Photos of the Garden Conservancy Los Angeles tour

By Emily Young

Christina House / For The Times

The Garden Conservancy's Open Days tour in Los Angeles on Saturday will feature six private landscapes. Here's a peek inside three of them, starting with the home of Clara Yust. It's hard to stroll through Yust's garden without feeling as though you've landed in another time and place. Rationally, you know you're in modern-day Hancock Park. But your senses tell you you're at a villa in Renaissance Tuscany. Sunlight warms wide gravel paths. Precision-trimmed hedges unfold in green symmetry. Sweet-smelling roses cloak the side of the house. And from the center of this scene comes the trickling music of a three-tiered fountain.

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Christina House / For The Times

"It's a romantic garden, comfortable and not pompous," Yust says. The classic look of the garden was created in 1921 by architect Francis Pierpont Davis, who also designed St. John's Episcopal Cathedral in Los Angeles and the Villa d'Este apartments in West Hollywood. He wanted to complement his new home, an estate so quintessentially Italian that it's believed he had craftsmen from the old country brought over to build it.

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