STYLE: GARDENS : Southern Exposure
For landscape architect Robert M. Fletcher, designing and planting this south-facing slope in Bel-Air was a special pleasure. “It’s bright, sunny and warm, especially in winter,” he says, the perfect place for the owners, a retired couple, to sit or garden.
He carved a sitting area out of the hillside with retaining walls of broken concrete, nearly covered now by plants that appreciate all the light and warmth of a southern exposure. In the heat of summer, jacaranda trees lightly shade the terrace, but in winter and spring, the sun, lower in the sky, streams under the trees or through the leafless branches, and bulbs push up through the gritty soil. Hiding under all the flowers and foliage is a surprisingly formal plan, though he never drew one up. “I designed it as a gardener would, not a landscape architect. We used sticks and string to lay it out.”
The design of the steps was borrowed from Italian Renaissance gardens, which were also built on sunny slopes. Starting on opposite sides of the terrace, the steps flow toward and then around it, meet below it and then depart on their separate paths. It would all be very axial and orderly were it not for the rustic nature of the concrete and the natural distribution of the plants.
Although some plants were reseeded by birds, most--the lantana and ivy geraniums that spill over the walls, or the rosemary and lavender, Santa Barbara daisies and santolinas that cover the ground--are part of the design. Fletcher wanted this hillside to look as wild as the native chaparral, so he let seeds sprout and allowed nearly everything to grow with abandon. At least until midsummer, when it all gets pruned. “Then it looks very spacious and formal,” Fletcher says.
Through these cycles of growth and flowering, there are constants that “remain like steadfast soldiers amid the chaos”: two rosemary plants on the terrace, which are clipped into tight cones, and pots of succulent cotyledons on the steps. To complete this rhythmic composition, which Fletcher likens to jazz, he tucked plants here and there that would “dance in the sun,” such as red Cordyline australis ‘Atropurpurea’ or red pennisetum grass. “That’s another reason I like south-facing slopes,” says Fletcher. “They catch every breeze off the ocean, which gives the garden movement and sparkle.”
