Time and the Garden

A winter garden is a lonely place, shorn of blossoms and abandoned by people, but none is so lonely as the rain forest of George Keahey.

It lies as ghostly still as a corner of Brazil’s Mato Grasso, but without the drenching showers that keep the jungles alive.

George Keahey’s forest is dying, its ferns turning brown, its bamboo wilting and the vibrant greenery of its vines fading into ashen pastels.

Once a garden of life, it seems now a garden of tears. The man who created it, who tended it and who sought solitude in its lush tropical ambience is gone, and the garden dies alone.

George Keahey was an eccentric, a collector and an artist of talent who suffered a fatal heart attack in September at the age of 63. No one quite knows why he created the rain forest. It was an anomaly on the quiet street of ordinary houses in the heart of Sierra Madre.

The thoroughfare is the very essence of suburbia, trapped in the kind of drab sameness that characterizes so much of L.A. and its environs. Keahey was anything but drab, and when he moved into the neighborhood 20 years ago, his rain forest began to grow.

“He just wanted to make everything beautiful,” a friend, Judy Trout, says. She lives half a block away. “He was looking for a place where he could find peace.”

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Peace was essential in his life. Keahey was gay, and a home he had owned in Pasadena had been burned to the ground. Arson was suspected but never proved. Gay-bashers had plagued him in the weeks leading up to the fire.

He came to Sierra Madre a lonely man and bought the small, wood frame house where he created his rain forest. He worked for the Bank of America once, but, laid off, he devoted his time to art.

Keahey could not keep up the payments, and ownership of the property changed hands several times. Each time, Keahey managed to remain its occupant. The current owner, Carol Winter, allowed him to remain there in exchange for yard work at her home not far away.

He was different and in many ways a loner, but the neighborhood liked Keahey. When women on the block shopped, they bought extra food to give him. Winter let him eat at her house.

“There was a time,” Judy Trout remembers, “when George lived on nothing but rice. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him.”

To the best of everyone’s knowledge, he never sold a painting, but he still managed to somehow collect antiques for just about every room in the house, including a closet full of toys from unremembered childhoods.

Items of glass and crystal were placed precisely where the sun would hit them at certain times of the day, creating streams of colored light through the living room and across a flowered tapestry on a far wall.

“He had a rainbow on his table every afternoon,” Trout said as we wandered from room to room. “He was so special.”

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While the house was his museum, the garden was his dream place. Walking into it through a wrought-iron gate, past a sign that says “Sierra Madre Rain Forest,” one enters another world.

Thick greenery, much of it in peril, encroaches on a narrow pathway. Things grow from above and below: spiky reeds, ferns of many varieties, wide-leafed palms, rare black bamboo and exotic trees that emerged from slips and seeds.

Both the L.A. Arboretum and the Huntington Library knew of Keahey’s rain forest and furnished him with seeds and cuttings. His garden grew with relentless energy, tended by a man who translated a dream of peace into a work of living art.

When Keahey died, his garden began to die with him and remains today in a state of neglect. A brief rain helped restore parts of it, and Carol Winter promises it will be tended once more.

But it will never be the same as it was when Keahey was alive because there’s a special relationship between a garden and the one who sees to its needs. A different garden will emerge to suit its new owner’s vision. That’s as it should be. Life is a cycle of change on many levels.

In essence, this is why I choose Keahey’s rain forest as a final column of the year. It’s a metaphor for the passage of time and the living things among us that die from neglect.

Our salvation is that we live in a world of seasons, and new life sprouts in the dust of the old. May George Keahey’s garden bloom again, and the cycles of renewal bring new life to a dream he left behind.