An artist of the alfresco

Occasionally designers produce work that changes the way we see. This is the case with Nancy Goslee Power. In the 27 years since she arrived from New York, she has rewritten the rule about what may constitute a frontyard, first enclosing it, then excavating it for good measure. She has used aloe, agave, lavender and olive trees so dramatically that the blue-gray western plant palette now belongs to this Easterner. She put a garden outside the Norton Simon Museum of Art that is as good as anything inside of it. The Chinese rain trees now softening Grand Avenue's glare are hers. The plans being considered for the rejuvenation of the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden in Arcadia: hers. The 2-acre garden that opens today at Kidspace Children's Museum in Pasadena: hers, too.

Though she started as a decorator, Power, 62, has managed to avoid the title "domestic diva." She will pose for a newspaper photographer with a coffee stain on her shirt. She is a design consultant to the cultural elite who is at the same time a presiding artist in her own right. As her Santa Monica firm Nancy Goslee Power and Associates has expanded with a team of four full-time designers and a maintenance company, she is to landscaping what her longtime collaborator Frank Gehry is to architecture: She hasn't so much broken the old mold as cast a new one. Kidspace architect Michael Maltzan says she has "rock star status." Kevin Starr, historian of the Golden State, refers to Power as "one of half a dozen leaders in her field nationwide."

She could have responded by hiding behind a publicist. Instead, she has converted a garage in a Santa Monica warehouse to hold gardening classes and is likely to personally greet anyone who has the energy to attend on foggy Saturday mornings. "Welcome, come in, excuse me while I take my shoes off, my feet are killing me."

Comment on how well put together her home is, and she'll raise an eyebrow and mutter, "I have help." She scandalized arboretum brass recently when a sanitized remark from her filtered into the press to the effect that every park worth the name had a lover's lane.

Very Nancy. The first thing most people comment about is her wit. "Nancy's a hoot," "a riot," "a scream." Indeed, she's funny. Ribald too. Yet there's more to it than a need to entertain. There's a kind of heroism. Maltzan sees her work as compassion-soaked and calls her "a profound humanist." Meet her, and the jokes, the candor and the passionate beautifications (surely they are art) start seeming like ammunition to preserve an armed truce between joy and melancholy.

Kid friendly

Ask an adult what children like, and you will hear what the adult liked as a child. Or loathed. Only weeks before the opening of Kidspace, as installation crews unload flat after flat of plants from nursery trucks, Power zigzags up a muddy hillside. "Kids hate 'kiddie' things," she says. "This is where the grass maze will be," she adds, stopping as if to claim the spot like a proud goat.

In other words, this is where she has created a detour from the formal path leading from an open-air amphitheater into a controlled woodland with Mexican elderberry, sycamores, pines, oaks and redwoods. The farther one proceeds, the better the class of hiding places and most excellent lookouts. Planting amounts to a kind of color-corrected wilderness. As she passes the "bumpy fuzzy" garden, a bed planted with gray-blue furry-leafed plants such as lamb's ear, she quips, "We should also have a thorn one. Yin and yang."

She's joking, of course, but only sorta-kinda. Power wants to deliver our cosseted and carpooled urban youth into the kind of wonderland that she knew as a child. She was born in Georgetown, Del., the first of three children of fashion designer Ellen Goslee and financier James Goslee. The brackish inlets of Chesapeake Bay signed her heart. "I loved canoeing through marshes in spring," she says. "There were irises and more snakes than the Amazon."

Throughout a series of meetings, a picture of her mother emerges as a designer who had children at 23 instead of a career. Every Christmas, she enlisted the children — Nancy, sister Judy, and brother James III — to transform the family's midcentury house into a church by pasting colored cellophane to the windows. But, says Power, "She didn't tuck you in at night."

Today, Power suspects that her mother battled mental illness. All she knew as a child was that she admired and emulated her father's more generous and gregarious nature. Her closest relationship growing up was with her brother, James, "Jimmy," the family bon viveur and designer, trained at Parsons School of Design and Pratt Institute.

At 20, Power was herself struggling with what later would be diagnosed as bipolar disorder. Depression followed by manic bursts of energy made enrollment in university untenable. In 1962, her family sent her to a fashionable finishing school, Villa Mercede in Florence. During her two years there, the American girl soaked up not just how to paint and draft, but the art of life.

"I was myself," she says, "free from the family identity."

INDOORS OUT

The 1970s were spent in New York, where she and Jimmy worked as interior designers. He became such an influential florist that when President Gerald Ford entertained the queen of England, James Goslee did the flowers. By 1977, one of her jobs had made the cover of House & Garden, and she'd married British film producer Derek Power and moved to Santa Monica. It didn't take long for the interior decorator to look outside. In 1981 she set up her first garden design practice with Pasadena landscaper Thomas Batcheller Cox.

The chemistry between Power and California was immediate, says Cox. "She just loved the gray-green foliage and was stunned by the light and how intense it was," he says. If she lacked a formal education, she had an advantage in never having received a bad one. Power taught herself. "She always had her camera with her," he says. "She wouldn't go past a plant without taking a picture of it. She was also very close to Phil Chandler, who wrote a nifty book for the Southern California Horticultural Society. He must have been in his 80s and was very acerbic but really knew his plants. He used to have tiny classes so she would of course go to those."

That first year with Cox, she rethought her 20th Street Santa Monica home. The front lawn was first to go. She enclosed the 38-by-38-foot lawn with a pittosporum hedge, a glossy-leafed evergreen with fragrant, almost gardenia-issue, white flowers. By doing this, she added another 1,400 square feet to her home. "I claimed that $150,000 sitting out there," she laughs.

A year into the project, she decided to excavate the captured space, only a couple of feet but enough to create a sensation of enclosure. She then used French doors to turn the garden into another room. "We lived out there."

The garden made the press, after which Power's every move was watched and copied by a magazine-reading public: loggias with solid roofs, open sides and a fireplace at the end; front gardens planted with olive groves; blue-gray gardens using aloe, agave, ice plants. To Cox, she approached gardens with a decorator's flair. "She's a marvelous example of 'a designer is a designer is a designer,' " he says. "If you're brilliant you can move into any field."

SIGNING A DECADE