Grace in leaf and stone
ALBERTO HERNANDEZ is out to repair the world. It is a broken place, he will tell you, and his garden is a prayer that it might be healed.
Cascading vines and well-rooted trees draw the earth up to the sky. Sunlight glows through green and gold wine bottles suspended overhead. A waterfall of white beads and coils of multicolored tinsel frame an altar Hernandez has built to one side.
Walk through this cathedral from green-enshrouded shrine to shrine, and you will hear Hernandez’s prayer begin to hum. It was this humming that caught the attention of filmmakers Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer eight years ago when they were looking for someone to remake their Echo Park garden.
“We were amazed to find such an inspired, extravagant, private kingdom behind Alberto’s modest house,” says Glatzer of the 42-year-old artist. “Thoughts of the Watts Towers came to mind -- of a folk artist with a major vision working away unknown by the world.”
No wonder they placed Hernandez’s creation in the center of their movie “Quinceanera.” Here the Silver Lake garden is both prayer and refuge for the central character, 84-year-old Tomas Alvarez, who has taken in his disgraced niece and nephew. On the altar, Tomas has placed their photos. In a later scene, he sits, tears falling, next to a tiled concrete fireplace screened by grape leaves laced with black beads. Above it, the wine bottles glitter in the frame.
Westmoreland and Glatzer’s interpretation of this space as a place of solace and wonder, a place where saints may walk freely, seems right. Hernandez himself will tell you that this has been a place of love from the day he started cultivating it 14 years ago.
But it wasn’t just Hernandez’s garden that caught the filmmakers’ attention. In their Echo Park neighborhood, they were observing the powerful impact of monied newcomers on their poorer neighbors. An old way of life was dying and a new one taking its place. Whom to admire in this anxious tableau? They admired Hernandez, whose story, as it unfolded to them, was of death and resurrection, of a child’s body so broken that it would take years to heal and of an adult who moves gracefully through the world, using his work with plants to make it more beautiful.
“Tomas was definitely inspired by Alberto’s Zen-like equanimity,” says Glatzer.
WHEN Alberto Hernandez was 10, the 13th of 22 children, he decided he was tired of this life. He lay down behind a truck so that it would drive over him and kill him.
Alberto’s much-broken body survived and he spent the next seven years in the hospital. You do not go through something like that and stay the same person, he says. It was here that he drew a bead on the importance of love, unqualified. Like that of saints. It embraces all people. It prays for healing. It makes gardens like this and inspires movies like “Quinceanera.”
Not only did Westmoreland and Glatzer end up using the garden, but “we used bits of Alberto’s own biography in constructing Tomas’ past,” including Hernandez’s early attempt at suicide. They also used his spirit. “Alberto is a shy, private man who exudes wisdom. His charisma is all the stronger for being twinned with shyness.”
Over the years Hernandez has taken some landscaping jobs, maybe 20 or 30, he says. He seems interested in doing it for a living. For now he works 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. as grounds superintendent at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, managing a staff of 22. They are from all walks of life and some can be trying. The garden helps him forget the aches of the day.
“Alberto is a true artist, someone who creates constantly, effortlessly, the way most people breathe,” says Glatzer. “When we first met him -- before Hollywood Forever began taking up most of his time -- he would work long into the night inventing overripe displays for the garden. In fact, the displays changed regularly and you never knew what to expect.”
In his native Mexico, Hernandez studied horticulture, opening his own nursery, but the business withered away in the poor economy. He went to Houston, where he sold champurrado and oranges on the street, but it was too hot. He came to Los Angeles 16 years ago and, looking for a job, wandered into a Culver City flower shop, where he was asked to do an arrangement on the spot and was hired. Over the years, as he was shaping the garden behind his house, he worked for other florists (the memory of one in Malibu is especially happy) and for a business that rented plants to offices. Often, perfectly good specimens would be discarded and he would bring them home like pound puppies to be loved.
The house, built in 1909, was “almost gone” when he bought it, Hernandez says. It was owned for decades by the silent film star Dexter McReynolds, and then by his widow, Mary. Westmoreland and Glatzer used Hernandez’s kitchen for the film, as the place where Tomas feeds and comforts his niece and nephew. One wall is covered with rows of plates, most of them picked up at garage sales. In the kitchen and living room are glass pendant chandeliers on which Hernandez has strung colorful beads.
As he restored the rooms, still encased in their original wood paneling, Hernandez added on a porch next to the kitchen. Around it hangs gold brocade drapes. From their cushioned seats Hernandez and partner Jazz Inda look down on the garden, “like birds in a nest,” they say.
