GARDENING : BRINGING LIFE TO A DEAD END : Two Neighbors Join Forces to Transform a Vacant Laguna Lot Into a Blooming Flower Garden

Dead-end streets usually terminate in weed patches. And Agate Streetin Laguna Beach, which comes to a halt at the head of a steep canyon, once did, too. But that was before two passionate gardeners, Gerard Hall and Debra Raeber, moved into the neighborhood.

Short on gardening space on their own properties, each looked on the weed-choked parcel between them as opportunity. Starting with the land nearest their residences and individually working toward the center, Hall and Raeber began supplanting the dandelions and cheese mallow covering the sharp slope with wildflowers, spring bulbs, native shrubs and tough perennials. The result of their joint efforts five years later is a hillside garden alive with color that is an asset to the community.

Hall began the garden nearly five years ago, shortly after moving into the area. The canyon was anything but an asset then, he recalls.

“People used to park their cars in the canyon or use it as a turnaround, and dirt bikers played in it. And both groups kicked up a lot of dust.

“That was one of the reasons I started the garden. I wanted to stop that.”

Hall began by putting in a narrow border of garden geraniums outside his fence, placing one of his large abstract sculptures in the middle of the existing traffic pattern and sowing wildflower seeds around the sculpture.

Another neighbor farther up the hill, Deborah Sullivan, was his inspiration, Hall says. “Deborah has sown wildflowers in the canyon outside her property, and I thought it looked pretty,” he says.

For more year-round interest, however, he soon added penstemon, scabiosa, gaillardia, coreopsis, and other easy-care perennials. Cleveland sage, lion’s tale, and Tagetes lemmonii came a few years later after Debra Raeber moved in next door and taught Hall to love rowdier plants.

“Gerard’s garden was one of the reasons I was so excited about moving here,” says Raeber. “He was out working in the garden when my husband and I first looked at our house, and Gerard and I started talking about plants immediately and became instant friends.”

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Raeber knew she would join in Hall’s efforts to beautify the canyon even before moving into the neighborhood, she says, but she wanted to take a different approach.

Influenced by her six years as docent at the Hortense Miller Garden in Laguna Beach, Raeber had developed a fondness for California native plants. She saw the sprawling canyon slope as the perfect laboratory for experimenting with Matilija poppy, Cleveland sage, Carpenteria and other natives too vigorous in habit for her residential garden.

Other large rdrought-tolerant shrubs like pineapple sage, Russian Sage, and Jerusalem sage went in, too.

The neighbors’ approaches are complimentary. Raeber’s shrubs add backbone to Hall’s more flower-intensive efforts, enhancing them like foliage in a bouquet.

Just how compatible the neighbors’ gardening styles are was evident in late May when the central triangle of the garden, planted by Hall, sported both the cool spring colors of foxglove, penstemon, and larkspur and the first of the hotter summer colors of nasturtiums, coreopsis and gaillardia.

Raeber’s wedge of the garden was quieter--her spring bulbs having mostly disappeared--but the green and gray foliage of her shrubs provided an attractive backdrop to Hall’s riot of flowers. And the summer color soon to come in her section was beginning to show. The first dinner-plate-sized blooms of the Matilija poppy had already opened, and lion’s tale and Tagetes lemmonii were budding up for imminent display.

The cantaloupe-colored flowers of an angel-trumpet tree--replacing Hall’s original sculpture as a traffic deterrent--served as a dramatic focal point for the dazzling array.

One reason the neighbors’ efforts mesh so well, believes Raeber, is that both are plant collectors above all else.

“I am not committed to a strict color scheme or design,” she says. “I just like plants. I put them in, and if they’re happy, so am I.”

Hall’s attitude is equally laissez-faire.

“Sculpture is a pretty disciplined art form,” he says. “And when I do landscape maintenance and design work for clients I have restrictions I have to follow as well. So this garden is my chance to bust loose.”

Therefore if some of Raeber’s bulbs naturalize on Hall’s side of the garden, or Hall’s perennials reseed on Raeber’s, or if Sullivan’s wildflowers drift down the canyon into either half of the garden, neither considers them intruders.

“There are always plenty of surprises in this garden,” says Raeber. “Gerard and I are always asking each other, ‘Did you plant that or did I? “

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While succeeding in deterring automobile and dirt-bike drivers, the garden has attracted another form of traffic. Hummingbirds, lured by all the tubular-shaped flowers, arrive in squadrons. Other bird life has increased, too, says Raeber.

“I’ve seen orioles and Wilson’s warblers this year, which, as far as I know, is a first here,” she says. “We’re providing cover with the shrubs and food from the flower seeds.”

The other bonus: Monarch butterflies.

Monarchs have wintered in a grove of eucalyptus in the canyon since the ‘20s, Hall says.

But their number had dwindled to a handful in recent years, he says, because there was very little milkweed left in the area. Milkweed (Asclepias) is the host plant upon which monarchs lay their eggs and the emerging caterpillars feed.

Two years ago, however, Raeber obtained seeds from a South Africa milkweed from the UCI Arboretum and sowed them in the garden. The African Asclepias --a much bigger plant than our native variety--had grown into a small grove of sapling-sized plants by last year. And they must have looked like Eden to the first few Monarch scouts flying into the canyon in December on a scouting mission.

“Because about three weeks later there were monarchs all over the place,” she says, “and I counted hundreds of caterpillars on the milkweed plants after that.

“Gerard and I were both thrilled and plan to seed more Asclepias further up the hill to increase the size of the grove this year.”

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Though the city of Laguna Beach could exercise its right-of-way option and continue Agate as a through street at any time, bulldozing Asclepias Avenue and the rest of the garden in the process, neither Raeber nor Hall spend time worrying about that prospect.

“I think the canyon is too steep for that to happen,” Hall says. “But, if it does, well, at least we’ll have had the pleasure of the plants in the meantime.”

The process of converting the weed patch at the end of Agate Street into a showplace garden has not only changed the quality of life in the neighborhood, but it also has permanently changed the way its creators view vacant lots.

“I can’t walk around now without noticing all these little pockets of land between properties just sitting there idle and imagining gardens in their place,” says Raeber. “I can’t help thinking, ‘Why doesn’t someone plant something there?’ ”