GARDENING : His Palette Is Plants : A master of English landscape design comes to Southern California with a range of horticultural styles up his sleeve.
Southern California is a far cry from Northern England, but when British horticulturist David Ma son washed up on our shores, he brought his old-world roots with him. He speaks with a lilting Yorkshire clip that suggests sturdy tweeds and shaggy, spotted country dogs. His Van Nuys yard is stuffed with the cottage plants English gardeners love--lion-headed euphorbias and silver helichrysum, feathery artemisia and heuchera “Palace Purple.” And when clients come to him for landscapes, they usually ask for--what else?--English gardens.
But although Mason--who trained at Wisley--the Royal Horticultural Society’s garden in Surrey--is happy to oblige, he’d like it known that he works in a full range of design styles, including tropical Californian. In fact, the overall aesthetic is less important to him than getting his clients outside--to prune, weed and enjoy their yards, the way that English gardeners do.
“To me,” Mason says, “having a garden means being a gardener--not just looking at flowers through a window.”
Most of Mason’s life has revolved around one garden or another, beginning in his native Yorkshire town of Harrogate, where he apprenticed in the public parks before beginning his studies. For six years, he labored beside some of English horticulture’s grand old men, a now-vanished breed of estate-trained gardeners he describes as “fellows who smoked pipes, wore trilby hats and had secrets they wouldn’t tell you till you’d proved yourself.”
After he finished school, Mason worked for a large nursery company, supervised the grounds at Wakehurst Place--the Sussex branch of Kew Gardens--and managed the internationally known Longstock Park Gardens in Hampshire. In 1989, he came to Los Angeles with his wife, Susie Grimm, a florist, intending to start a nursery, but wound up instead managing Sassafras Nursery in Topanga. In 1990 he started working for Francois Goffinet, an East Coast garden designer, and now does residential horticulture, design and consulting all over L.A.
What Mason--co-author of the “Complete Book of the Water Garden,” published in 1990 by the Overlook Press--brings to private landscapes is, first and foremost, his love of plants. These aren’t just ordinary garden varieties but things rarely seen at all but a few area nurseries. He cites Sperling Nursery in Calabasas as one of his local favorites, along with Limberlost Roses in Van Nuys and, of course, Sassafras (“for the unusual plants, and for the experience of talking to Pamela Ingram,” the English owner, he explains).
His own garden, which he and his wife designed, is evidence of their shared horticultural passions. Its wavelike borders lap at the edges of a small lawn and stone patio, rise up around a birdhouse and threaten to obliterate rambling paths with spills and sprays of mixed green, gray and silver foliage. In one tiny section of a single island bed, a California native fuchsia shoots up sturdy spikes among the furry pads of lamb’s ears and shrubby pineapple guava, while golden yarrow mixes it up nearby with violet verbena, white-blooming spirea and a variegated heap of coprosma. Throughout the garden--which is drip-irrigated and relatively drought-tolerant--David Austin roses climb fences and scatter showy petals among the quieter sprigs of rosemary, lavenders and sages.
Such an English-style landscape takes work, Mason concedes--even in sunny California. At the same time, he says, “the more you do, the more you get back. Weeding is meditative. Problem-solving is satisfying.”
And in the end, of course, you can just relax and pick the flowers.
