Harold S. Gladwin Residence, 780 El Bosque Road, Montecito, Santa Barbara County, CA

The field records include this book: Documentation of the Lovelace Garden Designed by Isabelle Greene (Ventura, CA: Schaf Photo & Design, 2017). ISBN #978-0-9823707-97.
Significance: The Lovelace garden is significant as an example of the contemporary California Regionalist Garden. The Regionalist garden found expression from the late nineteenth century to the contemporary period through a succession of architectural and landscape architectural styles that include the Arts and Crafts Movement, Modernism, and what has been variously called the "New Garden" or the "Post-Modernist Garden."

A garden in the regionalist concept is less a creation of artifice than a modified natural environment. In the mild climate of California, the Regionalist Garden is designed to conform to the local topography, climate, plant palette, and natural coloration of an area. Deference is given to the conditions of the individual site whether steep slopes, native oak woodland and chaparral, or boulder-strewn terrain. The Regionalist Garden is intended to "fit in" with its surroundings providing a visual bridge to the larger landscape beyond individual property boundaries.

The Lovelace garden was developed beginning in 1972 by Isabelle Greene, FASLA, a landscape architect known for her work in the Central Coast and Southern California. It is a four-acre estate situated in the hills of Montecito, California, an area of wealthy landowners in the foothills of the Santa Ynez Mountains rising above the Pacific Ocean. Montecito and the adjacent City of Santa Barbara are distinguished by many gardens and estates dating from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first century. Many of the important ideas of the Regionalist Garden were developed here by garden designers such as Lockwood de Forest and Theodore Payne.

The Lovelace garden is an outstanding example of California Regionalism in the Post-Modern period (1960 to present). It exemplifies all of the major tenants of the Regionalist Garden as it has been developed since the 19th century and adapted in the 1960s and on reliance on a plant palette of native and drought adapted species, especially the oak woodland (162 specimen trees), the use of boulders originating on the property, the integration of indoors and outdoors, and water conservation. The circulation is designed to reveal new views as one moves through the garden. Unlike more formally arranged traditional gardens the overall design cannot be grasped from a single point, but is intended to sequentially provide new revelations and surprises. In addition, the Lovelace garden is widely known for its naturalist swimming pool placed in a tranquil setting apart from the house.

The Lovelace garden also is significant as the work of a master. Among landscape architects and designers of the period from the 1960s to the present Isabelle Greene has been a leading figure. With over six hundred projects to her credit (primarily located in the Santa Barbara/ Montecito area and, to a lesser degree, throughout California and the U.S.), Greene is one of a loosely connected group of contemporary landscape designers whose practice is grounded in an ecologically informed regionalism and a deep appreciation of California's unique environment.

While she has received considerable journalistic attention for some of her innovative designs, she also has more recently begun to receive scholarly attention with a 2005 retrospective of her landscape work at the Museum of the University of California, Santa Barbara. The exhibition catalogue of the retrospective provided a contextual approach to Greene's work in essays by David Streatfield and Hazel White, placing her gardens in relationship to earlier expressions of California Regionalism. The catalogue also focuses on an analysis of several of Greene's most prominent gardens that illustrate her "intuitive and artistic" grasp of the individual site in relationship to it larger environmental context, and her understanding of her clients' needs and desires in creating private and public garden spaces.

In her Artist's Statement Greene has characterized her approach to garden design as an attempt to "...bring my love affair with this land...into the tiny patches of earth entrusted to my design." The Lovelace Garden is a masterwork that illustrates many of the major characteristics of Greene's work. As David Streatfield, the first scholar to analyze Greene's work in a historical perspective, has observed, the Lovelace garden is "unquestionably among the finest examples of western garden art of the late twentieth century."
Unprocessed Field note material exists for this structure: N145, N146, N147
Survey number: HALS CA-129
Building/structure dates: 1972 Subsequent Work
Building/structure dates: 1980 Subsequent Work
Building/structure dates: 1985 Subsequent Work
Building/structure dates: 1990-2000 Subsequent Work
Building/structure dates: 2012-2016 Subsequent Work
Building/structure dates: 1923 Initial Construction