Larchmont Chronicle
JUNE 2019
SECTION TWO
Home Ground (Continued from page 2)
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English country estate garden includes the usual (but always lovely) tropes: garden rooms, a walled garden, woodland garden, rose and cutting gardens; and — given the English craving for medieval ornament — a knot garden and one designed to mimic a stained-glass window at Chartres Cathedral. A long vertical axis connects these and other garden elements. Perhaps the most stunning visual element of Filoli, which was given in 1975 by its second owners, the Roths, to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is its setting. The estate is settled on an eastern slope of the northern Santa Cruz Mountains, surrounded by more than 23,000 acres of the protected Crystal Springs Watershed. Nearby is the breathtaking Crystal Springs Reservoir. (William Bourne was president of the Spring Valley Water Company; the site for Filoli was chosen for its beauty but was also part of the company’s land holdings.) The pair of artificial lakes that make up the reservoir are folded into the rift valley created by the San Andreas Fault; water was impounded by the Crystal Springs Dam.
SPRINGTIME WISTERIA abloom at Filoli, the Gilded Age estate managed by The National Trust for Historic Preservation on the San Francisco Peninsula. Photo: Douglas Whitneybell
The reservoir is the terminus of the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct; in 1934, architect William Merchant was commissioned by the San Francisco Water Department to design a Neo-classical structure, the Pulgas Water Temple, to commemorate its completion. Water flowed through it for 70 years. It no longer does, but did when I was a young school teacher in San Mateo. I often visited Crystal Springs on days off. I would stick my head into the well in the center and listen to the rushing stream — it seemed thrilling — unaware then of the power, complexity, and political realities of the presence, or absence, of water in California.