Now Showing Reel Gardens
If you liked the movie, you’ll love the garden, at least that’s what the organizers of the fourth Los Angeles Garden Show are hoping.
This year’s theme, “Gardens of the Silver Screen,” pays homage to Hollywood--the inspiration for everything from flower arrangements to the show’s style gardens.
The four-day garden extravaganza opens Thursday at the Arboretum of Los Angeles County in Arcadia, which just happens to be a favorite location for movies and TV series.
The original “Tarzan” was filmed here, as were “Fantasy Island,” “Murder She Wrote” and “Anaconda.” The snake-infested swamp in that scary movie was actually the peaceful duck pond at the arboretum.
Sponsored by the California Arboretum Foundation, the outdoor show is held in October because of the great autumn weather and because fall is such a good time to plant just about anything.
More than 25,000 visitors attended last year’s show; proceeds fund projects at the arboretum.
This year there are 13 small style gardens to look at or walk through, each created by a different designer and all based on movies or Hollywood personalities.
These sometimes fantastic gardens are full of design and planting ideas that can be borrowed or modified for your own backyard. They’re small enough (about 30 by 30 feet) to even make sense on a condominium patio but, because they are outside, they’re larger than those seen at the typical fair or flower show.
More often than not, they use new materials and plants, or daring ideas, that can’t be tried for the first time in a client’s garden.
Though the gardens may be the best reason to attend the show, it’s also a great place to hear lectures on all aspects of gardening. There will be two lectures going on during most show hours, about everything from garden antiques to feng shui in the garden.
Those in need of a few plants for fall planting, or some garden ornaments or gadgets, will find plenty to look at inside the Marketplace or outside at the Plant Market. Or, visitors can simply admire the flowers arranged inside the Floral Pavilion at Ayres Hall.
An area called Garden Living will feature seven canopied room settings designed by members of the Pasadena chapter of the American Society of Interior Designers, and these will also have Hollywood themes. One will recreate a jungle-like dressing room for Johnny Weissmuller, the star of the original “Tarzan” film series.
The Style Gardens
Just what does a movie-inspired garden look like? Because the gardens are planted only days before the show opens, you’ll have to visit to see for yourself, but sketches of the proposed gardens look intriguing.
Scenes from the 1939 classic “The Wizard of Oz” will greet visitors at the gate, but instead of a yellow brick road, the path will be lined with blazing yellow lantana.
Burkard Nurseries in Pasadena and wholesale Monrovia Nursery Co. are planting the entrance to look like the scarecrow’s cornfield.
Hidden among the cornstalks will be recent plant introductions from Monrovia, such as the plum-foliaged fringe flower named “Sizzling Pink” and the brightly colored dwarf crape myrtles and oleanders. (The show has always been a good place to see some of the newest plants available to gardeners.)
The Montana trout stream in Robert Redford’s “A River Runs Through It” will be turned into a dry stream bed that flows through an environmentally sound California garden by Toyon Design. Natives and other drought-tolerant plantings will grow along its banks.
Clint Eastwood’s “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” based on John Berendt’s best-selling book, was a puzzle to some viewers, and designer Suzie Moon promises that the garden will also be “grand and curious.”
A formal patio set in the South, it will be a combination of opulence and decay. Statuary and fountains done in black and white will combine with plants colored lavender, plum, purple, gray and blood red.
A garden by Rebecca Bubenas will look like a landscape “that might have been designed by George Hurrell,” who took crisp, contrasty black and white portraits of Hollywood stars of the 1930s and ‘40s.
The garden will contrast dark with bright plantings and will be full of strong shadows and sharp angles, as are the classic photographs.
“The Garden of Allah,” a 1936 film starring Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer, contained garden sets designed by landscape architect Florence Yoch (though her most famous set was for “Gone With the Wind”).
It will be the inspiration behind Martin Kelly’s Moorish design, with an octagonal blue pool surrounded by pots and pebble mosaic. The plantings are mostly things that could be found growing around the Mediterranean.
“The Secret Garden” by Janie Malloy of Home Grown is based on the 1993 children’s movie that was adapted from the well-known book. This neglected garden has been discovered by children who bring it back to life.
To get the proper look, “I’m actually using a lot of dead plants,” said Malloy, but it will also be filled with very alive and colorful grapes, roses and other flowers that look as if they have gone wild.
