COPING WITH THE WATER SHORTAGE : LIFESTYLES : Dry Landscape May Give New Meaning to the Greening of L.A.

The drought has come to Shangri-La--or, at least, to Hugh Hefner’s version of it.

Playboy Mansion groundskeepers are throttling back on the 25,000 gallons a day that have made Hefner’s Holmby Hills estate one of the most well-watered residences in a city where the average homeowner consumes around 400 gallons a day. They’ve installed the first low-flow toilet--and now at night they are going to turn off the waterfalls.

“He likes the look of the waterfalls and you can’t blame it for that,” Dick Hall, the head landscaper, said of Hefner. “But he’ll do it.”

Part English country house, part South Sea isle, its grounds a tapestry of forest greens and tropical reds, the Playboy estate is the kind of earthly paradise people have come to expect of Los Angeles over the last 100 years. Los Angeles has projected an image of natural splendor ever since 19th-Century real estate promoters began luring train loads of settlers with fanciful images of orange groves spread out between indigo seas and snow-capped mountains.

Now, with rationing imminent, Los Angeles landscapers are struggling to preserve the city’s luster without the abundant water that made the colors iridescent, the leaves shiny and the lawns velvety.

The drought threatens not just the city’s cornucopia of exotic planting but a way of life that has grown up around it. Much of the city’s plain and boxy residential architecture depends on curtains of greenery to create a sense of privacy and well being.

About 35% of all the water consumed by single-family homes goes to outdoor use. The region’s multibillion dollar landscaping business lives off the back-yard fantasies of weekend gardeners. The lush look of the place, stylized on orange crate labels, flaunted in movies and by the Rose Bowl Parade’s floral floats, inspired millions of people to move here and today helps make tourism the city’s leading industry.

“The boosters said you could have it all here, the modern city in the primeval garden . . . wealth, health and spiritual well being,” said UCLA historian Thomas Hines. “But without the orange groves, the fruit trees, the flowers and greenery, the myth of the new Eden wouldn’t have been possible.”

“As a city,” said Ellen Stern Harris, vice president of the parks and recreation department of Beverly Hills, “we can’t afford to lose our looks. Travel agents aren’t going to book people into a city gone all brown and withered.”

At the Playboy Mansion, Hall said he can meet rationing quotas without sacrificing the prettiest and thirstiest planting--the bowers of Australian tree ferns and the promenades of day-glo annuals. But the Playboy Mansion is among a fraction of the city’s residential customers--40 out of 400,000--already paying $15,000 or more for water. The 15% cutback to be enforced by City Hall this summer will still leave the heavy consumers with enormous quantities for irrigation.

It is on a more subtle scale that landscapers expect the most significant browning of the city to occur.

“You are not going to have the same visual scene,” said landscape consultant Patrick Turnbull. “Things will be a lot less lush, flowering less spectacular. Camelias won’t give out the same show. Magnolias will look stressed. We’re going to have to learn to like earthen tones.”

Many people can’t afford to redo long established gardens.

“Even if I wanted to take out my giant bamboo or my huge clump of bird of paradise,” Harris said, “I wouldn’t have the wherewithal to hire a landscape architect to design a drought-resistant garden.”

Angelenos have always made impractical decisions about the landscape. From the moment they arrived here, they wanted to give the place a face lift.

Early settlers chopped down the native oaks and set fire to the dusty, drought-resistant chaparral with its lilac, chokeberry and manzanita. In its place, newcomers from the East and Midwest planted lawns to remind them of home, introduced palm trees to remind them of the Holy Land and bougainvillea and other colorful exotics to let them dream of the tropics. The settlers found that just about anything would grow in the mild, Mediterranean climate as long as the water held out.

“The real estate promoters who laid out the subdivisions were trying to sell Southern California to a bunch of people who expected it to be green,” said Jere French, a professor of landscape architecture at Cal Poly Pomona.

With architects like Richard Neutra, Los Angeles acquired an indigenous building style that was part geometry and part natural finery.

“The cool crisp lines of modernism were softened by the lush vegetation,” said Hines, the UCLA historian. “For so much of L.A. architecture, the garden is a crucial part of the design.

“Landscape was so important to Neutra,” said Hines, who wrote a biography of the architect, “that when photographers came to take pictures of a new house, Neutra would hold up branches to ensure that the house was seen through a bower of foliage.”

But as the city struggles to maintain its mantle of imported greenery, other experts argue that it is high time for the city to shake its addiction to water-gulping lawns and plants.

“Like a lot of cities in dry areas, Los Angeles headed off in the wrong direction,” said Lawrence Halprin, a San Francisco landscape architect who frequently works in Los Angeles. “They tried to change an interesting landscape into a bunch of lawns and geraniums and trees that require a lot of water.”

