STYLE: GARDENS : Rooted in Japan, California Style
Though Japanese in ancestry, this Santa Monica garden and its designer are California kids: The first thing visitors see at the entry is not the traditional Japanese black pine, but a California scrub oak. The owners greatly admire Japanese culture and art, giving landscape architect Michael Kobayashi, who grew up in his family’s nursery business in Sylmar and earned a master’s in urban planning at USC, a chance to investigate his own design roots. But because the owners didn’t insist on too traditional an approach, Kobayashi was able to adapt ideas gained from studying Japanese gardens to California conditions.
Sometimes his adaptation is even whimsical: Instead of the traditional bamboo pipe used to lead water to the tsukubai , or hand-washing bowl found in Japanese gardens, Kobayashi used corrugated steel pipe. What the owners did insist on was some privacy from the street and usable space in the front yard. Kobayashi gave them a very workable deck with a wisteria arbor and a protecting fence between the lily pond and the sidewalk.
The water garden, which borrows ideas from Japanese “lake” gardens, is situated below street level so that the water appears to have naturally collected there. The concrete steps seem to float with the lily pads on the water. In Japanese fashion, they take an indirect and contemplative path across the pool. However, it is not as tortuous a path as some traditional schemes, which seem designed to trip up the traveler. Aquatic plants grow between the steppingstones, each in its own container. Tall water iris cluster near the shore, while parrot’s feather and water lilies float on the surface. The blue and purple lilies never stop flowering in summer but disappear in winter.
What Kobayashi calls “some serious boulders” surround and contain the pool, and in one corner there is a small water source that quietly burbles, helping to mask street noise. It is a tranquil and natural scene that could be in Kyoto, or the Sierra Nevada, but happens to be in a Southern California front yard.
