Blake Garden in Kensington: A Hillside Designed Around Shelter, Rock and Microclimates

By Matthew Martinez, Founder, CEO & Managing Broker, Diamond Real Estate Group. California DRE #01869679.

Blake Garden makes an East Bay hillside understandable at a more intimate scale. Within one property, a sheltered garden, exposed ground, creek corridor and shaded canyon create quite different experiences.

The design works with those differences. Its interest lies partly in the transitions: moving from one space into another reveals how topography, buildings and vegetation influence the conditions around them.

The house helped make the garden possible

UC Berkeley’s garden history explains that the house was positioned to take advantage of Bay views while sheltering part of the garden from western marine exposure. Architect Walter Bliss was asked to consider the landscape in deciding where the building should sit.

This reverses the assumption that a garden simply fills whatever space remains after a house is placed. Here, the building’s location helped create the conditions desired for the garden.

The relationship is relevant to a smaller hillside property as well. A terrace’s usefulness can depend on what stands between it and the prevailing exposure, alongside the view it faces.

The terrain offered several different kinds of place

The university describes rock outcrops, reaches of Cerrito Creek, a formal reflecting pool, a redwood canyon and a native wetland area. These features occupy a property of more than ten acres in Kensington.

They are not interchangeable settings for the same planting scheme. The canyon creates enclosure; the pool establishes a defined composition; and the wetland introduces another relationship among water, soil and vegetation.

The variety gives the garden a sequence rather than one repeated scene. Differences in light and enclosure become part of the route through it.

Two women shaped the initial garden plan

The university credits Anita Blake and her sister Mabel Symmes with the initial plan and major plantings. Symmes was among the early students in Berkeley’s landscape architecture program.

In a 1995 university account, Symmes’s early landscape studies are placed alongside Anita Blake’s interest in collecting plants from many regions. The account describes specimens including dawn redwoods, Himalayan dogwood and New Zealand lacebark.

The relationship between a spatial plan and a broad collection helped make the site more than an inventory. Plants could be arranged within places suited to particular conditions and experiences.

The historical record supports continued study

A 2022 presentation by the garden’s manager, hosted by the California Horticultural Society, emphasizes the surviving photographs, plant inventories, correspondence and other records documenting its development.

Those materials allow changes to be understood across time. A planting’s present size or position can be compared with earlier intentions and conditions, giving management a longer reference than one season’s appearance.

The garden’s teaching role follows naturally from that combination of physical diversity and documentation. The site can be studied as an arrangement of spaces as well as a collection of plants.

Read a hillside as several connected environments

Blake Garden offers a useful way to look at Kensington’s terrain: examine the sheltered corners, open slopes, drainage paths and transitions between them. A single label such as “Bay-view hillside” cannot communicate all of those differences.

Explore real estate and home for sale in Kensington and our property-setting comparison. Contact Diamond to compare homes through the actual relationship among architecture, outdoor space and terrain.

Sources checked October 28, 2026. The university notes steep slopes and limited accessible areas. Confirm current garden hours and access with its staff; this article does not report a private site inspection.