STYLE : GARDEN : Lawn Gone

When Santa Monica landscape designer Mary Effron set out to redo her front yard, she had two goals: eliminate the lawn and replace it with usable space. She ended up with more: a model garden for her business, plus a neighborhood focal point for children and adults.

“Lawns seem to say ‘Stay away from my home, keep your distance,’ ” Effron says. “And they take so much time and energy.” She now has a courtyard surrounded by colorful, drought-tolerant plants and paved with Mexican Saltillo tile, hand-cut by her husband, carpenter-mason Javier Valdivia, in a pattern seen at the Adamson Home and Malibu Lagoon Museum. Tall, salmon cannas grow in a planter; a graceful melaleuca provides shade. Outside the low wall are decomposed-granite paths through a forest-jungle of aloes, agaves, cacti, California poppies, the pungent-leaved marigold Tagetes lemmonii , the gray-leaved Cerastium tomentosum (snow-in-summer) and a magnificent Pride of Madeira. “It’s a curious thing,” Effron says. “The kids use that area almost like a sandbox. They know what plants to avoid.”

Effron’s dense arrangement was inspired by the countryside near Guadalajara, Mexico, and by her days as a struggling designer, when she rescued discarded plants because she couldn’t afford new ones. “That melaleuca was in a 6-by-12-inch pot,” she says. “Its roots looked like a spool of thread. I unwound the roots and stuck it in the lawn, and then we later built the courtyard around it.”

While Effron’s son and daughter play hide-and-seek in the cacti, Effron and Valdivia sit on the parkway under a carob tree or in the courtyard. “It’s the new front porch. Like the old Victorians, we sit out there in the early evenings, we meet people and we feel much more a part of the neighborhood.”