Hernandez planted ficus and queen palms, date palms and banana trees along the property’s border and in strategic groupings to create outdoor rooms. With regular watering, by hand, they became serene screens behind which the garden now naps, eternally cool and quiet. At their feet are the abandoned bromeliads, dracenas, ferns and other indoor greenery, safely shaded.
Paths are made of concrete squares in which, the cement still wet, friends pressed their hands, drew their names, invocations, significant dates. In the “rooms” themselves are floors Hernandez made of salvaged brick, ceramic shards, mirrored glass and, around one fountain, limestone from the garden of the actress who played TV’s Donna Reed. Every week Hernandez went to yard sales where he found the objects from which to make his art.
“People are drawn to the garden by its originality,” says Glatzer, “the perverse combining of natural and artificial, for example. There’s a sense of private vision but also a sense of community in the way Alberto has created his own Grauman’s Chinese by having friends leave prints in the cement.”
FROM its earliest days as a simple dirt rectangle behind a simple wooden house, the garden has showcased indomitable women. A bronze torso encased in straps is Frida Kahlo. On the altar is a black-and-white photograph of an older friend who recently died. The Virgin Mary appears and reappears. In one corner is a mannequin’s head painted white, white netting bunched like a Vera Wang veil at the top of her head. She rests on a pool of blue glass. Around her in no particular pattern are balls of red glass. What does it mean? “It’s a woman protecting the babies,” Hernandez explains.
While the spirit of the garden is intoxicatingly Catholic, nothing that speaks of love is left out. In a circular courtyard is a miniature Buddhist temple, Buddha statues, bowls with offerings of fruit and money that might show your state of mind (if you need money, leave some, Hernandez explains). Friends are forever bringing their findings: Like magpies, they often fall for the cobalt bottles that once held vodka or wine or tequila, and to one side of the yard Hernandez has strung them in a blue-on-blue grouping.
From his father, Hernandez got the idea to prick holes in aluminum soda cans inside which tiny electric lights shine at night. Throughout the garden the real mixes with the unreal: Artificial orchids and bougainvillea and grapes look almost natural. Hummingbirds and mourning doves and scrub jays flit by ceramic parrots from Mexico.
Around the plantings, concrete borders wiggle like salamanders; embedded in them are pebbles and marbles, fragments of glass and pottery, an entire ceramic bowl from Italy, plastic statues and religious medals. What appears to be a metal gazebo is actually an old TV antenna from which hang glass pendants painted with eyes.
“It’s a dream of angels and perfection and how we want the world to be,” says Hernandez.
To a leering Indonesian figure, Hernandez has added wings decorated with pink Christmas ornaments “to make it less scary.” Glass balls found at a garage sale hang like a cloud over a tinfoil infant, symbolizing much-needed rain. The effect is as playful as Gaudi and as thoughtfully composed as Rauschenberg. If you extracted all the objects tucked into this garden, they would form an overflowing collection box of things that people have loved.
UNTIL he saw the movie, Hernandez had no idea what parts of the garden had been borrowed by his friends. “We were away on vacation the week they were filming,” he says, laughing. He is proud, though, of his role in the creation of Tomas’ character, bringing out a copy of the screenplay, highlighted to show what was drawn from his life.
Even before the film, the garden was having an effect. As Hernandez painted and planted, others joined in, “like a competition,” he says. Discarded furniture vanished from lawns and driveways. He loves that as the litter disappeared so did the crime. He rejoices that home values have gone up although he has no plans to move. “We have too much stuff,” he cries.
Today on Hernandez’s block there is more than one garden that speaks of new money. Still, it is Hernandez’s garden that fascinates. Do people knock on the door asking for a look?
“Just about every day,” he says. He politely turns them away.
Still, during the recent Sunset Junction Street Fair, Hernandez opened the garden to a select group of revelers. Inspired by the fair’s message that the “world is out of balance,” he painted discarded mannequins a pure silver (“a healing color,” he says), gave them powerful identities and placed them throughout the garden. One bears a tinfoil headdress and torch, a Statue of Liberty who will once again protect a wounded country. Around her are scattered plastic arms and hands (“arms can protect people,” Hernandez vows). There are several silvery angels, and two silvery women embracing. The latter tableau is a homage to the 40-year relationship of a lesbian couple who are neighbors.
Off to the side is a silver head peering up from the floor. “That’s me,” Hernandez says, the artist as observer.