Art Takes Root : Landscape Architects Give Rise to Serious Sculpture in Garden

There’s a small but growing number of homeowners bringing Art intotheir gardens. Not a piece of statuary installed as an afterthought, but serious sculpture and murals specifically designed for a specific landscaping project.

Art with a capital A, in other words.

Artists see a world the rest of us don’t, but they make you wish you did, says Mike Chierney, who employed several artists in designing the landscaping of his Huntington Beach home. “When Leah (Vasquez) and Jana (Ruzicka) first talked about painting a seascape on our block wall that would look like the wall was breaking away, I thought they were both lunatics,” he says.

“But then when Leah looked at my concrete fireplace and said she could make it look like marble and she could make this really dull bathroom we have more interesting by painting in a fake window with a view of birds flying off in the distance, I realized she sees a whole world I don’t.

“I’d like to, though. So I told them to go ahead. I guess I started to believe in their world.”

Ruzicka, a landscape architect based in Laguna Beach, does have a way of drawing even the most timid clients into the imagined world she and her artist collaborators invent.

“I don’t think I’m one of these stubborn, egotistical architects who push clients against their will,” Ruzicka says. “But I do push when I want to show them something I don’t think they see.”

Often what Ruzicka sees and clients don’t--at least initially--is an opportunity to incorporate art into the garden. There’s hardly a project she sees that Ruzicka doesn’t think would be improved by the addition of a mural or piece of sculpture.

Maybe Ruzicka sees these opportunities because she has an artist’s point of view herself.

“Jana is just as much of an artist as I am,” says Vasquez of Laguna Beach, her most frequent collaborator.

Another collaborator, Irvine ceramic artist Julia Klemek, says Ruzicka sees opportunities for art because she treats plants the way an artist would. “She’s aware of the sounds plants make in the wind, and the way light strikes them (as well as) their shape and color. There’s a whole aesthetic to plant materials I’m learning about from working with Jana.”

Ruzicka’s background may play a part, too. In addition to her degree in architecture, the Czechoslovakian emigre learned about plants in her father’s nursery and attended horticultural school.

“I always wanted to be a landscape architect,” she says, “but I wanted a broader background in design first.”

European architectural programs are more general than those in the United States and include more art and art history classes, says Ruzicka. “Czechoslovakia is a small country, so our schools are less specialized than here, which, I think, is a good thing. It makes you a more flexible person.”

Simonne and Jim Highland did not know about Ruzicka’s passion for using art in her landscaping projects when they approached her about a small side yard at their Tustin Hills home.

“What I’d heard about Jana was that she was really good at using your surroundings and embellishing on them, and that’s what I wanted,” says Simonne Highland. “I wanted something that looked like it belonged here.”

The challenge the Highlands presented was to come up with landscaping that would not only be compatible with the red rock outcroppings in the steep hill behind their house, but also would look appropriate against the imposing backdrop of the Italianate villa next door. (The Highland home is quite large, too, but, being burrowed into the hill a la Frank Lloyd Wright, is very different in style from its neighbor.)

Ruzicka immediately pictured a piece of sculpture on the site to draw the eye downward, away from the overshadowing villa, and she called in Vasquez to design it. Though Ruzicka had originally pictured pillars or something equally classical in shape to blend in with the house, Vasquez came up with something that suggests an even earlier time.

Her solution was a tri-part sculpture that looks like three ruin fragments. The base of each structure is composed of the same split concrete block used in the retaining wall to the Highland’s house--tying the two elements together--and is topped with a slab painted with stylized animals reminiscent of cave paintings. Only, if you look closely, you see that some of the animals--cats and rabbits--are reflections of the Highlands’ domesticated pets.

Red rocks and a mini-rockslide, plus succulents, pampas grass, honeysuckle and other plants create the illusion that these “ruins” are remnants of a larger structure dating back to antiquity, destroyed in an earthquake perhaps.

The modestly scaled sculpture looks perfectly comfortable next to its towering Italianate companion. And it will look even more so when the Italian cypress trees Ruzicka planted on the hillside mature.

Though Highland confirms she got just what she wanted--”something that looked like it belonged there”--she was initially apprehensive when Ruzicka suggested sculpture.

