“Where you find the darkest avenue/ There you’ll find the brightest jewel,” sings Richard Thompson. That would describe the improbable garden Richard Gervais and designer Chris Jacobson have conjured up in South of Market’s ecologically mean streets. We’re tempted to call it a secret garden, but the redwood anchoring one corner shows up on Google Maps. Gervais’ touch has also spread to this narrow street, now tree-lined and refreshed by plants. But nothing prepares visitors for what’s inside.
Through a corridor of Southeast Asian carvings, one enters a lush piece of the tropics transplanted to San Francisco. Jacobson and Gervais, a longtime importer of Asian antiques, have assembled a distinctive blend of plants and art. Surrounding walls cast shade, so the stars here are foliage plants, sparked by occasional flowers: ferns, Japanese maples, bromeliads, monsteras, gingers, begonias, giant strelitzia, bamboos of every color and size – forest, understory, rain forest plants.
Large koi swim in a sunken pond ingeniously designed to evoke a running stream. On each side, mirrors framed in Balinese temple doors and Philippine runo-reed matting insinuate themselves subtly to visually expand the space. The pond and massed plants encourage each other physically, sharing moisture and nutrients, filtering the city air.
Everything reflects Gervais’ fascination with the East, especially the Philippines. Among the flagstones and bridging the pond are traviesas – 100-year-old railroad ties of Philippine molave wood, “the hardest wood in all Asia,” Gervais said. Grave markers from the southern islands, carved from volcanic stone, are upholstered in volunteer moss; so is a carved-coral spirit boat. An Indian cart wheel supports a glass table top.
All the moss, the aged timbers, the floor of stone and pebble mosaic make the spot feel serenely ancient, but only the redwood and a couple of tree ferns were there when Gervais moved in, 17 years ago. “The place had been a club for SM types,” Jacobson recalled; Gervais added, “with an ugly burnt-orange hot tub in one corner.”
Gervais started out in Springfield, Mass. (“I had to get out!”), drove west in 1964, headed for the University of Hawaii and spent a week in San Francisco: “I fell in love with the city while waiting for my ship to leave.” Inexplicably, Hawaii bored him, and he returned to finish school at San Francisco State. A world tour with a fellow student concluded in the Philippines, his companion’s homeland. Gervais knew nothing about the country, but was entranced by the people. He and his traveling companion set up the New Manila Import Co., which eventually became the Richard Gervais Collection; the garden is part of the showroom.
Chris Jacobson is an old friend, recently reconnected, who used Gervais’ art imports in clients’ gardens. A native Californian, he too had the urge to light out for the territories: “At 16, I tried to hitchhike out of Auburn in my new sport jacket.” No one picked him up. He hired out as a gardener in his teens, then worked as a ditchdigger for commercial landscapers. “I could always get a job because I knew plant names,” he said.
Six months away from an art degree, a falling-out with his faculty adviser (“He said people like me didn’t belong in art”) sent him back to his garden roots: “I started bringing my art background into landscaping. I wanted people to know there was an art to gardening.” He says he’s never taken a horticulture class.
Jacobson’s credo, published in Sunset’s Western Landscaping book: “I like gardens that connect their owners with the real world of earth, weather, seasons and change.”
“I have an environmental point of view,” he said. “That involves trying to be responsible, incrementally move closer to the goal of sustainability, cut back on water and chemicals.” But that doesn’t mean the result has to be boring: “When I want to introduce clients to the rather exotic style I work in, I take them to Flora Grubb’s and to Richard’s warehouse. They either get it or they don’t.”
After an hour in this fascinating, marvelously oxygenating oasis, we get it.
Joe Eaton and Ron Sullivan are naturalists and freelance writers in Berkeley. E-mail: home@sfchronicle.com
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