STYLE : GARDENS : Beauty on a Budget

Driving through the tonier parts of Los Angeles, one can easily lose sight of the fact that a garden doesn’t have to be elaborate or expensive to be good. On a small hillside in Los Feliz, Deirdre Sullivan has created a living tapestry with a simple plant palette and a modest outlay of money. The front garden she designed features large foundation shrubs--Australian tea trees, rockroses and Rhaphiolepis--but the landscape’s major visual effect, when viewed from the street, comes from a checkerboard of silver-gray snow-in-summer and purple lantana. Both are inexpensive, drought-tolerant and colorful year-round.

Sullivan, a movie producer, and her director husband, Greg Beeman, bought their house a year ago and immediately went into production on a film. But Sullivan was determined to create “an oasis from the hectic world of Hollywood” in place of the uninteresting ivy bank she inherited with her new property. After reading “every how-to book on plants,” she says, she restricted her colors to purple, pink, silver and green and focused on abundant flowers and plants that would take care of themselves.

“I didn’t have time to fuss,” she explains. “But this house just begged for a look. It was like some poor, uncared-for child. Now it has charm and personality.”