An Indoor Garden of Delights : Art: The Huntington’s Scott Gallery is showing ‘Personal Edens: The Gardens and Film Sets of Florence Yoch.’
Visitors who stroll through the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino sometimes feel that they have died and gone to heaven--or to Britain or France or Japan or a Southwestern desert, depending on which of the 15 gardens capture their imaginations. Inside the Huntington’s art galleries, the mood changes as nature gives way to cultural treasures meticulously fashioned by human hand.
That’s the way it is at the Huntington, except in “Personal Edens: The Gardens and Film Sets of Florence Yoch,” an exhibition at the Virginia Steele Scott Gallery (to June 1). In the process of paying homage to Southern California landscape architect Florence Yoch (1890-1972), the show provides an uncommon view of a marriage of nature and art.
A rich assortment of photographs and drawings reveals that Yoch not only bent nature to her artistic will, she also fulfilled the fantasies of film producers, in outdoor sets created for five films in the ‘30s. Working on private estates, she also satisfied the pretensions of Hollywood’s nouveaux riches and the dreams of Pasadena’s finest. Yoch’s raw materials were trees, shrubs, flowers, lawns, water, ceramic tiles and statuary, but she drew inspiration from international travel as she shaped gardens on the big screen and for clients from Montecito, Calif., to Sinaloa, Mexico.
Without Florence Yoch and her longtime partner, Lucile Council, the O’Hara estate in “Gone With the Wind,” the rice paddies in “The Good Earth,” the Capulet garden in “Romeo and Juliet” and the field of daffodils in “How Green Was My Valley” would not have been the same. Neither would film producer Jack Warner’s grand estate (now owned by record industry mogul David Geffen), the grounds surrounding Gordon Kaufmann’s buildings at Caltech or the 17th-Century Spanish courtyard at Vroman’s bookstore in Pasadena.
The show was organized by guest curators Scripps College professor Eric T. Haskell and James J. Yoch, an English professor at the University of Oklahoma, landscape architect and cousin of Florence Yoch. Along with vintage photographs of Yoch’s gardens and Harrison Clarke’s drawings in ink, watercolor and gouache, the curators have assembled such objects as Yoch-designed garden tiles and a watering can that she bought in Naples.
For those who delight in the nitty-gritty of artistic production, there’s a display of memorabilia including Yoch’s financial records, sketchbooks from her European travels in 1920-31 and an influential book, Edith Wharton’s “Italian Villas and Their Gardens” illustrated by Maxfield Parrish.
As a pioneer who earned prominence in a field where few women had received important commissions, Yoch spanned the abyss between Pasadena’s conservative tastes and the flamboyant whims of the new-money crowd on Los Angeles’ Westside. Her range is impressive, and it did not go unnoticed in her day. In a 1931 book on “California Gardens,” 35 of the 207 photographs reproduce the work of Florence Yoch.
“She was the landscape equivalent of Julia Morgan,” Haskell says, referring to the California architect whose commissions included Hearst Castle in San Simeon, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner building and various YWCA facilities.
Like Morgan, Yoch brought European influences into her work as she fed American dreams of the good, cultured life. But as pictures of her gardens proliferated in books and films, Yoch also contributed to outsiders’ notions of the California dream--a place where everyone could have a personal Eden and live as a free spirit or a movie star.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Haskell has organized a symposium, “Invention in the Landscape: The Modern Garden and its Contexts,” on April 3-5. Sponsored by the Huntington and the Scripps College Humanities Institute, the weekend event will begin with a Friday night reception at the Virginia Steele Scott Gallery and continue with a series of lectures on Saturday at Scripps College in Claremont. For information, call (714) 621-8326 on weekdays between 9 a.m. and noon.
