The Donnell garden achieved widespread fame almost from the time of its completion in 1948. It was extremely photogenic as well as unusual in form, and as a result, it appeared in popular home magazines as well as professional journals. The garden represented everything modern about California living and helped promote a lifestyle in which living outdoors shared equal importance with life inside the home. Not incidentally, every photo of the garden published by investigation, to Church the garden was most importantly a means by which to live well. As architect William Wurster had phrased it, architecture was the picture frame and not the picture.