Using her wealth of knowledge and love of gardening, Mountain Ranch resident Judy Dean has designed the grounds of Calaveras County Water District’s new headquarters for free.
Dean said her design was a “public-spirited” service.
“I can contribute by giving an idea of what to plant without wasting money,” she said.
On her 8-acre property, Dean has planted about 700 varieties of historic roses, various cacti and succulents, and hundreds of rhododendrons, antique camellias, irises and lilacs. She has studied landscaping for more than 25 years and owns more than 3,000 books on plants.
“She knows plants’ names better than peoples’ names,” said her husband Bob Dean, a CCWD board director, who recommended his wife as the grounds’ landscape architect.
Jeff Meyer, CCWD’s director of financial planning, said the county required a landscaping plan for the district’s new building.
“We want to be responsible and cost-effective,” he said.
When the water district put out a request for bids, it received one response of more than $50,000, Bob Dean said. As an alternative, he offered his wife’s services. He estimated the total expense of the landscaping will cost about 20 percent of the offered bid, “hopefully less.”
Since Judy Dean took on the landscaping, the project has morphed into something of a community effort. Calaveras Tree Nursery offered a significant discount of about 40 percent off the native oaks purchased and Carson Hill Rock Products donated the decorative and structural rocks for the grounds.
In the spring, CCWD will host a plant sale for the Sierra Foothills Chapter of the Native Plants Society. Dean said she wants to collaborate with the Calaveras Master Gardeners, a group that has a demonstration garden and plant sales in San Andreas.
Beyond the events, Mitch Dion, general manager of CCWD, said he hopes the site can be an everyday educational facility.
“Long-term, people can see how native plants work in landscaping,” he said.
Bob Dean said this was an ideal opportunity to act upon the 2009 Water Legislation, which mandated urban water suppliers to reduce statewide per capita water consumption by 20 percent by 2020.
As such, Judy Dean was intentional in her design. She incorporated a wide palate of drought-tolerant and cold-hardy plants. Almost all of the 280 varieties of trees and plants will be drought-tolerant, and 100 of them will be native to the area.
Dean compared landscaping the grounds to completing a crossword puzzle.
“You’re matching the plants to the site,” she said.
She said the natural surroundings of oaks and grasses influenced her design. And the building itself, with its clean lines and neutral colors, suits the environment.
“Our job, as we see it, is to soften it and give it some dimension, volume, height,” she said of the “cracker flat” building. “It’s good to blend seamlessly with the natural landscape.”
Dean said there were a few key elements in her strategy: staying low-maintenance, working with the existing views, and protecting and enhancing architectural features.
She avoided plants with invasive roots, rolling seeds and oozy fruits.
“You don’t want a mess to clean up,” she said. “You want something easy to control.”
The plants and trees will need to be watered every couple weeks for two years, she said. After that, she said they may only need to be watered a couple times every summer. The grounds will be drip irrigated and will incorporate both deciduous and evergreen trees.
“There will be assorted things to catch your eye in every season,” she said.
For example, in the shady picnic-lunch area behind the building, Dean hopes to plant Japanese maples, which will bloom orange and yellow in the spring and change color throughout the year.
She said seasonable and daily variations are not the only shifts in plants’ appearance. As the plants grow, their relationships to each other and the building change.
“Gardening is a movable artistic experience,” she said. “Plants and rocks are endlessly entertaining.”
Dean said this has been an enjoyable project for her because it is a new challenge. Whereas her gardens at home evolved over time, the CCWD grounds were planned ahead of time with acute attention to detail.
“It exercises my mind,” she said. “The more I do, the more I learn for myself and I can integrate it together.”
Dion hopes the lesson of water-wise gardening can extend to the community.
“The goal is to demonstrate on a backyard-sized scale,” Dion said. “We are going into a drought, gang. What do you do? You go native.”
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