STYLE / GARDENS : Pretty as a Picture

At first glance, the Silver Lake garden of landscape designer Ros Cross looks like a painted hillside, a colorful 3-D canvas. On closer inspection, the composition comes alive: Wind ruffles its grasses; birds settle on its walls; sun lights its tapestry of leaves.

“I like to create as many different sensations as possible in my designs,” says Cross, an English-born artist who grew up in a family of avid gardeners. Her training as a painter shows in her arrangements of foliage textures, her subtle brush strokes of color, her creation of uniform fields through which plants emerge like vivid icons. The influence of her plantsman father--who, she says, “was always trying things like black gladioli”--appears in her choice of quirky flora: a rare red succulent splashed amid compact lavender and Salvia greggii , for instance, and an unusual hybrid polygonum whose flowers echo the dark salmon-pink stems of nutmeg geraniums ( Pelargonium fragrans ).

While Cross preserved purple lantana, bird of paradise and giant agaves from an earlier garden, she added California natives and drought-tolerant Mediterranean imports. She unified the landscape with walls of Pasadena stone and repeated use of lantana, lavatera, ornamental grasses and Mexican marigolds ( Tagetes lemmonii ). She also arranged herbs and vegetables in their own seductive tableaux. “Gardens fill your senses and enlarge your spirit,” she says. “Edible gardens complete the experience.”