Front Yard Desert : Landscape contractor puts Van Nuys woman’s lawn out of its misery and creates an arid garden with warm gold tones.

With all the bad press front lawns have had in recent years, it’s amazing how universal they are--how much these dull, shorn rugs still define the look of our streets, our neighborhoods, our city. Part of the problem is figuring out what else to put in their place, and how to go about shaping a garden out of a blank, unconsidered space.

Barbara Ponse of Van Nuys waited 10 years before overhauling her Bermuda grass yard, which was utterly in keeping with its neighbors. First she redid her house, transforming it over time from what she calls “a little nothing place” into a vibrantly colored, Southwest-style bungalow. By the time she got to the outdoors, her grass, she says, was “in various stages of its death throes,” though two atmospheric yuccas and a palm tree were thriving.

Los Angeles landscape contractor Robert Cornell spared this prickly trio but put the lawn out of its misery, following Ponse’s instructions to make a desert grow in its place.

“I had in mind something like a Georgia O’Keeffe painting--cactus, rock. I also wanted somewhere to sit,” Ponse recalls.

What Cornell came up with is an exercise in simplicity that combines elements of the desert with a Japanese aesthetic and works for Ponse like an extra outdoor room. In the mornings, she drinks coffee and reads the paper while sitting on a rustic bench beneath a Mexican palo verde tree. Afternoons she returns to catch some late sun, which heightens the contrasts in color and texture between tough dry-land plants and craggy California Gold boulders.

For Cornell, more than anything, the power of rock set the tone for Ponse’s garden, and, indeed, one of the first things he did there was to place his carefully chosen boulders in precise relation to one another.

A designer known for his sensitivity to the environment, Cornell is also a Zen Buddhist, and his spiritual training has included time spent setting rocks with a Zen teacher. Standing at one end of the Ponse garden, he describes how he oriented the stones: “There’s a certain tension to the groupings,” he says. “Two boulders are set in opposition to another pair beside the bench, which directs your attention down the path toward this bench, the garden’s focal point.”

To create a visual unity around the warm gold tones of the desert, Cornell used the same California Gold rock in a crushed form to mulch his planting beds. Unusually colored Arizona flagstones set in a field of decomposed granite make up the rugged, compatible path, which is surrounded on both sides by a spare yet striking array of plants.

As with the rock placement, Cornell’s planting compositions are another example of where desert landscape and Japanese garden style come together. “One of the beauties of the desert--and the Japanese garden,” Cornell says, “is the separation between plants. Each has the space to shine in its own individuality.”

There’s no danger anywhere in the small garden of native agaves eclipsing hybrid echeverias, or opuntias invading the turf of tall, jointed cereus, or any one of the five species of aloes getting lost in the crowd.

Mexican bush sages are placed against the garden wall and some red fountain grass around the bench. For added interest, Ponse has planted California poppies and sweet alyssum and worked a number of what Cornell calls Southwest icons into the mix: a wagon wheel, a steer skull, a sculptural scrap of rusty metal.

Now, when people wander along Ponse’s street, they see the usual parade of lawns interrupted by something novel--a landscape tailored to its hot, dry Valley environment. Their reaction, Ponse says, is overwhelmingly positive. “Everyone loves and respects it,” she reports. “I feel I’ve created a little park here--and that I’ve brought the desert back home.”