THE SUNDAY PROFILE : Tough Row to Hoe : Independent and outspoken Hortense Miller, who has been gardening on a rugged Laguna Beach hillside since 1959, wonders who will reap what she has sown when she no longer can.
Like a teacher showing off prized student artwork on back-to-school night, Hortense Miller walks through her famous garden, pointing out the monstera deliciosa from Mexico here and the Belle of Portugal with its 50-foot long vines there.
Miller’s botanical oasis, which weathered fires both last year and in 1979, is on the steep eastern side of rugged Boat Canyon. Dubbed a “walk on the wild side” by Horticulture magazine, it is considered one of the best private gardens in America and draws visitors from around the world.
She began planting her garden in 1959 and has tended it every day (“a day I can’t go outdoors is a day lost”). But at 85, Miller says she’s “a little worried about what will happen with the garden after my death.”
With no heirs and wanting to see her botanical legacy live on, Miller deeded her property to the city of Laguna Beach in 1977--a move that infuriated some of her Allview Terrace neighbors, who feared that opening the garden to public tours would cause traffic problems on their private street. “You would have thought I was opening a brothel,” she recalls.
Under terms of the deed, the city is required to maintain her property as a garden after she dies, “and I don’t mean a kindergarten or a beer garden,” Miller says. If they fail to uphold their end of the bargain, she says, “they lose it, and it would go to the Nature Conservancy.”
In an agreement with the city, the Friends of the Hortense Miller Garden will maintain the garden, provided the group generates adequate funding. “But the future of the garden,” says Friends member Pat Worthington, “really depends on attracting the right person to undertake the hands-on leadership role in the garden--there’s got to be another Hortense in the future somewhere.
“If there’s one thing Hortense does not represent, it’s a committee. She is an extremely independent, unique individual, and her garden reflects that. So the Friends are going to be faced with the choice of whether to pick another very independent person and give them free rein--in which case the garden will continue to be an individual, unique entity--or try to run it by committee, in which case it will eventually be of no interest.”
In the meantime, the former Midwestern schoolteacher--long ago called “one of the great American gardeners” by House and Garden magazine--continues doing what she does best: tending her sprawling garden filled with more than 1,000 species of foreign and native plants and trees.
Gingerly descending a few steps to the second level of the garden--past the Chinese jasmine and the African geraniums and the Japanese anemone--Miller pauses on the narrow, mulch-topped path to admire a sprawling bougainvillea.
Planted 30 years ago from a one-gallon can, it now climbs halfway up a towering sugar gum eucalyptus tree and creeps 40 feet along the deer fence, a homemade affair Miller fashioned from bamboo, bender board and one-inch gas pipes held together with a continuous line of Manila hemp--”That’s the best rope there is, you know.”
Miller, who moved to Laguna in 1952, says she couldn’t grow the colorful tropical vines in the small garden she used to have at her home north of Chicago. She first fell in love with bougainvillea when she and her late husband, Oscar, visited Mexico in 1942.
“I came to Laguna because I wanted to be the mother of a bougainvillea,” says Miller, gently pulling down a thorny green branch festooned with delicate, tissue-paper-thin red bracts.
“I like bougainvilleas better than children,” she adds mischievously, a characteristically cheery laugh blossoming forth.
Miller, who has the friendly yet no-nonsense demeanor of someone who spent 25 years in classrooms, is described by friends as an independent, intelligent, opinionated, well-traveled, well-read woman whose knowledge of things botanical is no less than encyclopedic. But she has never belonged to a garden club. “They’re too silly,” she says, adding, “I’ve never been a joiner.”
Although she good-naturedly says she’s reached an age where people tend to want to hug her (“They didn’t do that when I was 60; I look innocent now, I guess”), she’s as opinionated as ever.
Among her special concerns are the environment and the need to curb Earth’s population, which has grown from less than 2 billion when she was born in 1908 to nearly 6 billion today and is expected to triple again in the next 70 years.
“We’re in real trouble,” she says. “What I object to is that they’re killing off the country and the animals. It’s going to be a dull world when it’s nothing but us and potatoes--potatoes because they give you the most food per acre of any crop.” So, she adds with a laugh, “live another 50 years, and you’re going to eat potatoes for breakfast and for lunch and for supper.”
A chat with Miller is likely to leap from talk of a new book she’s read to an obscure historical fact, from an anecdote from her world travels to art. Miller, who studied for a year at the Art Institute of Chicago, painted detailed watercolor still lifes of plants in the 1930s.
“She’s the most fascinating woman I have ever met,” says Ginny Worthington, an amateur gardener who met Miller in the early ‘70s and founded the Friends of the Hortense Miller Garden in 1976.
Advancing age keeps Miller from doing much physical labor in her garden, which has more than 400 steps and numerous paths zigzagging across the lush hillside. She pays two gardeners to work 10 hours a week, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t still get into the garden up to three times a day, cleaning up and feeding a pair of ravens that drop by every afternoon.
“I’m just amazed at how much work she actually does in the garden,” says Debra Raeber, a member of the friends group who helps out in the garden from time to time. “We walk around the garden, and the next thing I know she’s pulling weeds or has her arms full of branches. I don’t know many other 85-year-olds with so much energy.”
Miller also has a symbiotic relationship with the critters that show up in her garden. She used to feed the gray foxes that appeared outside her bedroom every night. She also has to keep a watch out for occasional rattlesnakes. One recent evening she nearly stepped on a rattler that had found its way into her living room. But she remained unfazed: She calmly put a metal wastebasket over the snake, then slipped a cookie sheet underneath it and let the uninvited visitor go at the northern end of the garden.
