STYLE: GARDENS : Rough & Jumbled

For artist Roger Herman, gardening is no orderly exercise in color and form. Like his enormous paintings--dense, lush outbursts of oil on canvas--his Elysian Park landscape is a foray into controlled confusion. “I like to experiment, do something, see what happens,” he says. “I rarely interfere with that process.”

In this way, over the past eight years, he has called up a mighty wilderness around his house, one where cacti and palms, fruit trees and exotic South African pencilbush ( Euphorbia tirucalli ) grow together along three formerly barren lots. Even interesting weeds are welcome here. “It really is kind of insane,” Herman concedes, pointing to where wild fennel has seeded among yuccas and magnolias, and an old Christmas tree flourishes in the shade of a nopalea cactus.

Around Herman’s olive-green plywood house, designed by architect Frederick Fisher, there are no garden beds per se--just one that rambles a quarter-acre. Nor are there any formal paths--Herman’s dogs simply wore their own routes into the landscape. And rather than grading his hillside to create terraces, Herman paved the flat spots with tile and brick rubble from old buildings on the property.

While several decks upstairs overlook this curious jungle, Herman’s first-floor studio is closed to it. “When I paint, I need four walls,” he explains. “I don’t paint from nature, and it’s hard to compete with it.” Still, he acknowledges a link between his art and digging in the dirt: “Gardening settles in your brain somehow. And it’s part of my temperament to want chaos around me.”