Sharing Advice About Friendly Bugs and Drought Tolerance, Lili Singer and Phyllis Benenson Nurture a Reputation as . . . : The Green Goddesses

Today’s topic: snails.

“I can’t kill them,” admits Lili Singer, surveying her backyard. “I can’t stand to hear them squish.”

Phyllis Benenson shakes her head.

“I’m ruthless with snails,” she says passionately. “I have no problem stepping on them. I cut tomato worms in half with scissors. . . .”

Singer shudders.

“I know, I know, you pick the snails up very carefully and take them across the street to the empty lot,” Benenson says.

“No, that was the grasshoppers.”

“Then what do you do with snails? Put them in an orphanage?” asks Benenson.

“I take them to your house,” replies Singer, smiling.

And yet, the garden behind Singer’s Van Nuys home has no snails, something even she can’t explain, although the 7,000 subscribers of the Southern California Gardener--the newsletter these two women have nurtured to full flower--would surely like to learn her secret.

Singer keeps few secrets. For instance, in her regular “A Letter to Our Readers” column, Singer, 47, entertains fellow gardeners with stories of travel, head colds, the Internet and her travails with her new home’s lawn.

“Folks come up to us at garden shows and wave to us, saying, ‘Hi, we’re members!’ It’s like we’re a club instead of a publication,” Benenson says. “People send us snapshots of their gardens. It’s completely wonderful. They call and say things like, ‘I have 14 roses that didn’t work on the coast. Do you know anybody inland who wants them?’ And every six months or so, I’ll get a call from a garden club member in Corona del Mar. I’ll pick up the phone and hear her say, ‘Well, somebody took it again. They left a note saying they were going to borrow the newsletter, but it hasn’t come back. We’ll just have to nail the next copy to the wall.’ ”

The award-winning, 6-year-old publication has earned such a devoted following--subscribers in 22 states including Vermont and Hawaii and even one who lives on an island off the coast of Spain--largely because of its straightforward intelligence. That reflects Singer’s encyclopedic knowledge of horticulture as well as her advocacy of drought-tolerant gardens, native plants and beneficial insects. And be assured, even though a handful of writers contribute to the publication, Singer’s sensibility illuminates the newsletter from advertising to illustrations to the calendar of coming events.

“There’s an identity to our Southern California gardens that we haven’t had before,” Singer observes. “For one thing, there’s a new recognition of what our climate really is. We don’t live in the desert--we get more rain than that. And we don’t live in a subtropical climate. We have what’s called a Mediterranean climate, and we’re one of only five regions in the world that have such a climate zone--the others being central Chile, southern Australia, the region surrounding the Mediterranean Sea and the Cape region of South Africa.

“And some people say we actually have three seasons instead of four--two mild seasons, which are winter into spring and fall into winter, and one hot season, which is, of course, summer.

“After seven years of drought, people really started looking at their plants and saying, ‘Hey, I didn’t water this camellia for three years and it still looks great,’ ” Singer says. “Gardeners are much more sophisticated in the sense that they’re not just repeating what their parents did or doing something because a book written by someone living in New England tells you to plant a certain way. We’re pioneers.”

*

“People always come into my nursery with their Southern California Gardener in hand,” says Mary Lou Heard, owner of Heard’s Country Gardens in Westminster. “When Lili and Phyllis speak, people listen.”

But what makes the Southern California Gardener vibrant has as much to do with the relationship between Singer and Benenson as it does with the larger kinship between editor and readers.

Benenson, 51, met Singer when the latter was working at Merrihew’s Nursery on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica.

“I was walking around the nursery carrying this 1-gallon lavender plant,” Benenson says, “and this woman--Lili--stops me and says, ‘Do you have any idea how fast that grows?’ I went back and got a 4-inch plant. . . .”

“Smaller plants are much more adaptable. . . , “ interjects Singer.

” . . . and I still have that lavender, which is now . . . “

” . . . the size of a dining-room table,” finishes Singer, laughing.

The daughter of a park ranger father, Benenson and her family grew up in the pristine wilderness of Washington state.

“Then I got married and came to Los Angeles, and I didn’t know how to do anything because all the rules had changed,” she explains, although it isn’t immediately apparent whether she’s talking gardening or marriage.

“My house was walking distance from the nursery Lili worked at, so I’d walk down there every day with my list of questions and sick plants. She was so in love with what she did. She taught me how to garden here. And that’s how we became friends.”

“And I liked her kids,” adds Singer.

Benenson has two grown children--one who managed to avoid getting the gardening bug, the other an avid gardener.

“I just got through having land wars with my 17-year-old son,” Benenson says. “We do this every year to see who gets the beds with the most sun. When my son was little, I used to grow one of the 5-by-10-foot beds entirely with mint because that’s what he wanted. And then we’d roll all the little neighborhood kids in it. It was great--a whole bunch of preschoolers getting rolled around in mint. We called it the Famous Mint Roll.”

Finally, the nursery closed--”Now, it’s a flesh-colored building on 15th and Montana where you can buy frozen yogurt and do yoga,” laments Singer--and the two women lost touch.

