Besides their wine, The Hess Collection has two big draws: their courtyard garden and their art collection. Upon arrival, guests are greeted with a placard with a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson "a weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered." Here plants are allowed to self-sow themselves to create the sense of an alpine meadow; this field is sectioned into strips running at a vertical angle and it's surrounded by a vine covered walkway and framed by Redwoods and ferns to imitate the natural world. An "Earth-Touching" Buddha statue by John Connell is overlooking the setting along with installations by other artists.

The second bonus to this vineyard visit is their art collection, which includes many heavy hitters like Robert Motherwell, Francis Bacon, and Robert Rauschenberg. As you tour the artwork and pause at the Frank Stella paintings, the geographic lines and repeated patterns seem vaguely familiar. In fact the landscape designer, Peter Walker was deeply influenced by the art of Frank Stella when he was starting out as a designer.

Robert Ceballos, who is the museum director at Hess, as well as a visual artist and landscape architect explained the evolution of the garden. "Mr. Hess wanted an Alpine garden that would bring in the surrounding environment, so that the winery would echo the vineyard. The first installation was random wildflowers, which looked good for 2-3 weeks out of the year, but the rest of the time was a weed patch. Next he brought in a garden designer to create a sea of English isatoma, or blue star creeper. This never quite looked as imagined."

Berkeley based landscape architect Peter Walker was passing through the courtyard at the same Mr. Hess was, and they had a spirited conversation about gardens and art. Hess hired Peter Walker to design it, and he in turn, brought in John Greenlee to help. John Greenlee is a garden designer and proprietor of Greenlee Nursery and he specializes in creating meadow gardens. He is known for bringing the use of ornamental grass to the West Coast.

"Peter Walker is a noted modernist and Mr. Hess wanted an alpine meadow that evoked the character of his homeland," John Greenlee explained. "So they created this meadow that's dissected with horizontal pathways with decomposed granite."

The next step for the Hess Collection?

"More natives," said Robert Ceballos. "People assume that these are native California plantings, but they're not. But we are working those in."

Tips for creating an Alpine Garden by John Greenlee

While the Hess vineyard meadow garden looks simple, it's actually layers and layers of plant materials such as annuals, perennials, bulbs, and grasses. The meadow garden is actually a complex and dynamic planting with hundreds of varieties of plants that come and go over the season.

1. Purchase his new book, The American Meadow Garden.

2. Groundcover grasses provide a framework for other plants to hang on.

3. While it's relatively simple to maintain a meadow garden, it is actually a complex and dynamic planting. Consider using many different varieties of plants so that while some bloom stop blooming, others start.