Ancient Gardens, Fresh Visions
Looking east for inspiration and ideas, the Los Angeles Garden Show has a very different attitude, and longitude, this year.
Gardens of Asia and Oceania--Polynesia, Japan, Bali, China, and India--are the theme for 1997, so you will see displays that mix tropical foliage and flowers from the Pacific Islands with the thoughtful, natural look of Asian gardens.
The third annual show, sponsored in part by the Los Angeles Times, is so changed you might even need this map to find your way around the Arboretum in Arcadia.
You certainly don’t want to miss any of the 18 style gardens created on the 20-acre show site by some of the top designers in Southern California.
There are also the popular Plant Market and Marketplace, in new locations this year, full of exotic plants and accessories for the garden, from bamboo to gardening tools and T-shirts.
Talks on gardening and landscape design are scheduled throughout the five-day show, and there will be cooking demonstrations by Times editors and others, plus table scapes, ikebana and other floral displays and children’s playhouses.
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Most of the 30,000 people who are expected to visit the show come to see the style gardens. They are the heart and soul of any garden show. Here’s a preview of some of the more interesting gardens.
Right inside the show entrance is the Bali-inspired garden by Julie Heinsheimer of Edward Carson Beale and Associates of Torrance. It sits in one of the arboretum’s large reflecting pools, a little Balinese house on stilts, surrounded by jungle growth.
Heinsheimer is actually building a Balinese-inspired garden for a new home on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, although it seems far-fetched. Many jungle plants thrive in Southern California’s mild climate.
Also near the entrance is a garden that occupies three plots, designed by Jane MacDonald Adrian of Environmental Interests. It’s full of exciting ideas for the garden, including some delightful paving stones you could make yourself.
Adrian used simple plastic nursery flats as forms and filled them with tinted concrete. She then turned them over and pressed objects, such as seashells and branches, into the still-damp concrete.
They make as interesting a path as you’ll ever see and radiate out from a pagoda leading to imaginative water features on every compass point.
Below Adrian’s garden, on the arboretum’s South Lawn, are more style gardens, including one by artist-garden designer Maria DeLuca that brings a classical Chinese painting to life, with waves of blue-gray grass and tortured trees on mountain-like crags.
There’s also a garden by Paul Nota of Lost West in Los Angeles that combines Western plantings and drip irrigation with Japanese traditions. The drip system is even exposed so you can see the controls that operate it, in case you’ve thought of installing drip in your own garden.
Although these gardens are temporary, lasting only until the show closes, their designers have tried to make them practical, as well as exciting. Most of the structures could be built at home and all of the plants are appropriate in Southern California gardens.
You can borrow ideas for plant materials and planting combinations, knowing they will grow once you put them in the ground. The designers’ ideas may be inspired by gardens of the East, but the plantings are very Southwestern.
Gardens by Di of West Los Angeles has put together another design that could almost be lifted out of the arboretum and plunked into your backyard. Flagstones surround a fountain filled by lilies, with herbs growing at its base. This garden is decorated with garden antiques, including a vintage garden glider.
At the far south end of this collection of style gardens is one of several places to eat or grab a cup of coffee.
On the North Lawn, above the arboretum’s central fountain and path, you’ll find half a dozen more style gardens, including one that uses plants you can use to make tea, by Janie Malloy of Home Grown.
Rodriguez & Satterthwaite in Topanga have designed a contoured garden with water burbling from urns that then spirals down channels to a lotus pool. Clumps of bamboo give height to the garden; cut bamboo makes up many of the structures.
Paul Gauguin inspired a Polynesian garden by the Daisy Digger Landscape Co., and as Susie Lamb-Buckman has often done at past shows, there is a lifelike fabric figure, this year of artist Gauguin, painting the garden
Next door, in a garden inspired by India, Groundwork Landscape Architecture uses bamboos and bananas with bougainvillea and jasmine around a lotus pond and wood deck. Called the Ardha Chandra, or half-moon garden, it’s designed for yoga.
