GARDEN SPOTS : The Grace V. Kallam Memorial Garden Is Living Proof That the Temporary Disappearance of Perennials Can Double, or Even Triple, Your Flower Power

“So many plants, so little time,” sighs Huntington Beach landscape architect Shirley Kerins.

If you can’t visit a nursery without buying a pot of something, think the newly opened blossoms of your plants are as exciting as Hollywood premieres, and find browsing through seed catalogues more entertaining than watching “L.A. Law,” you’ll understand Kerins’ sentiment. Life is just too short to plant everything you covet.

But a perennial garden can double or triple your flower power.

You can shoehorn more plant varieties into a perennial garden than an all-evergreen one because many perennials have the habit of conveniently disappearing after their season of glory, says Kerins. Their temporary departure opens up space for other plants to shine the next season. And the one after that.

To see just how many different plants it is possible to pack into one perennial garden when it is planted by a professional, visit the Los Angeles Arboretum’s recently completed Grace V. Kallam Memorial Perennial Garden. Too new to be listed on the Arboretum’s visitors map, the garden can be found by following the path to its adjacent attraction, Meadowbrook. When you spot the dark red canopy of Eastern redbud trees and the bright yellow plumes of the 6-foot tall verbascum straight ahead, you’ve found it.

In the relatively modest half-acre plot allotted to the Kallam garden, Kerins has managed to incorporate nearly 400 plant varieties.

“There is a fine line between exuberance and chaos in a perennial garden,” she says. “And the more plants you add, the more you push that line. But that’s where the fun and the challenge comes in.”

The Kallam garden is a memorial to Grace V. Kallam, a well-known gardener and amateur iris hybridizer in the Pasadena area who died in 1970. In his bequest to the Arboretum, Kallam’s husband requested that a demonstration garden showing appropriate seasonal color for the residential garden be created in her honor.

“I wish I could say the opportunity to design this project came from my wonderful reputation,” says Kerins. “Or because it was well known that perennial gardens are one of my specialties. But the truth is it was pure, dumb luck.” Kerins designed a residential garden for Kallam’s daughter, Barbara Cohen. Cohen, who was specified as an adviser in planning the garden in the bequest, later suggested Kerins for the project.

“So this wonderful plum of a project, this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, just fell into my lap.”

Perhaps. But the Arboretum couldn’t have picked a better candidate for the job, in the opinion of Huntington Beach landscape architect Karen Olmsted and Wade Roberts, director of Sherman Gardens, where Kerins conducts a six-week class on botany and horticulture to new docents.

Her horticultural knowledge--honed by 12 years experience at Huntington Gardens where Kerins manages plant production and sales--doesn’t often come in the same package with good design ability, says Olmsted.

“There are a lot of landscape architects good at design who don’t know much about plants,” she says. ‘That’s why you see the same things everywhere, which gets very boring. But Shirley’s a good designer and she knows tons of plants. That combination is rare.”

Kerins approached the Kallam garden design the way she would have a residential project. Her first decision was deciding what elements to retain.

“Since there wasn’t enough money in the budget to put in hardscape, the existing trees were my starting point,” she says. “They were the only hard things in the garden, and you need some hardness to contrast with flowers. Otherwise it’s like too much dessert--all frosting.”

The trees in the Kallam garden are all deciduous--perfect for perennial planting, says Kerins. “You can plant shade-tolerant plants under them in the spring. And fall-blooming plants later on, because they’ll get plenty of sun when the leaves drop.”

In addition to Eastern redbud, the Kallam garden contains several flowering cherry trees, a catalpa and four Chinese fringe trees (Chionantus retusus), which were recently blanketed with lacy clusters of flowers much like white lilacs.

“This tree would look magnificent on a lawn,” says Kerins. “But Californians are so cranky about leaves. They want flowers but they don’t want trees to shed. I think they want the leaves to fall upwards. But the law of gravity still works, even in Southern California.”

Once pathways were laid out to utilize the deciduous trees, a magnificent view of the San Gabriel Mountains, and a meandering brook as focal points, planning the sequence of colors in the Rainbow Garden section was the next task.

“When I teach classes in gardening design here at the Arboretum,” says Kerins, “the first thing people ask about plants is the color of their flowers. So I thought it would be educational for people to see lots of plants in different colors and how they work together.

“I began with white flowers and silver foliage because it would be a dramatic contrast with the expanse of green grass leading up to the garden, and because white and yellow are the colors that can be seen from the farthest distance, so they draw you in.”

The orange section came to be situated where it is because Kerins wanted a dramatically colored, nearly ever-blooming plant for an area where the Rainbow Garden section came to a point, that was highly visible from many vantage points in the garden. She choose Gaillardia grandiflora (blanket flower), a red flower bordered in yellow that “reads” as orange.

Purple was last in the color sequence because it was adjacent to the iris beds where purple-blues would predominate when the irises were in bloom.

True blues were located well away from the purples because the two colors are optically confusing next to each other, says Kerins. And the rest of the colors fell into place in between.

