A Garden Visit: Bringing beauty and bounty into our lives

Roger’s Gardens in Corona del Mar is not just an elegant nursery; it’s a destination of note. People from all over the Southland, the country and the world come to see the floral displays and visit the gift shop.

It’s not unusual to find a couple from Ohio looking in wonder at what we can grow in this neck of the woods.

For the last 20 years or so, Lew Whitney, who now has the odd title--for a nurseryman--of chairman of the board, has overseen Roger’s growth and operations. Whitney, 57, is also an avid gardener. So, you might ask, what does he grow in his own garden?

Although he works all day with plants, Whitney is no cobbler with shoeless children at home. His garden is as packed with plants as the nursery and every bit as refined.

Since Roger’s is best known for its flower color, you might naturally expect a lot of punchy color, and there is. But the color in Whitney’s garden comes from foliage, not flowers.

Rather surprisingly, “there’s no seasonal color, it’s all permanent stuff,” Whitney said, “a lot of burgundy, lime and gray foliage.” And, he might add, it’s all new stuff. “Part of the fun of being at Roger’s is seeing all the exciting new plants.”

Whitney has a “compulsive interest in gardening,” a feeling other gardeners might identify with. “I just can’t keep my hands out of the dirt,” he said.

He learned to garden at his mother’s side in Hancock Park, and he, his father and his brother are members of the Los Angeles Men’s Garden Club.

Although Whitney has an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, he could not ignore the siren song of gardening and went to work as a plant salesman at Roger’s 25 years ago for $600 a month.

He later became head of the design department, then president and now chairman. (Roger’s is owned by pharmaceutical magnate Gavin Herbert Sr., who has his own remarkable garden at the San Clemente estate that was used by President Nixon as the Western White House.)

During his career at Roger’s, Whitney has kept a stunning and imaginative garden at home, first in Laguna Beach, now with his wife, Toby, much farther north, in Pacific Palisades.

In one way, it is not unlike the gardens of many of the nursery’s customers. It’s on a flat, corner lot with a nice view of the Santa Monica Mountains in the distance, but it’s mostly front yard. There are some 250 feet of street frontage, a challenge unique to corner lots.

When he and Toby remodeled the home, they resisted the temptation to “mansionize,” even though they have four nearly grown children and could always use a little more space.

They didn’t go up or enlarge the footprint of the house, or even change the basic architectural style, although they completely remodeled the interior. They did redo the front entry, landing and path, and that led to a complete redo of the front garden. (The much smaller back garden is the next project.) It’s a fine example of how interesting and how finished a front yard can be.

The Roger’s Gardens landscaping crew did most of the installation on weekends, since it normally doesn’t operate this far north. But doing it in-house probably saved a bundle. Realistically, a job this big would probably cost in the neighborhood of $25,000, Whitney estimates.

Once the garden was installed last year, a professional gardener took over care of the remaining lawn, but Whitney does most of the real gardening himself on weekends--watering, weeding and doing whatever needs doing. He is seldom without a pair of bright red-handled Felco pruners in his back pocket. A garden of trees, shrubs and perennials is not labor intensive but does require regular maintenance.

Old, Unremarkable Lawn Had to Go

It had been a huge, unremarkable lawn peppered with a few trees and shrubs, so the first step in redoing the front was to kill off the old lawn with the herbicide Roundup.

Most of the tired trees and shrubs were removed except for one handsome old evergreen pear. Two Bobcat tractors scraped off the old lawn and soil preparation began.

The flats of Pacific Palisades have some of the most unworkable soil in Southern California--a sticky, heavy, clay gumbo. When it’s dry, a spade can’t pierce it, and when it’s wet, a spade will get stuck like a woolly mammoth in the La Brea tar pits.

Whitney, however, has made the soil workable, at least near the surface. Drainage is still a problem but getting better.

He had porous, gravel-covered French drains laid under the garden’s beds, which carry excess water into the gutter through holes cored in the curb.

He added an unbelievable 10,000 pounds of gypsum to the soil. Agricultural gypsum improves clay soils by chemically separating the tiny clay particles so they are less likely to stick together.

He added bags of soil amendment, and some fertilizer, although clay soils are naturally rich.

Whitney even added sand to the soil, which is something that must be done carefully because sand and clay sometimes end up being even more like concrete.

