Apartment Managers Vow to Preserve Much-Loved Garden

Jeanette Boree, too frail to continue living by herself in the Park Labrea apartment complex, leaves a prickly legacy: a collection of cactuses huddled in a front-door garden that she has tended for the past 30 years.

Boree, known to many Park Labrea residents as the Cactus Lady, was moved to an assisted-care facility last week. But neighbors and the apartment complex’s management are assuring her daughter that the green, flowering plants will bloom for at least another generation.

The collection of cactuses on Allendele Avenue in the huge apartment complex near Beverly Hills represents three decades of persistence and patience. The plants have survived floods, earthquakes and the occasional curiosity of stray cats that roam the grounds at night.

When Boree’s daughter, Jeanine Boree, realized that her 82-year-old mother would have to move, her thoughts turned immediately to the garden. It had become not only part of the older woman’s life but integral to the lives of surrounding residents.

Jeanine approached the management of Park Labrea, which expressed its support for maintaining the garden and sent over landscaper Mike Gabelman to examine the flora. As Jeanine spoke with Gabelman about the fate of the garden, a potential renter stopped to admire it. That moment, Jeanine Boree said, strengthened her belief that the cactuses and succulents would be preserved.

Jeanine Boree, a small woman with short blond hair, has taken charge of moving her mother’s possessions and distributing the indoor plants among admiring neighbors.

A painter who grew up in Park Labrea but now lives in Stanwood, Wash., Jeanine returned to her mother’s apartment to pack up the pillows, sofas, photographs and flowerpots. At the door she held up her hands. Evidence of her recent labors was written all over them: small pricks at the edges of the fingers and on the palms.

“Watering the garden can be a dangerous thing,” she joked. “My mother stockpiled Band-Aids, tons of them. Going through the house I must have found at least 12 boxes.”

As a girl, she collected little cactuses. Her mother began planting them. “She never bought a full-sized plant in her life,” Jeanine Boree said. “They’re all gifts or ones she grew from seedlings.”

In and out of the garden, Jeanette Boree taught her daughter the power of self-reliance and patience.

“My earliest memories are her gardening these little bulbs all in a row and me running after her pulling them out one at a time,” Jeanine said. “She never got angry though. The plants always turned out OK.”

Boree found time to cultivate the garden between raising two daughters on her own. “She taught herself shorthand and typing,” Jeanine said. “My grandmother read her things, and she would take them down to practice her shorthand. She got a job as a secretary. She worked at an insurance agency at Museum Square right down the way. She would work in the mornings and come home for lunch. She said to me, ‘Well, you always had a strong woman to contend with.’ ”

The garden began to take on an identity as strong as the woman herself soon after the Borees moved to the complex in the 1960s. Residents stopped to admire the greenery and eventually the garden’s borders extended into the neighboring lawn areas.

“I really knew it was something a few years ago,” Jeanine Boree said. “The first time I went to the Metropolitan Opera in New York I ended up talking to the person next to me. Turns out she lived right down here in Labrea. She said to me, your mother is the Cactus Lady of Park Labrea. It was the first time I had heard that.”

It wouldn’t be the last. The garden became an integral part of the apartment complex.

“It’s a magical place,” said Dawn Sinko, a four-year resident, who remembered being comforted as she drove by Jeanette Boree’s oasis. “I moved here from Canada, and the original apartment we were going to move into was disgusting. At the last minute, we couldn’t move in. We drove by here on a lark, and we looked at the garden. We had really felt terrified about coming to L.A., but seeing the space and her there in the garden was such a calm influence.”

Once known jokingly as Menopause Manor for its primarily older tenants, Park Labrea has recently seen an influx of twenty- and thirtysomethings such as Sinko. One of the newer renters is Eric Allen, who moved next door to Boree five years ago.

Allen remembers being struck by the ease with which the septuagenarian received him, and of course by her green thumb.

“When I first moved in, I was a freelance script reader and ended up having a lot of time around the complex,” he said. “It was amazing that we were able to talk and get along.” But he couldn’t get details from the older woman about how she grew her garden. “She’d just say, ‘Oh, a little of this and a little of that.’ ”

Jeanine Boree is grateful for the universal support of her mother’s legacy. “No one has ever given any resistance” to keeping it now that her mother has moved, she said, and smiled as she gestured to the prickly plants.

“They would have poked anyone who did.”