These Lands Not Exactly Your Garden Variety Plots
If you don’t think you’re much on gardens, take a day off and go to a big formal one and you’ll come away fully convinced that Adam and Eve were nuts.
How, you’ll wonder aloud, could they have screwed up such a perfect gig? All they had to do was steer clear of one stupid tree and they could have torn up the mortgage on the garden. The original garden.
Yes, visit one really wonderful formal garden and your first impulse will be to sell the condo and immediately move in among the rosebushes. Failing that, you’ll certainly decide that you cannot live a day longer without surrounding yourself with each and every striking plant variety that you’ve beheld on your stroll through paradise.
But this, too, is daunting. Once your head clears, you’ll realize that if you act on every horticultural impulse that seized you during your garden visit, you’d have to buy up your own entire neighborhood and three adjacent ones and have the whole thing rezoned as a national park.
Stunts like that are for Adnan Kashoggi. You, on the other hand, will need perspective.
Fortunately, Helaine Kaplan Prentice can give it to you. She’s written a book called “The Gardens of Southern California” (Chronicle Books), a look in text and photos at 25 of the Southland’s lavish public gardens. And she knows all about that kid-in-a-candy-store compulsion that comes over people when they see gardens that look like they were assembled by The Boss Himself.
You will likely want to be more modest, but you must begin the same way the master designers of the great public gardens began: with a fairly specific plan of how the garden should look when fully stocked and mature.
“The first lesson you want to learn from any of the public gardens is that they came up with a plan that was really suited to that place,” said Prentice, who is a landscape architect and a city planner in Oakland.
“You can learn from how they put the plants together and how they put the spaces together. They all have a strong sense of place and that’s just as important as picking the right plants. That’s what these gardens are about, a sense of place. There’s no other spot like them. All these gardens came out of somebody’s imagination.”
Generally, somebody’s big imagination. The gardens at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, for instance, are not just a few daisies on a bower. They are huge, sprawling, heavily themed and magnificent. There are gigantic lawns and ponds and canopies of trees and, probably, a serpent with an apple. The scale of those gardens will translate well to your home turf only if you happen to have a yard the size of Luxembourg.
On the other hand, said Prentice, the Sherman Library and Gardens in Corona del Mar is more for the person whose back-yard acreage doesn’t rate its own ZIP code. The gardens are bite-sized, divided into specific sections that, Prentice said, are roughly the size of many back yards.
“The Sherman is a really good example,” she said, “because the different outdoor areas are on a residential scale. You can get a good idea of what sorts of things will work on a scale that is fairly close to the one you’ll be working with.”
There’s more to establishing a garden, however, than collecting ideas and slapping in a few plants. What works at the Fullerton or Irvine arboretums (two other local gardens featured in Prentice’s book) may not work in your yard.
For instance, how hard are you willing to work? Gardens, said Prentice, don’t tend themselves, and if your eyes are larger than your capacity for digging in the dirt, you’ll want to stay away from plants and landscapes that need frequent attention. You also need to know your soil and what will grow best in it, and stick to those plants.
And, because plants have a tendency to grow, you’ll also want to plan for the future, said Prentice. Frustration will creep into your life like quick-growing ivy if one day you look into what used to be a beautifully proportioned garden and find that a particular tree has grown to the size of a Saturn booster and is entirely covering what used to be a sun deck.
Similarly, said Prentice, it’s not a good idea to fall in love with some of the massive statuary that might be seen in public gardens. That statue of Zeus may look spiffy with a few acres of land around it, but it could easily overwhelm a victory garden.
Instead, said Prentice, consider keeping your eye open for plant sales at nurseries and gardens where rare or unusual plants can be had for less money than you might think. You can then use that plant or plants as a focal point of your garden.
“You can pick up something that’s as rare as a painting for not much money,” said Prentice.
OK, now you’ve got a garden. You have one more decision to make. How do you want to look at it?
“Too many times,” said Prentice, “people think a garden is just something to see out the window.”
Which, I suppose, is fine, but it might feel a bit like dancing while wearing a space suit. You’ll probably want to get out into your garden, to smell it and touch it. But there’s just so much of that you can do on your feet. So, says Prentice, provide a place to sit. Gardens are for contemplation, after all.
A lot of contemplation. Prentice says she believes that gardening is a balm to body and soul and points out that many of the masters who created the great public gardens lived into their 90s.
“Of course,” she said, “they were also rich.”