He didn’t add a lot of sand, just enough to increase the workability to the point at which a handful easily passes that age-old test--squeeze it into a ball and it should crumble when you release your grip. There is not enough sand to be seen when you examine a handful, although you can see the pieces of ground bark from the soil amendment.

While tilling all of this into the soil, the crew ran into the massive surface root system coming from several evergreen magnolia street trees.

“We carted away two dump truck loads of magnolia roots” before being able to get on with the rototilling, Whitney said.

This had no effect on the magnolias, but they were thinned dramatically to let in more light for the garden, which faces mostly north.

The landscaping crew from Roger’s did most of this digging and tilling and pruning. While they were at it, they installed a new digital automatic irrigation system and low voltage lighting for the front.

“The new digital clocks are amazing,” Whitney said as he showed how simple it was to reprogram the sprinklers so they wouldn’t water the next day when rain was expected.

He changes the watering cycles all the time, although the not-yet-year-old garden gets watered no more often than every other day, even in the middle of summer. The lawn gets the most water, and the shrubs are watered less on their own system.

Glass-shaded lamps line the path, and several dim spotlights shine down from the trees so the front is softly illuminated at night.

A Neighborhood of Front Lawns

His is a neighborhood of front lawns, and Whitney did not want to break with tradition and plant mostly shrubs, so there are two ovals of lawn to either side of the path, nicely bordered with a brick mowing strip.

At the ends of these panels are big terra-cotta urns that draw the eye to these distant ends of the garden. They have the effect of making the garden look even longer and larger.

They are surrounded by groves of birch trees--not the ordinary green-leaved kinds, but a purple-leaved cultivar named ‘Purple Rain.’

Whitney notes that he probably planted way too many, even occasionally planting two in the same hole, but he wanted an immediate effect and is willing to remove some in time.

Purple or red foliage is a big part of the garden. There are also purple-leaved nandinas (‘Plum Passion’) and red-leaved loropetalums (‘Razzleberri’), as well as a border of dwarf, prostrate, red-tinged rhaphiolepis (‘Bay Breeze’).

How many plants are in the new front yard?

“Oh gosh, I haven’t a clue,” Whitney replied. “There’s 17 flats of lamb’s ears alone, that I remember.”

The lamb’s ear is that new nonflowering variety, ‘Helene Von Stein,’ so there is nothing to detract from the gray, felty leaves.

These circle the panels of lawn, contrasting nicely with the green of the tall fescue grass.

The shrubs and perennials, such as yarrow, are concentrated along the undulating entry path or next to the landing. Mixed in with the nandinas and loropetalums are dense mounds of the gray-leaved Pittosporum crassifolium ‘Compacta’ and another pittosporum, P. tenuifolium ‘Deborah,’ which has black stems and wavy light-green leaves.

There are the light-green leaves of mother ferns (Asplenium) and the lime-green leaves of Helichrysum ‘Limelight.’ Golden-leaved lysimachia spread across the ground, and blobs of brightly variegated Pulmonium ‘Brise D’Anjou’ are spotted here and there.

You won’t find Pulmonium in the Sunset Western Garden Book. Many of the plants Whitney used aren’t yet listed in the book, nor are they even commonly found at nurseries. But that was partially the point in using them, to learn how they grow. Their attractiveness is not in question.

For instance, Whitney has found that the tufts of a reddish grass named Stipa arundinacea do best when cut to the ground in January so they can emerge in spring as fresh as new grass.

However, clumps of gray-leaved festuca, another grass, don’t like being cut back, so they are left alone. Eventually, the clumps will need dividing or replacing.

The grasses add yet more color and another texture to this practical garden of permanent plants.

They, along with the colorful foliage on the shrubs, trees and perennials, show how new plant introductions can be put to good use, even in a front yard, even in winter, when most flower color has departed.

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Garden at a Glance

Location: Coastal; Sunset Zone 24.

Land: 12,400-square-foot flat, irregular corner lot, about 230 by 90 feet.

Soil: Heavy clay, improved with gypsum, organic amendments and sand.

Watering: Automatic, digital.

Fertilizing: Added at planting time.

Labor: Weekly maintenance gardener for lawns, homeowner does the rest.

Favorite plants:

* ‘Iceberg’ roses (all white, all the time).

* Helichrysum ‘Limelight’ (for dark shade).

* Stipa arundinacea (for its seasonal changes).