STYLE : Roadside Retreat

Parkways. Though many of us have them, few of us would consider getting a city permit and developing that scrubby strip of public ground between the street and sidewalk in front of our homes. But to Harry Segil, owner of HaRry Art Furniture and Design on Venice Boulevard, it represents a precious extension of his garden as well as a gift to his Carthay Circle community. “When you do something you don’t have to do,” he says, “you communicate a sense of caring.” In the two years since he and garden designer Rob Steiner of Sassafras Landscaping began planting, people have come to know the place, to picnic beside it and to leave notes in appreciation of its beauty. Blending color and texture in unexpected combinations--tall pink and flame cannas with a spiky purple crinum lily, orange and lavender lantanas with fuzzy red fountain grass--the garden blooms year-round and is redolent with the seasonal scents of Corsican mint and Burmese honeysuckle. Punctuated by Segil’s metal sculptures, it is, he says, “a landscape of gentleness, a place to retreat from the brutality of the city.”