STYLE: GARDENS : Paradise Revisited

The Roaring ‘20s were a quiet time for some of Pasadena’s residents, those who moved west to escape the cold and build great estates awash in roses, oranges and waving palms. Formal Mediterranean gardens, with their cooling fountains and decorative tiles, were a major influence on these new Edens, as were romantic, cactus-filled visions of the American frontier. Add to this the zeal of wealthy landowners for collecting and displaying exotic plants, and you had paradise California-style.

Many of these elaborate gardens have since vanished, but today’s designers are ransacking history to revive them, as local landscape architect Owen Peters of EPT Landscape Architecture did for this Pasadena garden. Calling on the work of such early 20th-Century master landscape designers as Florence Yoch and Ralph Cornell for inspiration, Peters gave the property a formal, axial structure and added pergolas for balance and shade and an enclosure of deodar cedars, goldenrain trees and king palms to augment a few existing native oaks.

His clients threw themselves into the enterprise, developing passions for antique tile, desert plants and showy roses. Plain & Fancy Tile in Pasadena helped them splash fountains, walls and tables with colorful old and new tiles, and the California Cactus Center integrated their impressive collection of spiny rarities with the more conventional garden flora. But the highest voltage probably comes from the thousands of hybrid tea roses in carnival colors that rampage out of Peters’ sunken rose bed, parade around the pool and march uphill toward the house. Their flowery opulence--not to mention mingled perfumes--pervade the garden most of the year in a rainbow show that would have warmed the hearts of pioneering Californians.