GARDENS BY THE GALLON : Artists paint floral scenes in places where plants aren’t able to grow.

By now, most of summer’s flowers have faded, but in a few gardens they’re as fresh as spring. The colors are crisp and bright and every flower is perfect--no mildew, no bugs, no flower past its prime.

“And you never have to water,” said artist Nancy Turner, because these gardens are painted, not planted.

People are not abandoning real plants in favor of painted gardens, but they are discovering that there is a way to have a pretty garden in spaces or places where plants won’t grow.

Turner and her husband, Peeter Alvet, of the Turner-Alvet Studio in Los Angeles, painted a garden in a narrow passageway between a garage and the side of a house, where there was barely room to walk, much less plant.

The painted garden was a birthday surprise for Judy Richards from her husband, Roxy. Richards returned from a vacation to find a painted garden growing up a blank stucco wall, with a heavy concentration of flowers opposite the kitchen window.

There is even an arbor and gate leading to a more distant scene. This part of the painting, with its exaggerated perspective, is called trompe l’oeil, which is French for deceiving the eye. By forcing the perspective, or by careful shading, things can be made to look distant or multidimensional.

Alvet, trained as an architect, lays out these tricky perspectives, as well as the “hardscape,” such as the paving that seems to disappear into the distance.

Around the Richards’ painted garden gate, which conceals a door into the garage, grow towering delphiniums and foxgloves that never need staking, marigolds and other flowers that never need fertilizer and bougainvilleas that cascade from the painted trellis, even in the dead of winter. Painted vines even climb an old laundry pole, nicely disguising it.

The garden scene wraps around the garage and regularly stops traffic down the alley beside the garage. Neighbors in an apartment across the alley love their view of the garden, and, with a little imagination, they can even work in it because there are trompe l’oeil tools painted on the wall next to the trash cans.

Small atriums, surrounded on four sides by walls, are another logical place for painted gardens because few plants can grow in the extremes of temperature and sunlight.

The atrium in the third-floor town house of Judy Neveau, owner of JN Designs, an interior design firm, looked empty, even though there was a partial fountain on one wall. But the Turner-Alvet Studio filled the wall with a lagoon, jungle plants, a parrot and a portrait of one of Neveau’s cats.

Most visitors are surprised to discover that much of the fountain is painted on the wall, including the low wall that makes the lagoon look so distant.

“It is amazing how much depth that little scene added to the atrium,” Neveau said.

Nicki Diatz with partner Debi Schroth, of The Painted Look in Los Angeles, brought a garden inside for Phyllis Eckler, complete with what Diatz calls “the perfect neighbor,” a quiet little cottage at the end of a meandering path.

Eckler’s kitchen is quite small but the new garden vista seems to open one wall to the out of doors. In the foreground, the exaggerated perspective in the tiles of the painted patio make the garden scene seem even more distant, another example of trompe l’oeil.

The garden looks so good it inspired Eckler to redo her real garden outdoors, but, alas, it will never be the picture of perfection painted on her kitchen wall.

Diatz and Schroth also embellish walls outdoors. They have painted windows, or window boxes, where there aren’t any, have added niches to blank stucco walls and draped doors with climbing roses “where every rose is in perfect bloom and in the perfect place,” said Diatz, something any gardener can be jealous of.

Diatz and Schroth have been painting trompe l’oeil and murals for 17 years and they say these paintings last. Some of their original work still looks fresh.

They, and the Turner-Alvet Studio, use ordinary house paints, searching out the unusual or extra bright colors. Nancy Turner also uses little dabs of artist’s acrylics to brighten the centers of the flowers.

Some of the murals are protected with a final coat of a tough water-based floor varnish, but Peeter Alvet says even without the protective coat, the murals last for at least 10 years before they begin to fade, though they fade faster on the sunny, south side of buildings.

Southern exposures are good places for painted gardens. Nicki Diatz has painted plants, sometimes growing in trompe l’oeil pots on south walls that were too hot for the real thing, usually because paving reflected additional heat onto the walls.

The sunless, north side of a building is another perfect place for the painted roses, bougainvilleas and other vines. Mitzi Shore, owner of the Comedy Store, had the Turner-Alvet Studio paint vines, champagne-colored climbing roses and window boxes on the shaded east side of her home.

The paintings are seen through a planting of real trees that completely shade the wall and it takes a few minutes to realize that the painted plants aren’t real. They also make the yard look much deeper than it really is by adding another layer of complexity, another good use for painted gardens and trompe l’oeil.

Both artists say they can paint on just about any surface--wood fences, plaster or stucco walls, metal siding (or the sides of a dumpster), concrete block, fabric awnings, even glass, although Diatz points out that rough stucco is the toughest because the detail tends to disappear. “You have to settle for a little less detail,” she said.

They paint with brushes and rollers, laying in the basic background color with several sizes of rollers and brush painting the details. In some areas, there are as many as 10 coats of paint, as one color is laid over another.

The flower garden for Judy Richards required 20 cans of paint and took two weeks to complete, which is a lot less time than it takes to plant most gardens. Painted gardens cost a little more, however. Peeter Alvet says that most jobs work out to about $10 a square foot. But then they require virtually no maintenance and they are always in bloom.

And, Nancy Turner says, her flowers “are guaranteed to grow anywhere.”