Space is tight in Lincoln Park. With an alley out back and a three-story neighbor looming next door, Tamar Mizrahi’s back yard has just a patch of concrete patio, a few scraps of ground and a garage.
But it’s what she did with that space — creating an inviting but secluded roof-deck living space over the garage and planting the whole space with sure-handed verve — that made her the runner-up in the Tribune’s Glorious Gardens Contest 2007.
“This is what gardening in the city is all about,” says contest judge William Moss, an urban gardening consultant for the National Gardening Association. Doug Wood, president of the Wicker Park Garden Club, another of the judges, called it “a space both elegant and incredibly accessible and useful for everyday use.”
One of Mizrahi’s main concerns is privacy. But rather than wall off the neighbors, she designed planters and trellises to encircle the roof deck. The soft forms of plants, such as sumac, curly willow, sand cherries and prairie dropseed grass establish a sense of enclosure. Over the sitting area, with its built-in seating, is a pergola with a yellow trumpet vine that gives shade as well as a sense of shelter. Nearby is a trellis with a climbing hydrangea.
“When I sit here, I don’t feel like anyone’s looking at me,” Mizrahi says. “Living in the city, you just know this is the way it is. You create these little niches for yourself.”
Many homeowners, feeling exposed, erect solid 6-foot fences or towering hedges to shield the entire yard. Yet you don’t have to wall yourself off from the neighborhood to feel like you have a place to yourself.
“If you give people even the slightest degree of separation, psychologically they feel more private,” says Tony LoBello, project manager for Mariani Landscapes in Lake Bluff.
That can be a single-layer trellis with vines growing on it; a few well-placed shrubs; inexpensive, temporary bamboo or willow wattle fencing; or, as in Mizrahi’s garden, ornamental grasses, which are cut down in spring but grow tall by autumn.
They give Mizrahi’s outdoor living room texture, movement and a sense of insulation from the surroundings.
Gerry and Jim Bellanca, the contest’s Best Overall Garden winners, decided against screening their property with an impenetrable evergreen hedge like the house next door in Glencoe.
“I think it’s just the difference in personalities,” says the gregarious Gerry. “If you’re going to spend all this time on the garden, why shouldn’t everybody enjoy it?”
So along the sidewalk, they built a chest-high wall with layers of shrubs and small trees planted inside it. The vegetation, along with the slope of the lot — which makes the wall feel taller from inside the garden — creates a sense of enclosure without isolation. But passersby can easily see into the Bellancas’ exuberant garden and often stop to chat — which is only a trial at meal times on the patio.
In Mizrahi’s garden, the rooftop view looks down into the tiny yard, where her Japanese maple and flaming maple, lilies, Knock Out roses, passion vine and tomatoes are sparked by pots of Fusion impatiens, coleus and tropical plants, and through a glass wall into her living room, where a giant banana tree thrives all year. In the evening, it’s secluded enough for Mizrahi and her husband to enjoy the hot tub, and the experience is made tropical by the surrounding foliage.
When you seek privacy outdoors, it’s important to consider what you want to see as well as what you don’t want to see, LoBello says.
“I think it’s nice when people glimpse into the garden and also when people glimpse out of the garden,” LoBello says. “Taking advantage of views is as important as getting rid of the bad ones.”
Mizrahi’s patio — with tall walls on either side — was built as a courtyard hideaway. But by lifting the living space up onto the roof, and then figuring out how to make the roof a garden and join it to the garden below, she created a single plant-filled space, full of color and interest, that feels far away from the neighbors next door and the alley just outside.
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ebotts@tribune.com
