In the Best Gardens : Landscape Contractors Install the Latest in Design Trends--Mini-Meadows and Waterfalls--in Award-Winning Settings
AN EXECUTIVE’S PRIVATE balcony; a gem-like, Japanese-style backyard in Santa Monica; a serene San Marino retreat set in a woodsy, bouldered glen, and an eat-your-heart-out 8 1/2-acre estate off Benedict Canyon are this year’s winners of the California Landscape Contractors Assn. 32nd Annual Beautification Awards.
Each of these gardens is artfully designed, functional, tailored to the needs of its owner--but the designers are not the award winners. Landscape contractors install the pools, gazebos, plants, paths, decks--all elements of the designs conceived by landscape architects--and many will maintain the gardens once they’re put in. The Beautification Awards call attention to the craft of gardening by illustrating that proper construction, planting and care can make the difference between an evolving, always-pleasing garden and a once-lovely plan that went to seed.
Still, it is difficult to look at these gardens without noticing certain obvious design trends. The “natural” look--which is definitely not natural but gives the illusion of an unplanned forest or a mini-meadow--is enormously popular, and splashy flowers are never out of favor. And, according to Richard L. Segal, Santa Monica-based landscape architect and board member of the California Landscape Contractors Assn., the architectural elements, such as arbors and pergolas, are appearing in all the better gardens. “They make a very inviting statement,” he says. In addition, designers are becoming more artful and ambitious in adding water to our desert landscapes, Segal says: “Not just waterfalls or a statue spitting water, but more like a soft bubbler that gives you the sound of water.”
Segal also sees a trend--reflected in these gardens--to limit the scope of plant selection. Instead of using many different kinds of plants, landscape architects and contractors now prefer to mass several plants, especially trees, of the same variety. This often creates a satisfying unity of design--and is in fact more “natural”--but it can also present a predictable sameness and lack of excitement. You can’t find too many recently designed Southern California gardens without at least one Podocarpus gracilior , azalea, impatiens, agapanthus or nandina (not one of which is native to this area).
Three of these familiar plants flourish on the winning executive balcony, on the fourth floor of a West Los Angeles office complex overlooking Olympic Boulevard. The views there are not spectacular, so West Los Angeles landscape architect Steven A. Ormenyi’s design draws the eye inward, into the balcony, with colorful flowers and shrubs in terra-cotta-colored containers that complement the simple teak lawn furniture. You could spend many a futile hour here looking for dead leaves and spent flowers. Toddco Landscape Co. of West Los Angeles won the best Small Commercial Maintenance award for this balcony as well as a special award for colorscape: choosing and planting new flowers, which they do about three times a year. In the containers--made of fiberglass and filled with an especially light soil mixture because the balcony could not hold the weight of clay pots and potting soil--are planted gardenias, azaleas, impatiens, ivy, agapanthus, lobelia, oleanders, an unusual tricolor-leaf bougainvillea called ‘Raspberry Ice’ and several handsome Metrosideros tomentosa , New Zealand Christmas trees. But the first things we see are a topiary lion and elephant, welcome touches of whimsy in an otherwise no-nonsense urban space.
In Santa Monica, Allen and Sheila Enelow have transformed their average-size backyard into a Japanese-style sanctuary. Designed by Takao Uesugi of West Covina and installed by Koyama Landscaping Inc. of Temple City, the 85-by-50-foot area is crammed with separate features. Yet there is an open, uncrowded feeling. In one corner is a teahouse, with an office attached, a narrow deck in front and an arbor on one side; near the teahouse is a small stone basin with water trickling into it from a bamboo spout. A stone waterfall bubbles off to the right of the concrete-and-stone pool that dominates the center of the yard. Japanese-character plants surround the pool: black pine, Japanese maple, nandina, three kinds of bamboo. Perhaps most inviting is the small walkway that encircles the yard, winding up, down and around, allowing strollers to discover small treasures and different perspectives. Although a neighbor’s house looms in the back--a plain beige eminence--it will soon be obscured by the bamboo.
It took five months for Glenn Koyama to install the landscape, which won the Small Residential Renovation award and the Sweepstakes prize. “We had to do it mostly by hand; there was no place to store materials, so we had to bring everything with us every time.” As there was no vehicle access--which is often the case with small yards--all materials were hand-carried. It was a complete renovation: Landscape architect Uesugi says that only two trees remain from the previous garden--a jacaranda and an orange.
Why did such a relatively modest-scale garden win the big prize? “I think it was because there are so many Japanese details in it,” Koyama says. Down to the drain spout from the house roof--a chain, not the usual cylinder--and a bamboo broom for cleanup.
At the Mosely estate on the Pasadena-San Marino border, dozens of glorious mature trees were preserved during renovation of the half-acre property, including a 100-foot Aleppo pine that towers over a eucalyptus grove. The modern Buff & Hinsman-designed house seems to be floating on a sea of boulders tumbling down the hill.
“Every boulder, every rock, was hand-placed,” says Harold Britton, whose Monrovia-based Britton Landscapes won two awards for this property: Large Residential Maintenance (to keep it looking immaculate, he says, takes “seven man-hours a week”) and Large Residential Installation, the latter shared with Los Angeles’ Cornell & Wiskar Landscaping Inc.
According to Robert Cornell, the Mosely job, designed by landscape architect John Myhre of Pasadena, took five months to install. The 214 tons of rock had to be dumped about half a block away from the property and carried in by small truck and crane. Boulders are tricky; the very large ones must be placed with one-third of their mass in the ground, and the angle of one or more boulders can focus a viewer’s attention--or confuse it. There was a practical aspect to some of the stones: Britton points out the drainage difficulties on the sloping site, where the stone stream beds serve as non-eroding channels during rainy periods.
In the hills above Benedict Canyon, a large stone house is surrounded by acres of perfectly situated and pruned shrubbery and flowers. This is not a yard; these are grounds. The panoramic view is breathtaking: woods in the foreground, city beyond. The basic landscaping--a grove of trees, the pool, a fish pond--was accomplished when the previous owner lived there, but the new owners wanted more of an English-garden feeling: more flowers and a slightly more relaxed style. Jesse & Alex Landscaping Inc. of Marina del Rey did the design and installation, for which they won the Best Large Residential Renovation award; the company also maintains the huge selection of plants.
Jesse Haro has been a gardener for 30 years; Alex, his son, is a landscape architect. For this property, the Haros planted flowering shrubs--azaleas and Raphiolepis --and ferns and annuals such as Vinca , marigolds, impatiens and sweet alyssum. “Mainly it has a natural look but also a little of the English garden,” Jesse Haro says. Many of the flowers are massed at the front entrance, with a sinuous row of shrubs along the edge of the flat portion of the property. Although it is 8 1/2 acres, only three acres are used; the rest is practically vertical. The owners recently purchased three additional acres below, where they will install a tennis court and where the Haros will design an extension of their work.
Visitors to the Benedict Canyon property and the other gardens listed here will undoubtedly be impressed with the serenity, the purity of design, the guilt-inspiring tidiness of the sites. They probably won’t realize how many hours it took, and continues to take, to install and maintain these horticultural jewels. And that’s as it should be: The best landscape contractors leave no hint of their labor, just ample testimony to their skill.