To know the real Hortense Miller, advises one friend, read “The Garden Writings of Hortense Miller,” a paperback anthology of articles she has written for the group’s quarterly newsletter.
The paperback book, which is sold by the organization, is akin to Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden”: Miller’s ongoing observations on the plants, animals and doings in the garden over the years.
Miller made her national writing debut in 1992, artfully describing her garden in an issue of Fine Gardening and amazing the magazine’s editors with her distinctive literary voice.
Her evocative prose--”When the fog is low, it comes up the canyon like a snake following its curves”--is as opinionated and entertaining as her conversation.
A wry sense of humor, undoubtedly abetted by a lifetime of reading her favorite author, Mark Twain, runs through Miller’s writing like the blue morning glories that lace through her favorite bougainvillea: “A garden without animals is like a florist’s refrigerator,” and, “People can’t imagine that what they buy in a gallon pot can cover a wall, grow two stories high, cover a hillside.”
Miller hasn’t owned a TV--”I’d get mad spending a half-hour looking at that slop”--or even a radio in 35 years, preferring to spend her evenings reading.
About half the books in the floor-to-ceiling bookcase in her living room are on gardening. The other half--and those in another bulging bookcase in her bedroom--are filled with an eclectic assortment of novels and nonfiction. She’s currently reading “Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist” by John Tyler Bonner, “The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas” by Gustave Flaubert and an anthology of the writings of Dorothy Parker.
“Reading and the garden have been the most important things to me,” Miller said. But there’s no question which receives the priority.
“The garden has won,” she says.
Miller’s sprawling garden represents the fulfillment of a lifelong dream nurtured during a childhood in St. Louis, where she grew up in a two-family flat.
Her family had only a tiny, back-yard garden where, she recalled, they grew day lilies, irises and pansies. But she also remembers picking violets and spring beauties that grew wild in the park down the block.
Her family had room for a larger garden when they moved to a house in the suburbs when she was a teen-ager. “The garden was full of plum trees that were wonderful in the spring. I just hated to go to school that first week in April; the garden was just all white plum blossoms.”
But that was her father’s garden.
It wasn’t until she married husband Oscar, a Chicago lawyer, that she was able to have a garden in the lot adjoining their house, but the cold northern Illinois weather appealed to neither her nor her plants.
Drawn by the mild climate and the lure of having a “year-round garden,” the Millers moved to Laguna Beach in 1952 after he retired. During their first seven years in Laguna, they lived in a house with a garden only large enough for her to putter in.
Then they bought the spacious lot overlooking Boat Canyon.
The Millers had the house built with a garden in mind, with overhangs and trellises for dozens of vines. The house itself--a classic ‘50s modern design with lots of glass, brick and a wrap-around deck overlooking the garden--gives the impression of being in a treehouse.
Gardening quickly became the focal point of Miller’s life: Her husband died a month after they moved and, she recalled, “I just had this garden. It was an enormous toy. I was just delighted with it.”
With help from her gardener, she began by planting next to the house, then gradually moved down the hillside covered with thick coastal sagebrush. She was undaunted by the steep lay of the land. “It makes the garden more interesting,” she says.
Other than keeping the garden in tune with its canyon locale and free of “marble statues and balustrades,” Miller insists she had no grand design in mind when she began planting.
That’s still her philosophy.
“I don’t make any plans,” she says. “I just buy something and walk around and look for a place to stick it. And if it doesn’t do, I put something else in. I like anything that takes care of itself and just grows. I don’t like to have to coddle them and beg them and watch them and compliment them and urge them to grow.”
House and Garden was the first national magazine to discover Miller’s garden in 1965, calling it an “intensely personal garden” and a “portrait of horticultural excellence.”
Over the years, it has been featured in numerous magazines and newspapers and a handful of books: It was one of only three gardens west of the Mississippi mentioned in Ronald King’s “The Quest for Paradise, a History of the World’s Gardens” and is featured in “Beautiful Gardens” by Eric Johnson and Scott Millard, “America’s Great Private Gardens” by Stanley Schuler and “Visions of Paradise” by Marina Schinz.
Early on, the garden began attracting visitors.
Since she deeded her property to the city in 1977, tours arranged through the city’s Recreation Department have been conducted by members of the friends group on Tuesdays through Saturdays. Still the teacher, Miller always joins the tours. “You know, if you’ve got an audience, you talk,” she says. She also leads occasional tours on her own. “Yesterday I had two people from Houston. They called me up and I said, ‘Yes, come.’ Delightful people.”
Miller, however, downplays her role in creating her acclaimed garden.
“I didn’t create it,” she quickly counters. “I buy plants, and I put them in the ground. and they grow.”
Perhaps, it is suggested, it would be more appropriate to say she instigated the garden.
“Well,” she says, “I did have art training, and maybe I placed things right, and if they grow, I don’t interfere with them. They know what they’re doing at least as well as I know what I’m doing. Most people want to be boss in the garden, but I don’t. And this garden’s too big for me to boss.”
For a time last October, the boss was a wind-whipped brush fire that roared down the canyon, burning the sagebrush at the bottom of the garden and a number of trees before firemen stopped it.
The garden was less fortunate in 1979 when a brush fire destroyed most of it. Within four years, however, it had grown back and, she said, “looked the same as ever.”
Had the recent fire taken her house, Miller said she would have walked away. She said she’s too old to rebuild and start over.
Not that Miller can imagine life without her garden.
“Oh, it would knock me out,” she said. “It’s the one thing that I want. The canyon with no people in it, the loneliness is delightful. And it’s quiet. I don’t like noise.”
Docent-led tours are held Tuesday through Saturday at the Hortense Miller Garden, Laguna Beach. For reservations and information, call (714) 497-3311, Ext. 426.
