Samin Nosrat’s Communal Courtyard Garden in Oakland, CA

Communal courtyard garden: a concise orientation before we get practical.

Communal courtyard garden: Quick notes

Like many excellent chefs, Samin Nosrat is also a keen gardener. When she’s not recipe testing or cooking for friends or, as is often the case these days, traveling to promote her new cookbook Good Things, she can be found puttering around the courtyard garden that she shares with three other households in Oakland, CA. (I wrote about their unique communal living situation in the 2022 book Remodelista: The Low-Impact Home.) Every neighbor pitches in when it comes to gardening chores, “but I tend to drive the bus,” she admits.

“I’ve been gardening avidly for about 15 years now. My interest in it grew out of both my cooking career and my love of flowers and friendships with Sarah Ryhanen [of Saipua] and [floral designer] Nicolette Owen. And over the years, as I’ve spent more time in the garden, it’s occurred to me that many of my maternal ancestors were also extraordinary gardeners,” she shares.

“For many years I was hesitant to start gardening because I was a renter and felt like, ‘What’s the point? I’ll have to leave everything behind when I move!’  Then, a master gardener taught me that gardening’s real takeaway is the experience, and that even the best gardeners have tons and tons of failures. This has been a great gift to me, as a recovering production-oriented perfectionist. I love that gardening gives me a daily opportunity to slow down and pay attention, to get my hands dirty, and to learn how to look at my surroundings.”

Below, Samin takes us on a tour of her courtyard garden, a place for gathering together and growing things. (Curious about her home kitchen? Head over to Remodelista for a peek.)

Photography by Aya Brackett.

We reference Communal courtyard garden briefly to keep the thread coherent.

Communal courtyard garden comes up here to connect ideas for clarity.

Above: The courtyard is where the neighbors come together for shared meals. Above: “I don’t have much room in the front of my house and there is a lot of shade, too, so I took a maximalist approach and tried to pack in as much of a cottage garden here as I could,” she says.”Lots of moody oxalis, hellebores, and heuchera, as well as different types of ferns, including a beautiful bronze fern…. I’ve got chocolate akebia climbing the front, and added a clematis this year. There are a couple different abutilons, a few silver-leafed Japanese camellias, and some oak leaf hydrangea. I also always have Minoan lace and Dara Daucus planted, and then I add annuals throughout the year.”