Located in Sonoma Valley, this garden was created as a part of the Cornerstone Festival of Gardens in 2004. World-renowned landscape architects were invited to create fifteen small, showcase gardens around the nine-acre Cornerstone’s perimeter. One landscape architect among the invitees, Mario Schjetnan of Grupo de Diseño Urbano (GDU), used his rectangular, 1,300-square foot plot to design a garden that tells the story of Mexican and Central American immigrants in the United States, highlighting the difficulties they face and their importance to the Californian economy.
Bordered by boxwood hedges and situated on the eastern edge of the relatively level property, Schjetnan transformed his section into a series of three outdoor rooms defined by three walls of varying height. The first room, paved with shards of terracotta roofing tiles, is formed by a red, segmented plywood wall and a diagonal, corrugated metal wall, which symbolizes the wall constructed by the United States at its border with Mexico. At eye level, the walls have narrow, horizontal slots displaying photographs of immigrants attempting to cross the border and being detained, as well as statistics about California agriculture and its reliance on immigration. Around the corner is a “patio orchard” featuring a miniature vineyard and raised beds replete with vegetables, including cabbage, spinach, and lettuce. Visitors are encouraged to interact with plants—watering, tilling, weeding—in recognition of the labor many immigrants contribute to California; one can also rest on a bench overlooking the crops while reading a poem by Chicano writer Manuel J. Velez that is hung on an adjacent stone gabion wall. An opening in the boxwood hedge frames borrowed views to the east of a lily pond, the vineyard, and mountains beyond. In the third space the angled stone gabion wall stands in a pool across from a raised, metal platform. Photographs of the five immigrant workers who helped create the garden, labeled with the names of famous Mexican actors, hang on the wall next to a shrine for the Virgin of Guadalupe and postcards from their hometowns in the Mexican state of Michoacán.
