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Gardens on tour: Annual show features six colorful AG landscapes

By April Charlton/Senior Staff Writer

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Six Arroyo Grande gardens will be featured on the SLO Botanical Garden Tour, including Tom and Beverly Mascari’s flowering display. / TPR/Bryan Walton

Arroyo Grande resident Tom Mascari loves to show off his garden, so much so that he jumped at the opportunity to have it featured in this year’s San Luis Obispo Botanical Garden Tour, Visions & Vistas.

“This is the color house of the whole tour,” Mascari, also known to many as Tom Anthony from his days on the Silver Screen, said of his garden. “We put so much work in here. We love showing it off.”

The Visions & Vistas self-guided tour will feature six gardens — all in Arroyo Grande — and is set for Sunday, May 18. Each garden will feature live music at specified times, and Linda Brownson, local photographer, will display and sell her work at the Mascari garden.

“People really like to share their gardens,” tour coordinator Mary Ann Rutshaw said. “Very seldom do we get a ‘no’ when we ask” people if they would open their gardens to the public for the annual tour.

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Color abounds everywhere in the Mascari garden, from the pink and purple petunias and yellow marigolds bordering concrete walkways throughout the side yard to flowering plum trees and purple potato bushes that dot the manicured landscape.

English roses, pink and white, greet visitors as they enter the side yard, and red bougainvillea wraps around a wood fence at the top of the yard that overlooks the Pacific Ocean.

“Our main feature is color,” said Owen Portwood, retired landscape artist and Mascari garden designer. “The basics were here when we started seven years ago, but we didn’t have any color. It was long-term project to get it the way it is now.”

Portwood, a Grover Beach resident, is also proud of the Mascari’s garden, which he helped create, and has employed the use of clay pots — he plants flowering annuals in the pots — to bring even more color into the landscape.

“We just keep adding more,” the 82-year-old said with a big grin. “We spent seven years changing the landscape, and this is what it turned out to be. It sure changed from what it originally was.”

The retired landscape artists spends a couple hours a day at the Mascari home working in the garden, which he said keeps him spry and in shape.

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Shortly after moving to their Arroyo Grande home in 2000, Beverly Mascari became ill, and the couple who spent much of their retirement years traveling the world, could no longer.

“I thought I had to do something,” Mascari said, about his wife’s illness and making the decision to transform their yard into an oasis of color and tranquility. “We can’t travel anymore ... so Bev and I just walk around the garden now. She enjoys the color.”

The garden also features a small brick patio and fountain outside the home’s sunroom, where the couple can sit and watch the sun set over the ocean. The patio that Portwood constructed by hand is his favorite part of the garden, Mascari said.

He also said if Portwood decided to really retire, he wouldn’t know what to do.

“If Owen didn’t come back, I’d be in big trouble,” Mascari said several times, each time with a wider grin.

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Botanical Garden members and volunteers begin planning the annual tour at least a year in advance, and learned of the Mascari garden through a member who lives near the couple’s home. They also learn about potential gardens to feature from UPS drivers and mail carriers.

“We try to look for different gardens so not all of them are the same,” Rutshaw said about choosing gardens to feature on the tour. “We try to get something for everyone.”

During this year’s tour, participants also will get to visit private yards that feature a small stone fruit orchard and 140-foot water feature, a working ranch with a timber-frame barn and live oaks, a Mediterranean garden filled with large, upright cactus and succulents and much more.

VISIONS & VISTAS GARDEN TOUR

n A light breakfast will be served at 9 a.m. at the Village Gazebo behind Arroyo Grande City Hall.

n Self-guided tours begin at 10 a.m. There are four different tour routes. Maps will be available at the gazebo.

n Tickets are $40 and can be purchased by phone at 541-1400, ext. 302, or online at www.slobg.org.

n Optional lunch tickets cost $10. Lunch tickets must be reserved by May 14.

n For more information about the tour and photos of the featured gardens, visit www.slobg.org.

acharlton@timespressrecorder.com