“Like Water for Chocolate,” the award-winning Mexican film by Alfonso Arau, suggested a relaxing Mexican hacienda courtyard to Topanga designers Rodriguez and Satterthwaite.
The garden’s handmade adobe walls will be surrounded by plants chosen for their slightly magical and “ esoteric qualities,” said Jade Satterthwaite, such as corn and echinacea. There is even a canvas stage set used as a background.
Bing Crosby and Bob Hope’s 1942 “Road to Morocco” inspired the garden by Judy Kameon of Elysian Landscape in Los Angeles. A huge daybed (“a good place for napping,” said the designer) and four butterfly chairs sit under an open octagonal structure with a fountain at its center.
A “fantastical mix of tropical and herbaceous plants and grasses” will surrounded it.
“Casablanca,” the beloved 1942 classic starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, prompted Pamela Berstier of Flower to the People in West Los Angeles to make Rick’s Cafe in L.A.
Visitors can sit down in this show garden, where tables and chairs rest on red, blue and white pavers. Almost all of the plantings will be in pots and most are edible (but not, of course, the oleanders).
A huge hydroponic wall, full of herbs and other edibles, will stand by the entrance to the patio, which is surrounded by Moroccan walls and arches.
Garden Art
“2001, A Space Odyssey,” the spectacular and confounding 1968 space epic, will be the inspiration for Santa Monica designer Maria DeLuca’s futuristic show garden.
“It will be a land and water sculpture,” she said, with squares of slate and glass that seem to float on a pool, surrounded by squares of ground covers. Its geometry looks “vaguely like Hal the computer.”
“The Fountainhead,” the 1949 film version of Ayn Rand’s philosophical and symbolic novel starring Gary Cooper, will become an architectural garden by designer Jane Adrian.
Designers often experiment with the new and unusual in their show gardens, and Adrian will use both glass slabs and colored, crushed glass in her design, a relatively new use for this sparkling recycled material.
Other unusual materials will adorn the garden, including sheets of brass being fashioned into a fountain by a French horn maker.
Concentric circles of plants such as liriope, blue fescue and phormiums will radiate from the fountain, which will sit on a colorful, painted deck.
The Germinators, a group of Los Angeles-based artists, some of whom are also avid gardeners, will honor surrealist films with their garden design.
“It’s going to be a beautiful garden but in a surreal sense,” said artist Laura Cooper.
There will be some “bizarre juxtapositions,” such as body casts made into planters. Surreal films, including one made just for the show, will be playing on a monitor. This garden will be “a costumed event,” with the artists and volunteers wearing elaborate gear that goes with the garden, as Cooper did with her Aquaflora pool design at the 1996 show.
Flowers on Display
A portion of the Garden Show is actually a flower show, where visitors can view floral arrangements. They’ll be housed in the Floral Pavilion inside Ayres Hall.
There will be a display of blooming orchids assembled by the San Gabriel Valley Orchid Hobbyists, surrounded by ikebana arrangements--31 exhibitors in all, from all four schools of this floral art form.
New this year will be an area where show visitors can exhibit their own prize flowers or plants, in containers or vases.
According to the show organizers, this Flower Festival has five categories: “flower arrangements; single horticultural specimens in bloom and in a container; distinctive foliage plants in containers; a group of plants in a single container;” and “a single cut stem of a horticultural specimen displayed in a glass carafe.”
It remains to be seen how many people actually bring their prized or unusual plants, but it sounds like fun, and the sponsors have contingency plans if not enough entries are received. (The nearby Huntington Botanical Garden will bring cut stems of unusual plants.)
Show-goers’ entries must be inspected by a passing committee on Thursday between 7 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. and are expected to look fresh all four days of the show. Exhibitors will get one chance to refresh their displays from 7 to 8:30 a.m. on Oct. 10.
The Markets
The Market Place and the Plant Market, housed inside and outside a giant tent on the north lawn, will be full of plants and garden accessories.
Almost all of the style gardens have fountains of one kind or another, and there will be no shortage of fountains for sale. If you want sculpture or statuary to go with your fountain, these will also be in abundance.
There will be copper gates, iron garden ornaments, carved stone fountains, concrete pots, foam logs, terra cotta feet to support patio pots, cedar furniture and gold-plated natural objects that have been made into jewelry.
Visitors can find orchids and other tropical plants at several vendors; others will have perennials, roses and herbs.
And food will be provided by Chez Sateau, Dickenson West, Lido Sausage, Simply Unique, Twin Palms and Texas BBQ.
