are larger, fawn-and-white. Both breeds are well known for delivering milk with a high level of protein and butterfat.

There was a dramatic sky behind them the day I took this picture.