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Country gardens aren’t found in only the English or French countryside. The Dragonfly garden by Fred and Dawn Van Allen of the Garden in Pomona is a Japanese country garden with a wandering path and stream and rustic arbors covered in climbing roses. It’s the kind of spot a contemporary Japanese gardener might build, combining the romance of the West with the natural grace of the East.
The style gardens are the perfect place to look for the latest thinking on design and plantings, which is perhaps the most valuable aspect of a garden show. You can gather ideas for redoing your own garden: ways to use water or stepping stones or ideas for plantings.
Although the style gardens are the center of the show, there’s lots more to see and do.
Robinsons-May will again sponsor room vignettes by noted interior designers. The seven scenes, housed in a large tent, also will have an Oceanic and Asian approach.
Right next door will be another tent with floral arrangements by top floral designers. Each of the 18 displays will represent a different Asian or Oceanic country, from Australia to Thailand.
Another tent will house displays of ikebana, the traditional method of Japanese flower arrangement. Four schools of design will be represented, from the traditional Ikenobo to the more recent Sogetsu school.
At garden shows it’s hard to look at all the plants and gadgets and not want to buy something to take home. There will be 44 exhibitors at the Marketplace, from Smith & Hawken to VLT Gardner Horticultural Books, which probably has the biggest selection on the West Coast.
There will be orchids and tropical plants for sale in this tent, as well as hammocks from Brazil, elegant garden prints, copper and stone sculptures, even weather vanes, wildflower seed and predatory decollate snails, which eat common garden snails.
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In front of the Marketplace will be the outdoor plant sales area, the Plant Market, where nurseries that include Desert-to-Jungle, Hortus or NK Bonsai Tree Nursery will have all sorts of trees, shrubs and flowers for sale.
You can also attend a multitude of lectures and demonstrations and go home a much more knowledgeable gardener.
Slide lectures on gardening will be given indoors at Ayres Hall, and outdoor lectures and demonstrations will be held in the tent just outside.
Experts will speak or demonstrate garden skills and techniques at both of the lecture areas. Charles Hardman will show some of the amazing bulbs we can grow in Southern California, Bob Cornell will speak about the Asian influence in garden design and Lew Watanabe will speak on Japanese garden design. Jan Smithen will talk about lavenders, and there will be demonstrations of ikebana. Clair Martin will speak about English roses for Southern California, and Wolfram Alderson will talk on herbs from Asia and the Oceanic area.
Nearby will be The Times’ Cooking Pavilion, where there will be cooking demonstrations and lectures during the day.
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Oceanic and Asian Approaches
The third annual Los Angeles Garden Show, featuring the theme “Gardens of Our World: The Oceanic and Asian Approach,” will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday at the Arboretum of Los Angeles County, 301 N. Baldwin Ave., Arcadia.
To reach the show, take the Baldwin Avenue exit from the Foothill Freeway or off the San Bernardino freeway. Follow the signs to free parking at Santa Anita Park, Gate 8. Buses will shuttle you to the show entrance.
Admission is $8 at the gate, with children 11 and under admitted free. Tickets purchased in advance cost $7, and groups of 10 or more can get advance tickets for $6.50 per person.
Editor to Share Garden Secrets
Times Garden Editor Robert Smaus will talk at 11 a.m. Wednesday through Friday and at noon on the weekend in Ayres Hall. He will present a slide show on transforming his front lawn into a full-fledged garden, complete with vegetable beds, herbs and even blackberries. You will see how quickly a garden planted in the fall, when he planted his, grows to maturity. He will also show some of the exciting new ornamental plants he’s been trying there.
Los Angeles Garden Show Lecture Series Schedule
Wednesday, Oct. 22
Ayres Hall
11 a.m.
Bob Smaus
“Adventures in My Front Garden”
noon
Charles Hardman
“Bulbs From Around the World”
1 p.m.
