Rocky-Road Lawns Rake in Long Green

Around the house where Alan Huck grew up, there was always a lawn.

It had to be watered. It had to be mowed. “That’s probably what turned me off having lawns.”

Now that Alan Huck is an adult, he has a yard of his own, filled with 250 varieties of cactuses and succulents.

No rain, no pain.

The water-wise landscaping outside Alan and Christine Huck’s Arleta home won them a $1,000 first-place award Friday in Los Angeles’ second annual water conservation gardens contest, one of 11 cash prizes in the competition sponsored by the Department of Water and Power and the Los Angeles Beautiful group.

In the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, where the first Oscars were handed out, 11 Strelitzias--trophies topped by a golden bird of paradise, the official city flower--were distributed to homeowners whose gardens and yards are long on looks and short on water.

As guests dutifully conserved water with glasses of white zinfandel or sparkling apple cider, Jim Wickser, the DWP’s assistant chief engineer for water acknowledged the odd timing of low-water garden awards during the first rainy spell of the season, and was stern.

“We’re in a dry year in spite of what today’s weather may look like,” he admonished. “We get a few rainy days and everybody forgets about it (saving water).”

The slide-shows of winners’ spectacular gardens, in professional and amateur design categories, proved that the ideal water-saving yard in Los Angeles’ desert climate does not have to be a slab of concrete with a potted hunk of cactus.

Ten years ago, camping out overnight in a tent as he waited in line to buy his new Arleta home, Huck decided he was “not going to be a slave to my lawn.” So the professional artist and his preschool-teacher wife, both conservation-conscious down to their 14-year-old compact station wagon, planted ice plant and junipers, installed several Christmases’ worth of living fir trees, and “spent hours importing rocks from the Tujunga Wash” for a yard that won the “portion of landscape” category for its side plot cactus garden. On a street lined with grass, “We just tell people looking for our house that it’s the one without the lawn,” said Christine Huck.

She said they entered the contest on a lark, when they saw the announcement in their DWP bill--which is “as low as it could be.” Besides the “plain economics” of water-saving, Alan Huck thinks things should grow where nature intended them to, “and not be so foreign.”

It was foreign design that inspired the other amateur first-place winner, Rose Rhodes, whose Pacific Palisades yard reflects the Oriental design themes of her house--and her childhood in China.

“Initially I was thinking of water conservation and low maintenance,” said Rhodes. “I lived in India, too, where you only had water two hours a day,” and even now, “I don’t let the water run in the sink and all, because it’s a waste.”

Her bonsai-clipped junipers, blue-flowering rosemary, Chinese cedar and Japanese black pines are watered about once a month, and most are kept low so as not to block her view of the mountains and sea from a low stone bench.

There are garden clubs in her neighborhood, but “I don’t belong to any of them because there’s no challenge there,” said Rhodes. “Don’t misunderstand me, they’re beautiful gardens but . . . like petunias--you have to put them in today and water them tomorrow. I don’t like to do that.”

In the “professionally designed” competition, homeowner David Bernstein of Reseda won first place for his cactus garden among rocks and driftwood. Joe and June Nishimura of Los Angeles tore out their thirsty dichondra 10 years ago after another of the city’s recurrent water crises, and on Friday won a first-place award for part of their yard, a rock garden island of pebbles and boulders set in a yard dominated by a huge magnolia tree and a sago palm, whose seed June Nishimura’s mother brought from Japan in a coin purse more than 30 years ago.

First-place prizes carry a $1,000 cash award, which Rhodes said she will use to buy “nice presents” for each of her five overseas foster children, and for herself--a coconut ice cream cone.

Alan Huck said he plans to spend it on art supplies, although a friend at the studio where he works on the “Alvin and the Chipmunks” Saturday cartoon show kidded him, “Hey, now you can spend more on water.”