Contrary to what the name might lead you to expect, however, the Rainbow Garden is not composed of solid blocks of single colors, because every color affects adjacent colors, says Kerins, and you have to blend them. Additionally, our eyes retain a momentary memory of the first color when we turn to look at a second.

Kerins uses this optical phenomenon to her advantage with a preview/echo technique.

In the white section, for instance, the delicacy of white Jupiter’s Beard (Centranthus ruber), Snow-in-Summer (Cerastium tomentosum) and Ageratum houstonianum “Summer Snow’ are heightened by the drama of a purplish-blue Alyogyne huegelii “Purple Delight” (blue hibiscus) in the background.

Similarly, a white-flowered bush (Aloysia virgata) in the true blue section that follows serves as a foil for Salvia chamaedryoides, Evolvulus nuttalianus “Blue Daze” (morning glory), Ceanothus “Concha” (California lilac) and Oxypetalum caerulea.

“The Aloysia is an echo of the white garden,” says Kerins. “It also serves as an anchor, holding our interest, because blue tends to recede and is easy to overlook.”

One area where this preview/echo technique works especially well is in the orange section. In one cross-section, reading front to back, are Geum and Helianthemum in the same soft orange, followed by yellow and white iris (an echo of the preceding yellow garden), a yellow and red-flowered Justicia rizzinii bush which reads as orange (“A little-known bush that should be used more, since it is both shade- and drought-tolerant”), and, finally, a cream-colored Abutilon hybridum (Chinese lantern) with pale orange centers.

When the white-blossomed Chinese fringe tree here is in bloom, the cream of the Abutilon and white in the iris coordinate in still another way.

Kerins not only took into account adjacent plants within each flower bed but the colors in all nearby beds as well.

The purple section, for instance, is not only a lead-in to the iris beds, but also is a cool contrast to a neighboring bed of sunny warm colors. The yellow centers of the Nierembergia “Purple Rose” used as an edging plant here also tie in the yellow Geum across the path, the focal point at this end of the drought-tolerant section. They also coordinate with the prominent yellow Verbascum and Phlomis plants coming up in final section of the garden.

“Everything within a viewer’s cone of vision anywhere you looked in the garden had to coordinate,” says Kerins. “Juggling all these matches was like juggling balls in the air. The challenge was in seeing how many ways I could make the plants interrelate without everything falling apart in confusion.”

The varied uses of color is one of the lessons the Kallam garden demonstrates. The uses of foliage, texture and scale is another.

“One way to get more variety in a small garden, without creating chaos, is to put together plants of the identical color that will ‘read’ as one,” says Kerins. The butter yellow of the Verbascum, Phlomis and Achillea flowers in the garden’s southwest section is a good example. “Another way is to put together plants with similarly shaped flowers and foliage and on the same scale.”

In the central Rock Garden, for instance, Kerins clusters a dwarf New Zealand tea tree (Leptospermum “Nanum Tui”), a Serissa single, a Serissa double and Erodium chamaedryoides. Visually, the plants meld, creating a delicate pink cloud that is a double of the airy canopy of the cherry tree above them.

The Kallam garden also illustrates the multiple uses of silver foliage. Gray-leafed plants are invariably drought tolerant, says Kerins. But that’s not the only reason to learn to love them, she says.

Silver is the perfect foil for certain colors, like purples and pinks. “Pink against green is OK, but against silver it becomes absolutely magical,” says Kerins. “Look at dianthus.”

Gray-leafed foliage can also tone down bright colors, serve as a buffer between colors that are too close together, and serve as a uniting thread pulling the eye from one section of the garden to the next.

Gray-leafed plants were the inspiration for the final section of the garden, the coarse-textured plant area near the main pathway just before you exit this segment of the Arboretum, an area Kerins calls “the metallics.”

Gray foliage provides the silver, flaxes and Dodonaea viscosa foliage provide the bronze and the soft yellow flowers of Phlomis, Lantana “Cream Carpet’ and Mimulus bring about the gold.

Though one section of the garden is specifically designated as drought tolerant, at least 90% of the plants here would fit into that category, says Kerins. “When you live in a desert, which essentially we do, it’s the only responsible kind of garden to have.”

Thorough soil preparation and a sophisticated, well-compartmentalized irrigation system make the Kallam garden even more water-efficient. Soil amendments are two-feet deep in most areas, according to John Schoustra of Cal Pacific Landscape Inc. of Whittier, who handled plant installation.

“Therefore the soil can absorb more moisture and we can water deeper and less frequently,” he says.

Deep watering saves evaporation loss, says Schoustra, but it also prevents mildew from forming at the base of plants and discourages weed seeds from sprouting, so it makes for a healthier garden, too.

With 17 different stations, the garden can also be watered selectively.

Planting a garden is creating a little slice of heaven, Kerins believes. Despite the drought, she says, we needn’t be deprived of our piece of paradise. With some careful planning there’s no reason Southern Californians can’t have a rich, varied perennial garden

“You really can have it all,” says Kerins. “The Kallam garden is living proof.”