Bob Cornell
“An Asian Inheritance”
Thursday, Oct. 23
Ayres Hall
11 a.m.
Bob Smaus
“Adventures in My Front Garden”
noon
Jan Smithen
“Lavender”
1 p.m.
Charles Hardman
“Bulbs From Around the World”
2 p.m.
Mary Tonetti Dorra
“Beautiful American
Vegetable Gardens”
3 p.m.
Lew Whitney
“American Gardener at the Chelsea Flower Show”
Friday, Oct. 24
Ayres Hall
10 a.m.
Mary Tonetti Dorra
“Beautiful American Vegetable Gardens”
11 a.m.
Bob Smaus
“Adventures in My Front Garden”
noon
Charles Hardman
“Bulbs From Around the World”
1 p.m.
Bridget Skinner
“Feng Shui in the Garden”
2 p.m.
Theresa Loe
“Entertaining From the Garden”
3 p.m.
Greg Asbury
“Rain Forests to Flowers”
Saturday, Oct. 25
Ayres Hall
10 a.m.
Charles Hardman
“Bulbs From Around the World”
1 p.m.
Bridget Skinner
“Feng Shui in the Garden”
noon
Bob Smaus
“Adventures in My Front Garden”
1 p.m.
Clair Martin
“English Roses for
Southern California”
2 p.m.
Kathryn Phillips
“Paradise by Design”
3 p.m.
Lew Whitney
“An American Gardener at the Chelsea Flower Show”
Sunday, Oct. 26
Ayres Hall
11 a.m.
Jan Smithen
“Lavender”
noon
Bob Smaus
“Adventures in My Front Garden”
1 p.m.
Charles Hardman
“Bulbs From Around the World”
2 p.m
Greg Asbury
“Rain Forests to Flowers”
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Ayres Hall
Jameson Pavilion
11 a.m.
Eileen Rosenthal and Hiroko Kurata
Ikebana Demonstration
noon
Wolfram Alderson
“Bulbs From Around the World”
“Miraculous Herbs From the Oceanic and Asian World”
1 p.m.
Andy Lopez
“Don’t Panic, It’s Organic!”
2 p.m.
Lew Watanabe
“Japanese Garden Design”
3 p.m.
Jack Christensen
“All About Roses”
Thursday, Oct. 23
Jameson Pavilion
11 a.m.
Wolfram Alderson
“Miraculous Herbs From the Oceanic and Asian World”
noon
Taylor Ingebretsen
“Garden Gleanings: A New Way to Look at Nature”
1 p.m.
David Shaw
“Seeds of Inspiration”
2 p.m.
Eileen Rosenthal and Haruko Takeichi
3 p.m.
Jack Christensen
“All About Roses”
Friday, Oct. 24
Jameson Pavilion
noon
Robert Kourik
“Pruning: Clipping With Confidence”
1 p.m.
Jan Weverka
“Arrangements With Garden Roses”
2 p.m.
Andy Lopez
3 p.m.
Jack Christensen
“All About Roses”
Saturday, Oct. 25
Jameson Pavilion
1 p.m.
Lew Watanabe
“Japanese Garden Design”
noon
Jan Weverka
“Arrangement With Garden Roses”
1 p.m.
Taylor Ingebretsen
“Preparing for the Holidays: Topiary Wreath and Garland Crafting”
2 p.m.
(1 p.m. program continues until 3 p.m.)
3 p.m.
Jack Christensen
“All About Roses”
Sunday, Oct. 26
Jameson Pavilion
10 a.m
Andy Lopez
“Don’t Panic, It’s Organic!”
11 a.m.
Shofu Shohara
Ikebana Demonstration
noon
Wolfren Alderson
“Miraculous Herbs From the Oceanic and Asian World”
1 p.m.
David Shaw
“Seeds of Inspiration”
2 p.m
Stephanie Georgieff
“Healing Aspects of Herbs in Asian/Pacific Cuisine”
