After living with an English–style garden for 25 years in a dry environment, the owners of the Davis residence were ready for something different in the redesign of a portion of their residential setting. They wanted the new garden to be low maintenance with cacti, have a Mexican influence, and be visually separate from the existing garden.
To accommodate the owners’ wishes, the new garden is developed as a kind of “folly” enclosed by walls within the existing English garden. This new garden of Mexican influence incorporates bright colors and various plantings of cacti.A simple palette of concrete walls, paint, gravel, and cacti is used reinterpret a Mexican walled garden. The design is a series of boxes, gardens inside of gardens, presenting a metaphor of the house typology. Singular plantings of cacti inhabit the different garden rooms as the space contained by one box and outside of another becomes intentionally ambiguous.