Halprin and others in his field say it is time for builders and landscapers in Los Angeles to follow a role model that has been here all along--the one set by Spanish settlers.

“Instead of plunking houses down on humongous green swards and separating them with long lines of trees, the Spanish model relies on attached housing built around court yards and arbors,” Halprin said.

The communal, Spanish style did influence the early 20th-Century work of Irving Gill, one of the city’s most important architects. Its revival depends on the willingness of local residents to give up the dream of the private domain--the lawn, the shade trees and the detached single-family home.

More realistic, perhaps, is the hope that some local gardeners will rediscover the subtle beauty of the chaparral and its hardy plants.

“I tell my clients to go out in the desert and look at the rocks and the dust,” Turnbull said. “I tell them to think of it as a design element, as a background for succulents and bulbs. I’ve planted six rock gardens this year, so I know I’m having some success.”

All across the city, landscapers are presenting tough choices to their clients.

“I’m advising my clients, ‘for God sake, let your lawns die,’ ” said landscape architect Isabelle Greene. “Take care of the shrubs and trees.”

Officials of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said that many homeowners want to know whether it is better to starve the lawn or drain the swimming pool.

Southern California is the swimming pool capital of the country, according to the National Pool and Spa Institute. One of every six pools and nearly one of every two spas in the country are in California, with the great majority in Southern California.

Pool industry spokesmen contend that a swimming pool loses less water through evaporation than is consumed by a lawn of the same size. DWP officials agreed that the water requirements of pools and lawns are about equal. However, they said, pools that are covered when not in use probably take less water than lawns.

Still, some pool builders worry that decisions to stint on landscaping could also affect their business.

“Our pools often are as much landscape features as they are recreational facilities,” said Bernard Zimring of Aquatic Pools in Los Angeles. With an average cost of $40,000, Zimring said his pools frequently come with their own tropical backdrop of verdant islands, beaches, grottoes and waterfalls.

Similarly, officials of the Landscape Contractors Assn. are concerned about the potential impact of rationing on their business. Landscaping is a $10-billion industry in California and employs 150,000. Two-thirds of the business is located in Southern California.

“Policy decisions to reduce water for landscape irrigation would have a significant impact on our industry and probably lead to employment cutbacks,” said association spokesman Larry Rohlfes.

In Los Angeles, landscape experts worry that if the city loses some of its natural texture, the void will be filled with more glass and concrete.

“I think people may gradually get used to a treeless landscape, and structures and pavement will go in where the greenery used to be,” Greene said.

At Southland Sod Farms, which sells 2,000 acres of sod a year and is one of the largest lawn suppliers in the region, a spokesman said the firm is busy taking sod out of production.

“I expect the market to disappear for the duration of the drought,” said Jurgen Gramckow, one of the firm’s general partners.

And greenery is being assaulted on one more front: Local landscapers said hundred of drought-weary cyprus and eucalyptus trees are falling prey to insects in Griffith and Elysian parks.

“The trees aren’t toppling over yet, but I think you’ll start seeing them before long,” Greene said.

Not even the city’s most water rich environments are immune from the drought.

It is hard to find a more paradisiacal place in town than the grounds of the Hotel Bel-Air, an 11-acre retreat that is nurtured by 98,000 gallons of water a day--equal to the daily consumption of 240 households, according to the city’s Department of Water and Power.

At the Bel-Air, you can sit under the blue-flowered lonchocarpus tree, a native of South America and the largest of its kind in the United States.

With the water table at the Bel-Air just 25 feet below the ground, the roots of the hotel’s more established trees do not appear to be in immediate danger. But head landscaper Al Peiler, who has tended the property for 30 years, said that pine trees on the slopes above the hotel are dying. And Peiler said he is worried about the impact of a continuing drought on much of the hotel’s exotic plant life.

Strolling through the grounds, Peiler ticks off the potential casualties: the pink and white azaleas, pansies and impatiens, the flowering plum tree on the path to the gazebo, the white tulips bordering the patio dining room, the banana trees, the red buds and magnolias with blossoms the size of tea cups.

With severe rationing, Peiler said, “we would have to change our whole philosophy from subtropical to arid. We would have to use a lot of succulents and native plants. It wouldn’t have the same charm. People would ask ‘what’s happened here? what’s happened to all the color?’

“It certainly would affect the business of the hotel, and I think it would have a cultural effect. Natural scenery like this calms people down and gives refreshment to the soul.”

Peiler fears that rationing will force him to choose between water for the hotel’s swan pond and the surrounding greenery, which he calls “my paradise.”

“We could lose half of our lawns, but the swan lake we can’t lose,” he said. “People want to see the water.”