Barbara Dubbs, the daughter of a military father, “lived everywhere — Washington, Oregon, Illinois and Turkey,” which is why she really didn’t have a garden to call her own as she grew up.

However, “I am half-Japanese and would visit Japan to see relatives and we would always take trips to see the beautiful gardens of Kyoto, Nara and Tokyo,” she says.

These gardens influenced the first garden project of her Tam Valley home. This month, she celebrates 40 years of living there and a recent retirement, after working for more than 30 years for an international ocean container shipping company.

She recalls that, when she first moved in, there was no landscaping in the back and only grass in the side yard.

Those areas remained like that for a number of years, but she hired a professional to create a landscape in front that was inspired by the Japanese gardens of her youth.

“They were so exquisite that my first project was to transform the front of my house as a Japanese garden,” she says.

Her home, which sits on a third of an acre, offers her just the right amount of land for gardening.

“It’s very compact and easy for me to handle,” she says. “I have a gardener come once a month for big stuff, but I can pretty much take care of the details.”

Around a decade ago, she turned her attention to her back and side gardens, and it was an evolutionary journey for her.

“You’re so busy with your career, but then you get little inspirations from everywhere and I would put them in a binder,” she says. “I would look through all those Sunset magazines and I used the ‘Western Garden Book’ as a guide.”

They helped shape her garden design, most of which she did herself with assistance from her gardener, who installed the raised beds, decomposed granite and drip system.

Working with a color palette of greens, reds and oranges, she says, “the goal was to make a beautiful, functional space without using a lot of water.”“I’ve learned you really don’t need a whole lot of water to grow plants, so I have been monitoring it for several years,” she says. “I was growing a lot of weeds there for a couple of years.”

The drip system serves as a water source for her garden, which includes a productive orchard, succulent section and five raised garden beds.

It’s here that she harvests figs, persimmons, apples, mandarin oranges, pears and Meyer lemons from her trees, and lettuce, radishes, carrots, squash, spinach, cucumbers, eggplant, tomatoes, parsley, cilantro and shiso — an herb in the mint family — from her raised beds.

Dubbs reserves one raised bed for wildflowers, purchasing either Fairy Mix or California Color from Botanical Interests.

“It is nice to have color and surprises in the garden,” she says.

She incorporated succulents, such as agave blue, aloe, echeveria and “lots of aeoniums like black rose, salad bowl, sunburst and kiwi,” she says, to create an array of textures in her garden.

She’s learned how to propagate the succulents, which she does usually in March or April, thereby saving her money to purchase more plants.

Now retired, Dubbs is looking forward to spending even more time in the garden.

“I have it all, with a hot tub with a view of Mount Tamalpais, and the succulent garden with my beautiful heron as a centerpiece, and all of it surrounded by oak trees,” she says.

Dubbs shares her top garden tips:

• Amend the soil with compost for vegetable beds and new gardens every season.

“That is your building block,” she says.

• “It’s your garden, so plant what you want and not what’s in fashion,” she says.

• “Weed, weed, weed,” she says.

• Keep a journal and diagram of what you plant.

“It’s hard to keep track of so many plants,” she says.

Show off

Please send an email describing either one (or both), what you love most about it and a photograph or two. I will post the best ones in upcoming columns. Your name will be published and you must be over 18 years old and a Marin resident.

Don’t-miss event

• Take a virtual tour of “Remarkable French Rose Gardens” when Rose Gilardi, of the San Francisco Rose Society, comes to the Marin Rose Society at 6:30 p.m. July 9 in the Livermore Room at the Marin Art and Garden Center at 30 Sir Francis Drake Blvd. in Ross. Light refreshments will be served and a rose-related raffle will take place. Admission and parking are free. More information at marinrose.org.

PJ Bremier writes on home, garden, design and entertaining topics every Saturday. She may be contacted at P.O. Box 412, Kentfield 94914, or at pj@pjbremier.com. Submit story ideas and events via email or mail.