GARDENING : Communal Spirit in Bloom : Neighbors are welcome to traipse among island beds outside a North Hollywood residence.
Katherine Glascock’s flower-happy street garden in North Hollywood should wear a sign: Trespassers Welcome. The mailman cuts through it on his rounds. Schoolchildren bike wildly along its paths. It’s even a favorite with the stroller set.
A patchwork of rambling island beds intercut with concrete and decomposed granite walks, the place is a springtime riot of California poppies and purple verbena. It cools somewhat as summer arrives, when the quieter native and Mediterranean plants send up their stalky blooms. Among the most magnificent are Matilija poppies--with flowers like splattered eggs--Mexican bush sages, waving fuzzy purple tentacles, and poor man’s orchids, which put out multiple pink puffs along delicate stems.
It’s hard to believe, as one hikes from one end of this herb-scented, bee-humming corner lot to the other, that five years ago it was nothing more than a scrubby lawn around a modest Radford Avenue bungalow. “We walked straight out of the house into a busy intersection,” explains Glascock, a professional garden designer. “The landscape needed levels and layers. Our first job was to get the fence line in.”
But while her husband, Baylis Glascock, a film editor, set to work creating graceful redwood barriers separating private and public space, the couple also valued the neighborhood’s friendly atmosphere and wanted to emphasize their links to their surroundings. The solution pairs a small enclosed area immediately around the house--one that contains vegetable and shade gardens, an exotic tabebuia tree and a quiet place for sitting--with the more communal-feeling grounds between the fence and the street.
Both landscapes feature a mix of California native plants and drought-tolerant imports from climates similar to our own. Such materials, Glascock says, are aesthetically pleasing as well as economical: “It’s wonderful to see a garden of plants appropriate to a site. They’re happy, they have fewer health problems and they look as if they belong together.”
They are also, in this case, very easy to maintain. Now that the landscape is well-established, Glascock waters only every three or four weeks. Otherwise, she does no mowing or feeding (“Plants are hardier,” she feels, “when not being pushed to perform”), and only cuts the garden back about four times a year.
Most of her native plants she buys at the Theodore Payne Foundation in Sun Valley. For Mediterranean and other imported material, she likes Sperling Nursery in Calabasas, and for hard scape, such as gravel, cobblestones and precast pavers, she goes to Balboa Brick & Supply Co. in North Hills.
Indeed, in her street garden, gravel and cobbles actually stand in here and there for plants, suggesting dry stream beds and abstract sweeps that set off lush, growing materials. Such water-saving tricks are subtly incorporated into the garden’s free-flowing yet deliberate structure, which Glascock developed over time, first on paper and then outdoors.
“The planning process is critical,” she advises all would-be garden-makers. “You can try things out through sketches and make changes without breaking your back moving boulders around.”
Nor must the creation of a landscape cost an arm and a leg, especially for those willing to work the earth themselves. The retail price for the plants, fencing and hard scape materials in Glascock’s street garden came to about $2,900--not a lot when spread out over 3 1/2 years, or when one considers the lasting pleasures of a world that springs from the imagination of its maker.
To tap that imagination for the purposes of garden-building, Glascock suggests that people “reach into their store of memories and re-create some setting or feeling that has meant a lot to them.”
After all, she believes, a landscape’s purpose is to give comfort and security, to provide a refuge for the spirit. And, too, it just might make a nice gift for the neighborhood.
