STYLE : STYLEMAKER : Putting Down Roots
Everybody in the California garden world knows Philip Chandler, and Chandler knows more about what grows well in California than anyone else. Since 1951, he has taught horticulture and garden design to legions of weekend gardeners as well as landscape designers and architects such as Nancy Goslee Power of Santa Monica and Robert Fletcher of Pacific Palisades. For the past 16 years, he has also conducted a weekly tour of private Los Angeles gardens through Santa Monica College.
Rakish and energetic at 82, Chandler has tended his own garden in Santa Monica since 1947. “To the average homeowner, a garden means flowers, things that bloom tra-la,” he says. “You don’t get them very interested in studying textures or the different shades of green.” In his back yard, Chandler has fine-tuned a composition of subtle grays, greens and bronzes. Eucalyptus, potted magnolias and a potbound podocarpus are the tallest elements. The spiky bronze leaves of dracaena and New Zealand flax project sharply, like modern sculptures; closer to the ground are dozens of varieties of gray-blue succulents and unthirsty plants--several species of dusty miller, clumps of fescue, kalanchoe, Senecio mandraliscae , South African tree heather, statice and santolina.
Growing up in Columbia, Mo., Chandler never thought of becoming a horticulturist. “My father’s people were terrifically interested in the espaliered magnolia on the side of the house,” he says dryly, but gardening wasn’t considered something to do for a living. After getting a journalism degree, he came to the West Coast, where he worked briefly as a journalist and then for “five lost years” as a buyer at Douglas Aircraft. “I made up my mind that if the war was ever over, I was going to do something I liked,” he says. In 1945, at the age of 37, he began his new career with a job at a nursery.
As a designer who prefers to work on an intimate scale, he never sought huge commissions in Beverly Hills or Bel-Air. “He’s not going to design Disneyland fountains and massive color beds,” Power says.
Over the years, Chandler has continued to moonlight at nurseries (currently at Sassafras on Topanga Canyon Boulevard) to keep abreast of new plants and trends. “Plants have fashions the same as ladies’ skirts and hairdos. Now,” he says gleefully, “you don’t go with people who don’t have grasses in their garden!”
