STYLE : GARDENS : Old at Heart

Creating a garden can literally be an act of laying down roots, of manufacturing a sense of permanence and history in a raw, new place. This scene, designed by landscape architect Mia Lehrer, is a scant 2 years old, but it looks as established and timeworn as the 1929 Hollywood Hills house it surrounds. Though most of the plants, along with the garden’s structure, are recent arrivals, the design has its foundations in the past, incorporating in its walks, walls and terraces the broken bits and pieces of earlier gardens on the site. “I wanted the feeling of great age--almost like a ruin from Pompeii,” explains the owner, who has traveled widely in the Mediterranean.

Lehrer’s raw material was a huge, monolithic slope from which she carved out three levels: On the lowest, three stone cherubs crowned with silverberry spew water into a semicircular fountain beside a stand of horsetail grass. Level two has a small lawn, a dining terrace and an herb garden. Above these lies the pool terrace, which features a citrus grove, a vegetable plot and an airy pergola with rubble pillars made up of bits of old pool tiles and concrete decking.

One of the garden’s most atmospheric spots is the herb collection, where arugula and lamb’s lettuce are going to seed around an old-fashioned gazing ball. A dilapidated, colonnaded birdhouse sits on the encircling broken-concrete wall, in the shade of a giant bird of paradise that lingers from the 1930s-era landscape. In years gone by, the property also sprouted palms and thick-trunked yuccas willy-nilly. Some of these were regrouped in the new garden, near a giant antique wine jar from Portugal. This fanciful vignette, with its outlandish proportions, speaks of the very personalized version of history that guided this evolving paradise--a landscape that seems timeless.