Then, seven years ago, newly divorced and trying to figure out a way to support herself while staying home with her younger child, Benenson decided she had to make up her own job.

“I’d been a journalist all my life, and that was really the only tool I had,” she says. “That and I loved to garden. And all of the sudden I thought, we could do a publication. I’m not an expert, however. Just a hysterical amateur. But Lili’s got the world’s most incredible head about gardening. . . .”

“And she can write,” prompts Singer.

“And she can write,” Benenson says with a smile. “So I called her, and we embarked on this great adventure with neither one of us having the foggiest notion of what we were getting into. We didn’t know, for example, that something like 80% of all new publications go under in the first five years.”

“We have our up months and our down, but here we are,” adds Singer.

*

Southern Californians may recognize Singer as the passionate and knowledgeable voice of “The Garden Show,” which aired for 12 years on KCRW-FM before being canceled last year.

“Among all the gardening people I know, Lili really has an amazing depth of knowledge,” marvels Michael MacCaskey, editor in chief of National Gardening magazine and former Los Angeles resident. “I used to listen to her radio show and wonder how she could possibly know the answers to all the callers’ questions, especially since she was doing it all without notes.

“I went to school to learn horticulture, but Lili learned everything from her father, who also was a very bright, self-taught horticulturist. She learned from the heart.”

A Los Angeles native, Singer grew up in Reseda with her sociologist mother and her mechanical engineer father, who also cultivated a passion for cactuses and succulents. While attending Pierce College as an English major--”I was going to be a poet,” Singer explains--she also accompanied her father, who now had his own succulent nursery, on trips to Mexico to collect specimens.

After working as a nursery school teacher and in the production department at KPFK-FM, Singer began working with her father at his nursery. Today, Singer juggles her editorial duties at the newsletter with her work as a landscape consultant.

Her own garden is relaxed, friendly and clearly a work in progress. A large-windowed sun room opens out onto a backyard outlined in calla lilies and citrus trees.

“See these?” says Singer, pointing to a large bed of bearded iris beneath a huge Chinese elm. “They have to be moved. Too shady. And look over there,” she adds, pointing to a white bucket of water tucked in a shady corner next to the house. “Talk about the fisherman’s children having no scallops--I’ve had that rose since January and I still haven’t planted it.”

In one corner, Singer has raised beds filled with California poppies, tiny wild strawberries, Italian parsley and tidy rows of lettuces. In another location, an old mailbox is surrounded by paperwhite narcissus; self-sown hollyhocks sway in the vegetable garden. As Singer and Benenson walk through the garden, Singer’s cat, Tabby, watches goings-on from his treehouse perch erected in a nearby English walnut tree.

“I’m a bit of a perfectionist, and what I love about gardening is that it’s the only place where I recognize that I’m not in control--and never will be,” says Singer, who keeps a scrap of paper by her computer that reads: “The moment of absolute certainty never arrives.”

*

Singer and Benenson joke that theirs is the perfect marriage.

“We communicate by fax machine. And perhaps because of that, we’ve managed to stay together longer than the average marriage in California, which is 4.3 years,” Benenson says.

It should be noted that Singer’s weakness for dispatching snails extends even to seedlings.

“I can’t bear to thin out young plants,” she admits. “I just can’t do it. So I sow the seeds half as thick as the seed companies advise and let them grow.”

Singer also advises gardeners to respect their insects.

“If the plant is healthy, even if there are bad bugs, there’ll also be good bugs,” she explains. “If you spray, you kill them all and then you’ll get more bad bugs because there’s nothing to keep them in balance.”

And Singer has one other hard-learned piece of gardening advice:

“Plant only one zucchini.”

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Ideas to Plant in Your Mind

Four tips for gardening in Southern California:

* Plant any time, but fall is best.

* You can grow almost anything, but always combine plants with like requirements.

* Water only as needed and mulch, mulch, mulch.

* Assume most bugs are good bugs and do nothing without proper ID.

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The First Seed to Sow: Get a Subscription

A one-year subscription to the Southern California Gardener costs $20. Write to 610 20th St., Santa Monica, CA 90402-3030.

Phone: (310) 395-7023

Fax: (310) 395-7370

E-mail: sogardener@aol.com

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Lili Singer and Phyllis Benenson

Claim to fame: Co-publishers of the Southern California Gardener.

Personal background: Singer, 47, grew up in Reseda, lives in Van Nuys; no children, but one cat, Tabby. Benenson, 51, grew up in Santa Rosa, Calif., and Lake Crescent, Wash. Moved to Southern California in 1970; lives in Santa Monica; has two children.

Benenson, on water-stingy gardening: “After the earthquake, my sister, who’s a landscape designer in Northern California, came down to help me build a xeriscape garden in my frontyard that included a trough for a water garden. We told neighbors it was to water the livestock passing through Montana Avenue.”

Singer, on the power of the media: “A few years ago, the county was going to shut down the arboretum in Arcadia, as though botanical gardens were no more important than an amusement park. When I did my radio program that week, I asked listeners to call their local council members. And while I was still on the air, we got a call from one member’s office saying, ‘Tell that woman to stop!’ because his office had been flooded with calls. I was really proud of that one.”