STYLE: GARDENS : JUST ADD WATER
Throughout history, garden-makers in hot, dry climates have known the preciousness of water. On a baking day, its presence, however paltry, can bring relief. The very sound of it cools us, whether it trickles through a rill or showers in recycled torrents down a rocky wall. Like Persian pleasure gardens, residential L.A. landscapes are often built around water judiciously used. Some feature swimming pools, reflecting ponds, even streams. The more modest might have a fountain or a spa. In others, water is symbolized in the “dry stream bed,” a fluid array of stones that looks almost like the real thing.
Going With the Flow
For sheer cooling power, the sight and sound of spouting water may be second only to a plunge in a pool. Which is why father and son Charles and Stephen Kanner of Kanner Architects in Westwood endowed their family home with enough flowing features to suggest what Stephen calls “a land of a thousand lakes.”
The Mandeville Canyon property already had a trout pond and a natural stream when the Kanners moved there in 1959. Its wooded half-acre also featured exotic trees--palms, loquats, macadamia nuts--as well as an orange grove and coastal canyon natives. What it needed, though, were a couple of spills closer to home, where they could be seen and heard on a sunny dining patio and from windows placed to capture the outdoors. In the courtyard, Charles built a fountain, using terra-cotta waterline pipe to echo the roof tiles of his Spanish Colonial house. His wife, Judith, planted the openings of the pipes with baby’s tears, which now overflow onto the bricks in a verdant stream of their own. Next, the Kanners modified their existing pond, setting a spa into it for a tiered effect. The pond, like another small pool by the front door, is planted with papyrus and waterlilies and flashes with mosquitofish and goldfish.
As if these rippled currents weren’t enough, two years ago, the Kanners added a lap pool, which gleams, like a long pane of glass, in a wild palm-and-fern grove. As beautiful as it is--reflecting a tangle of greens from the tropics--it’s also useful when distant water isn’t enough to kill the heat.
The Coasts Are Clear
When Laird Koenig, a writer and frequent traveler to Japan, looks out the windows of his Brentwood house, he sees a scene that reminds him of Kyoto. Gravel and greenery flow like water into the landscape, which is set with boulders and ancient Japanese millstones. To further cool the scene, water itself splashes into a rock bowl modeled on a tsukubai-- a traditional hand-washing basin. Sunlight feathers through fronds of Henon bamboo ( Phyllostachys nigra ‘Henon’ ) onto a verdant bank of ferns. Simple, spare and formal yet suffused with shaggy naturalism, Koenig’s garden links his ‘60s-era wood-and-glass home with the wildness of an adjacent hillside. Though it looks authentic, it combines traditions of Japanese garden-making with a sensitivity to the California setting.
“You can’t just lift a landscape out of its context and plunk it down,” says the garden’s creator, designer Katherine Fukami Glascock of Landscapes Designed in North Hollywood. Moss, for example, a common material in Japanese landscapes, dried up in the sun here, so Glascock introduced an eye-fooling substitute: green carpet ( Herniaria glabra ) . In place of stone lanterns, which she and Koenig found cliched, she used Arroyo lanterns, reinforcing the connection between California Craftsman and Japanese aesthetics. Water, of course, sparingly used, belongs to both traditions. And while her bamboo and ferns would be right at home in Kyoto, Glascock’s additions of ornamental grasses, Mexican evening primrose ( Oenothera berlandieri ) and sweet olive ( Osmanthus fragrans ) thrive in Koenig’s canyon and tie the garden to its locale.
The Spa That Refreshes
However useful it may be, an outdoor tub isn’t always a thing of beauty in a garden. One solution is to disguise the spa as a reflecting pool and build an outdoor room around it. Add flowers and a spilling fountain and you have what Los Angeles landscape designer Janice Tidwell created for Steven and Jeri de Souza of Santa Monica: a place for water gazing as well as soaking in the steam.
A simple rectangle edged with 18th-Century French cobblestones and lined with green glass tile from Brazil, the pool is formal yet rustic, reflecting the old Victorian box tree ( Pittosporum undulatum ) that arches overhead. The fountain sluices down a playful boulder-and-brick wall, which Tidwell designed, in California Craftsman style, with Santa Monica artist-mason Chuck Simmons. Linking the area to the De Souzas’ 1912 Craftsman house, the designers’ off-kilter interpretation suggests a storybook grotto. This delights the De Souzas, two screenwriters who often wander outdoors in search of peace.
Tidwell’s plant palette ensures that the couple’s serenity is never static. Her choice of white-blooming greens changes constantly with the seasons: Winter paper white narcissus makes way for spring tulips, summer tuberoses and ‘Casa Blanca’ lilies.
But during a hot spell, the pool is the garden’s real star. “We’re used to Southern California as being all sun and brightness,” Steven de Souza says. “Here, it’s always cool and quiet.”
