what is a mediterranean garden - part I

In the most recent issues of The Mediterranean Gardener, editor and current President of The Mediterranean Garden Society (MGS), Caroline Harbouri, states:

I have sometimes been asked what a mediterranean garden is, and have never been able to come up with a better answer than "simply a garden made in, and compatible with, a mediterranean climate".

I agree that there is no quick answer to this question, encompassing as it does the larger question of what is a garden at all. But, since reading this, I’ve found myself musing on the topic. Caroline admits her British bias (one she shares with many members of the MGS) in having revised her "earlier English assumptions about gardens" living in Athens, Greece for almost 40 years.
      This got me to wondering about my own earlier assumptions.
      We had typical suburban yards in my post-WWII neighborhood in Santa Clara, California – lawns, a token shade tree, a few foundation shrubs against the house. Not particularly exciting, or distinctive, each one interchangeable with another. Some lawns were softer, or sturdier, or some of a friend’s parents allowed rough activities where another would not. There was even the wife of a neighbor, who we never saw in person – we only heard her scold us through a screened window if we ever inadvertently happened to step on the corner of their pristine lawn (consequently we would dare each other routinely just to see if she were watching!).
      But my school was in another, older part of town. Here, the houses were all distinctly different, and the plantings around them unlike each other or anything else. I thought of these as gardens – not mere yards. One would have vegetable, fruit trees, and flowers, in a charming disordered jumble. Other was full of semi-tropical wonders, with intoxicating fragrant flowering ginger, strange bird of paradise. Another was full of all manner of ancient found objects, arranged with loving care, half museum, half cabinet of curiosities. A large grand home, built in 1892 by Charles Copeland Morse, of the Ferry Morse Seed Company, was singular again – very Victorian grounds with a huge Southern Magnolia (M. grandiflora) as tall as the elevated 3 storey, turreted mansion.
      I would often walk home from school (having spent my bus fare on a treat) through this collection of unique and unusual properties. Each had a character all its own. Many of the plants remain familiar to me even though I only learned their names many years later when I became interested in botany and horticulture. There were stories embedded in each, the individual personalities of each owner spilling out into the garden. Year ‘round, there was always something interesting and even surprising happening in these gardens.
      Born and raised in California, the climate I came to know only later as mediterranean was all I knew. So, in later years, learning the definition and distinction of the world's five mediterranean climates, I rediscovered some familiar themes – those of childhood experiences. I saw the source of many of these outdoor living spaces – Italy, Spain, Southern France, Greece. I saw the culture of how to live in this benign climate and understood it from my own experience. Many of the preconceived notions that gardeners had about what a garden is were always foreign to me, and now I understood why. The mediterranean climate, and how to live with it, is what I had always known.