Subdivision: Diamond Tail
Owner/ Designer: Oddie and Juanita Brown
Garden Type or Features: This Asian themed garden features unique placement of boulders to create a mountain outcropping favoring the naturalization of seedlings and providing protection for plants. A large rock waterfall provides peace for onlookers and a respite for wildlife. The Albuquerque Bonsai Club members will demonstrate the art of bonsai on small plants.
Artist in the Garden: Tamara Harder.
Description:
This legacy garden is distinctly Asian in style and in perfect harmony with the natural landscape. Oddie points out how the garden changes throughout the day with the shifting sunlight. Shadow in a garden sets the mood and is essential to its enjoyment. Oddie loves to talk about his artistic design aesthetic along with his personal history of moving in his youth from Mississippi to the south side of Chicago.
Oddie was trained and influenced as a young man in garden maintenance and landscape design by Yashiro Yamada, his football coach, while growing up in Englewood, IL. This laid the foundation of Oddie’s garden education which would lead Oddie in retirement to design a garden in Rio Rancho for his former business partner. People saw the results and that led to further projects. Oddie works with a dedicated crew to implement his designs via his artistic drawings.
Oddie starts with a clean slate to develop one of his masterpieces. In 2005 Oddie brought in large boulders and moved them in place to create the irregular mountain outcropping surrounding his home. This became the backbone of the garden. He tinted the landscape boulders by hand to provide a uniform reddish brown sandstone appearance. It took Oddie just three months to build the large cascading water fall and pond in the back of the house. The rock, swales, and slopes of his landscape passively collect rainfall, promote propagation of plants from seed, and the naturalization of cactus and wildflowers. This garden is ever evolving, and little if any water is used to maintain it.
Education: The Albuquerque Bonsai Club
