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Residential:
Henderson Residence Huntington Beach, CA Completed in 2006		Henderson Residence – Huntington Beach , CA completed: 2006 The owner of this 25 by 115 ft. lot was tired of the mostly underutilized space around his house of a large deck, and inspired by his one time resident, Roland Oehme, who talked about how one could truly live sustainably by living in harmony with nature and using less resources, he decided to hire Roland to create an oasis of green beauty. The client, Jeff, sought to live a sustainable lifestyle by following a vegan diet and now he decided to do more by hiring Roland to design an ecologically thriving garden where he could grow much of the food he ate.
It was a monumental task to convert this once mostly barren plane of wood decking into a living garden. Luckily, the client, Jeff, was so motivated to transform the space that he did much of the demolition in the Fall of 2005 before Roland arrived on the scene. With Roland's guidance, Jeff took out all of the wood deck from the rear, side and front of the house, thereby revealing a nice concrete, curvilinear pathway, removed the five inch thick concrete patio in the rear, removed a useless wooden window box support adjacent to the house in the front, and removed a hedge and numerous weedy plants in the garden. While flying out to CA to start constructing Jeff's garden in February 2006, Roland drew the basic drawing of the new design for Jeff's garden. Roland refined the design over the next several weeks according to the client's desires. The garden would have elements of a xeriscape landscape in the front, a shaded, tropical, jungle like side garden, and a vegetable garden and a flowering subtropical garden in the rear with fruit trees throughout. During the next two months, while enduring many rainstorms and flooding of CA's rainy season, making work very tedious at times, Roland and Jeff, with some help from friends, built most of the garden in a frenzy of activity, Over the course of construction Roland, with Jeff's feedback, developed several innovative ideas that he and Jeff built in the garden such as the xeriscape mound in the sunny front, the placement of fruit trees throughout the garden in harmony with ornamental plants, the integration of pumice deep into the soil to bring air to the roots and create better drainage, and the raised bed vegetable garden constructed with brick. The use of perennials and grasses throughout the garden, some repeated, is the glue that holds the garden visually together. Since the garden was finished, Jeff has exulted in the joy of being able to pick his own organic fruit from his trees and harvest fresh organic vegetables and herbs from his garden. He delights in watching and listening to the sounds of the thriving hummingbirds, butterflies, and songbirds visit his plants daily. Roland's vision of a regenerative garden paradise, now realized, has fulfilled all of Jeff's desires to live in harmony with nature!