Tiny Plot, Grand Plan

In search of the right garden for a home remodel they had done in Mar Vista, architects Kevin Daly and Chris Genik called on one of landscape architecture’s living legends. Garrett Eckbo, 86-year-old professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, had designed the streetscape around the house in question back in the 1940s, creating a parklike setting for 50 modest but stylish homes by architect Gregory Ain. “It’s a very small backyard. You probably wouldn’t be interested,” Daly apologetically told Eckbo, who, during 60 years of practice, shook up the rules of his profession and became famous for his relaxed garden plans. Happily, Daly was wrong.

“I like going back to old stamping grounds,” said Eckbo, now semi-retired in the Bay Area, as he recalled the years he spent in Los Angeles--from 1946-1965--designing everything from private patios to public parks. At the Mar Vista site, his job was to make something inviting out of a 75-by-20-foot yard shrunk further by the residential expansion. Fortunately, Daly and Genik’s new two-story-high living room had already opened the home to the outdoors with its slide-away glass corners and translucent crown of polycarbonate, a material used in commercial greenhouses. Eckbo capitalized on the room’s breeziness by designing a pond just outside, so that the sound of water and its reflections carry indoors. He focused on foliage, pairing the shapes and tones of leaves to make the space appear larger, deeper and somewhat mysterious at its edges. “Darker, duller, denser plants tend to recede,” he explained, “while lighter, glossier, more open foliage comes forward.” Since ease of maintenance and economy also dictated his choices, he kept an old bamboo hedge for privacy and an existing curly willow leaning fondly toward the house. He scrapped lawn and bordered a patch of no-mow mondo grass with camellias, azaleas and vinca, all tried-and-true shade favorites. Along the pond, silver dragon liriope and broad-leafed ferns catch the light. “Everything was planted small--to save money and to give the owners the fun of watching things grow,” he said.

Pond-framing concrete patios designed by Daly and Genik increase the outdoor area for dining and lounging without detracting from the intensity of green--or limiting, in Eckbo’s words, “the opportunity for imaginative exploration.” This, in his view, is the point of gardening, whether the lot is large or small. “When I design,” he said, “I like to assume an infinite number of possible variations. And no design is ever finished. You’re inventing a world that’s always changing, with enough order to avoid confusion but never so much that you get bored.”