“I thought, “Oh, my gosh! That’s the last thing we would have thought of.’ ”

But, after living with cardboard replicas of the proposed sculptures for a few weeks, Highland was persuaded.

“We’re really pleased with the yard now,” she continues. “It’s fun, and it’s different. If we ever moved, I’d do something like it again.”

The red hill behind their house was Ruzicka’s inspiration at the Highland project; at the Rosenthals’ it was a scarlet macaw.

“Dr. Michael Rosenthal had the parrot on his shoulder during our initial interview,” says Ruzicka. “The parrot was my inspiration. I really designed the garden for him.”

When the Rosenthals bought the Laguna Beach property as a vacation home (the couple live and work in Claremont), it was smothered in 20 years of unpruned vegetation, most of which they removed. But even the Saint Augustine grass and juniper hedges that were spared proved too much upkeep for a second home.

“We still spent several hours mowing, hosing down and raking whenever we went down there, and we didn’t want to keep on doing that,” says Karen Rosenthal. Low maintenance and low water usage were high priorities.

But top priority was creating an outdoor living area compatible with the outpost-from-civilization atmosphere they wanted in their retreat.

Ruzicka divided the back yard into “rooms.” One is a wide, elevated sandstone terrace that takes advantage of a tiny wedge of ocean view at the opposite end of the downward sloping yard. “You can see Catalina from there on a clear day,” says Rosenthal.

Sans Catalina, there is still a small fountain, imitating a rocky ledge with water trickling over it, surrounded by ferns and other tropical plants, to satisfy the eye.

At the rear of the property is another “room,” housing a piece of sculpture that tends to draw the eye to it, even on those days when it competes with an ocean view. Here Ruzicka commissioned another “ruin”--a pair of pillars connected by a twisting iron vine. The metal vine provides support for the bauhinia being trained to grow over it and visually substitutes for it during the vine’s deciduous stages.

Unexpectedly, the iron wire is a favorite landing platform for hummingbirds. “My husband is a birder, and he thinks that’s just wonderful,” says Rosenthal.

Enhanced by the banana trees and bamboo plants Ruzicka has framed it with, the ceramic sculpture makes the yard look bigger while breaking it up visually, Rosenthal says.

“It’s like a good painting. Your eye is drawn to the focal point, which leads you to look elsewhere, and then somewhere else, and then back to it, so you’re not seeing everything in once glance.”

The sculpture, created by UC Irvine instructor Julia Klemek, is also a conversation generator, says Rosenthal.

“It’s very evocative,” she says. “Some people think it looks like Mayan ruins, some Greek. And some just wonder what it’s doing there. It provokes conversation.”

The inspiration for art at the Chierney property--which Mike Chierney describes as “a typical flat, rectangular, not very large tract yard”--was, of all things, a blank concrete wall.

The Chierneys wanted a landscaping plan that would include a pool for their children, a spa for the adults with a bench near it, a water fountain and landscaping that was low-maintenance, “a little wild looking” and “different than the impatiens and begonias you see everywhere.”

Using the half-dozen or so queen palms as her starting point, Ruzicka designed a desert lagoon setting that appeared to meet all the family requirements. Sitting on the combination sandstone bench-fountain at one corner of the property, surveying the dark-bottomed, curvilinear pool before you, and with the sound of palm trees slapping in the wind at your back, you might think you were at a desert retreat.

Ruzicka, who thinks barren concrete walls are soul-stifling, created an “ocean view” even though the Chierneys’ home is two miles from the beach. “If we stood on the roof and jumped up and down we might see something blue out there,” says Chierney. “On a clear day. Maybe.”

Now that the Chierneys have lived with their “ocean view” mural for a few years, they can’t imagine a yard without one. “Your eye tends to gravitate toward the prettiest thing in view,” Chierney says. “We have power lines and the Edison power plant in the distance, but now I don’t even see them.”

Instead he sees a mural of the ocean rolling in with sand and dune grasses in the foreground, and he is reminded of his Cape Cod boyhood summers.

“It’s the most satisfying garden we’ve ever had,” he says. “We’ll never be able to go back to begonias now.”