STYLE / GARDENS : MIRRORS ON THE FENCES, ANGELS IN THE TREES : A WRITER CRAFTS A LANDSCAPE OF SURPRISES IN SILVER LAKE

Ryan Murphy planted a garden for all the typical reasons but mostly because, he says, “I like to be entertained.” So while other gardeners shopped for poppies and impatiens, the Silver Lake novelist and screenwriter haunted nurseries for oddities such as the obedience plant, whose pink spikes can be bent into whatever shape you want. He found pelargoniums that smell like Lemon Pledge and skunkbushes that smell like skunk. He hauled out the decorations: seashells for pressing into planting borders; carved angel heads to hang in trees; mirrors and birdbaths, fountains and friezes.

Like any good entertainment, his garden has a strong underlying structure (of rock-lined paths, walls and clipped hedges) and is full of surprises. One of the angels he propped in a plum tree has been overgrown and peeks out tragically from its bark trap. A lavender hedge holds a birdbath like a hidden jewel within its foliage.

Inspired by an existing 75-year-old hibiscus and photos of a blowzy landscape in Provence, Murphy built his garden “plant by plant” over five years in an area that was once asphalt and concrete. To the creamy orange flowers of the hibiscus, he added purple-blooming Mexican bush sage and the orange daylilies of his Indiana childhood. He used plenty of silver-leafed plants for their reflective qualities, balancing them with deep-green yews that have been trimmed into ball topiaries. Wisteria and grape vines twine heavily along an arbor that connects the garden to the house, adding to the feeling that the vegetation is getting the upper hand.

“I like the look of things lost and forgotten in the landscape,” Murphy says, “of nature growing up around them, slowly changing their shapes.” At the same time, he constantly rearranges objects within the garden and brings things out from indoors. A chandelier that once lit up his living room now swings from a dead lemon tree in his flower border. Wall mirrors hang on fences, making the small garden appear larger.

Murphy, who shares his early 1920s Craftsman house with film director William Condon, three dogs and two cockatiels, spends a lot of time in the garden, mulling over his writing as he tends to his plants. “Every year in the garden is a different chapter,” he says. “It’s animated and mysterious--more than anything inside--and watching it is never dull.”