A Living Tribute to a Green Thumb
Half a century later, a motorist’s kindness to a hitchhiker is remembered beneath a shady grove of oaks, alders and sycamores next to a rock-strewn streambed and roaring waterfall.
The tiny slice of wilderness in Agoura Hills is marked with a hand-hewn wooden sign that proclaims it to be the “Lee Haines Garden of Native Plants of the Santa Monica Mountains.”
“Lee changed my life,” says Edward Gripp. “I owe so much to him.”
White-haired and spry, Gripp picks his way through indigenous chaparral and climbs over rocky outcroppings as he makes his way to the base of a cliff. There, above a tiny sign bearing the name Dudleya lanceolata, a rosette-shaped succulent clings to the rock wall.
Gripp, 73, is a veteran Thousand Oaks landscape architect who created the garden, hauling in boulders, adding a cascading, 30-foot waterfall and planting a small forest of native trees.
But vegetation isn’t the only botanical wonder from the Santa Monica Mountains that Gripp has come to appreciate. Lee Haines is another.
“It was 1950 and I was hitchhiking to Santa Monica City College the day Lee Haines picked me up in Topanga Canyon. We got to talking and he asked me what I was studying. I told him I was taking a forestry class, but that I really was interested in orchids. I said that my brother and I were interested in the orchid business because our dad’s cousin had brought some cymbidiums here from Britain when greenhouses there were destroyed in World War II,” he recalls.
“Lee was a botanist. He had taught botany and business at Canoga Park High School before becoming head of the biology department at Pierce College. He told me I was in the wrong place. He said, ‘Come spend a day at Pierce and you’ll see.’ ”
Gripp accepted the invitation and ended up transferring to what was then known as the C.W. Pierce School of Agriculture in Woodland Hills. Haines gave Gripp a job as a lab assistant. He eventually put the 20-year-old to work helping plant the school’s arboretum and the pine trees that now stand outside its football stadium.
“He was a scholarly man, very serious. But he was a very unique person -- he took a personal interest in me. He turned my life around. He changed me forever,” Gripp said.
After junior college, Gripp studied horticulture and biology at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo before embarking on a successful, half-a-century career in landscape design.
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In the early 1990s, Gripp was building a headquarters in Agoura Hills for his firm, Land Form Design Inc., when the idea for a native plant garden struck him. He credits a former local city engineering official, Elroy Kipkey, with suggesting that the streambed running through his lot at 28328 Agoura Road be preserved.
“This would probably have been boxed in as a storm drain, been covered over and become a parking lot if it hadn’t been for Elroy,” Gripp said.
Along the creek bed, Gripp noticed native shrubs growing, as well as coast live oaks and valley oaks, a California black walnut tree, an elderberry, a black willow and a bay tree.
“On this quarter-acre, there already were 50% of all the native trees in the Santa Monica Mountains -- there are very few trees that grow in the Santa Monicas.”
So he cut the size of his planned office building in half, designed a meandering walkway through the trees and built small footbridges over the creek bed. Gripp planted missing native tree varieties: white alders, big leaf maples, sycamores and a Fremont cottonwood. A Catalina cherry -- “a volunteer,” as he puts it -- planted itself.
Using reclaimed water and a recirculating pump, he devised the waterfall over what was a naturally occurring storm-runoff raceway on the face of the cliff.
But before Gripp could move into his new tile-topped, hacienda-style building, the president of an environmental consulting firm stopped by and asked to lease it.
Envicom Corp. head Joe Johns is a rock climber who says he was initially drawn to the site by the granite cliff. Later, he became enamored with the natural streambed and the grove of trees.
Some of his employees are former students of Haines. So Johns heartily endorsed the Lee Haines Garden.
As the native plant garden began to flourish, Johns started using it as a classroom. With their own eyes, developers could see the types of vegetation and “blue-line stream” that they are required to protect through the environmental impact reports that Johns’ firm produces.
“We bring clients out to show them plants that are on their property and why they’re important,” he said. “When I have tough problems to resolve, I’ll come out here in the garden and sit and listen to the water.”
Passersby often stop to gaze past the garden fence and the trees at the cliff’s tumbling waterfall. Those who ask to visit are given a key to its gate. Sometimes Johns’ employees will give brief tours and tell of the garden’s rare plants and habitat.
Gripp has never publicized the garden, though. Even its closest neighbors are unaware of how it’s a tribute to botanist Lee Haines. He retired from teaching in the early 1970s and died before the garden was finished.
Financial planner June Slayton, whose office is in a remodeled circa-1930 garage directly across the street from the garden, said she bought her building because of the restful, forest-like view out her front window.
“I put in a Dutch door so I could open the top part and hear the waterfall,” she said. “People are always stopping to look at it. It’s as cute as a bug over there.”
Being a garden of native plants, would that bug likely be a Philotes sonorensis, the caterpillar that is said to nibble on the Dudleya lanceolata?
Lee Haines would have known for sure.
