Be bold!

A Burlingame gardener turned-designer offers tips on getting a garden that's not like anyone's

By Elizabeth Jardina, STAFF WRITER

A YARD LIKE Suzy Kunda-Cvitkovic's doesn't just lie there looking pretty in front of the house.

There's electricity in the way the chartreuse coleus bumps up against the black rosette succulents. There's magic in the way black elephant ears frame the cheerful red-striped yellow helenium flowers.

The thick red blades of phormium, a New Zealand native flax, seem to leap out of the front bed, their swordlike shape mirrored in the thinner, yellow and orange blades of libertia. A brugmansia with hanging blossoms the color of the harvest moon and a heady fragrance after dusk anchors the whole garden profusion.

Kunda-Cvitkovic's garden reaches out and grabs you. It makes you slow your car down as you drive by. It makes you think, "I should go to the nursery."

Kunda-Cvitkovic, 47, has been working on her Burlingame garden for 20 years. When she and her husband Emilio bought their stucco California bungalow, it had a plain lawn and a line of shrubs.

Now, it's a curving oasis of succulents, lushly colored foliage plants and a few irresistible bloomers. "

The garden is holding the house in, like a floral bracelet," she says.

She's attracted to plants in bright yellowish green, red, orange, bronze and black. Oh, and anything weird. That includes a mimosa tree with deep maroon leaves, an orange-blooming rhododendron, a hibiscus that flowers the gray-purple of a storm cloud and a magnolia tree with yellow flowers.

Even though Kunda-Cvitkovic isn't a big fan of gray-green foliage, she couldn't resist a South African melianthus, a 6-foot-tall, prehistoric-looking shrub with bold, jagged leaves.

Even when she uses more ordinary plants — colorful leafy coleus, sweetly trailing bacopa — she picks unusual cultivars, ones with funny leaves and strange colors.

When she goes to the nursery she says she's never sure what she's looking for, but knows when she finds it. "I'm like a plant shark," she says.

She stresses that independent nurseries often have more unusual things than big-box stores. "Unfortunately, most nurseries sell the same thing," she says. "Patronize the nurseries that take the time to find unusual plants."

Her favorite nursery — where she recently got a part time job after being a customer for years — is Golden Nursery in San Mateo.

Kunda-Cvitkovic also went from a hobby gardener and a corporate editor to being a professional gardener this summer.

She got much of her garden education by finding and joining garden clubs — everything from the North American Rock Garden Association to the San Mateo Arboretum Society.

Learn all you can, she suggests, but the best place to learn about gardening is in the dirt, she says. She recommends always pulling out plants you don't like, and planting flowers and shrubs that make you happy.

"Try things, try things, try things," she says. "Just try them. It's a metaphor for life. You'll never get a beautiful garden if you don't try things."

-          Suzy Kunda Cvitkovic's Web site is

http://www.theavantgardener.biz.

Elizabeth Jardina is a Bay Area Living staff writer.

E-mail her at