Trails of the Unexpected

Norman Neuerburg’s Los Angeles garden maps the history of his life--from his childhood in the San Fernando Valley to his soldiering days in Italy during World War II to his years as a teacher and artist with special interests in ancient Rome and early California. The rugged hillside above his 1930 Spanish-style house is full of paeans to the past, collages built of swap-meet finds, vintage statuary and Neuerburg’s own paintings and sculpted figures. Wandering through his 59-by-140-foot lot, you might glimpse Demeter, Greek goddess of agriculture, Zeus, god of gods, or St. Francis of Assisi. They peer down from the capitals of made-up monuments and from the sides of small, fantastic structures that Neuerburg, a professor emeritus of art history at Cal State Dominguez Hills, built himself. Each vignette contains bits of bygone worlds: stone fragments from a demolished downtown bank, mission roof tiles, chips of Grecian urns and even Pismo Beach clam shells.

“I conceived the garden as a series of experiences that lead you on to others but never let you see everything at once,” says Neuerburg, 71, who still does historical and art consulting. In addition to lecturing and curating museum exhibitions, he also works on mission restorations. In the past, he advised on the design of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, and samples of building materials used there figure prominently in his landscape. So do his hand-painted motifs from mission murals. “It’s a collection of notes for my autobiography,” he says, smiling. “And my materials are mostly castoffs, salvaged and reassembled, as they would be in a Florentine garden.”

Italian gardens were a major inspiration for Neuerburg, who explored them at the end of World War II and again when he studied painting in Rome and did research in Naples during the 1960s. The gardens of Pompeii and the famed Villa d’Este and Hadrian’s Villa near Tivoli had the greatest impact, he recalls, “because of their use of drama and surprise, their spatial formality and their elements of whimsy.”

Fortunately, his own property had a certain formality, too, when he started developing it a decade ago. A previous owner had built terraces, a broken concrete retaining wall and a central staircase that led uphill from the house. Neuerburg tiled the stairs--with leftovers from a neighbor’s renovation--and began crafting his scenes one at a time: a pair of tool sheds, a gazebo, several dry fountains and shrines, a clock tower with a sundial entwined with ‘Joseph’s Coat’ climbing roses. On one of his sheds hangs the likeness of a pigeon--a nod to his father, who raised fancy pigeons as a hobby. In his plantings, Neuerburg honors his mother. “She was a farm girl, a gardener. I learned from her.” To a framework of old cedars and fruit trees, he has added the lavenders and reds of roses, iris, agapanthus and buddleia.

“I’m not finished, I’ll never finish,” he sighs. “A garden is the most ephemeral medium. And as such, it’s exactly like life.”