Sowing Lesson

The best gardeners seem to get the worst dirt. Or maybe it’s the dirt that forces them to gardening greatness.

When I visited Catherine Ratner’s garden in Palos Verdes Estates, I was barely inside the front door when she insisted I look at the photos laid out on the kitchen table.

They showed her property before she began the taming process, plus a neighboring hillside home where workers were excavating. Photos of the latter revealed a thin layer of black adobe on top of solid white shale, sometimes called Palos Verdes stone when it’s used to make patios.

Pointing to the photos, she said: “That’s my alibi.”

But this gardener of 52 years needs no alibi. Despite a fearsome soil that has to be dug in to be appreciated, her garden is an exquisite mix of unusual plants that are carefully tended.

The Southern California Horticultural Society displays cut blooms of unusual plants at its monthly meetings, and for years I had noticed that many of my favorites were identified as coming from the garden of Cathy Ratner.

“That must be some garden,” I would think to myself, and it is, although it wasn’t always so.

As a girl growing up in the Berkeley hills of Northern California, she played in her mother’s “big, untidy” garden but paid little attention to her surroundings.

It wasn’t until she and her late husband bought their first house near Pico and Sawtelle boulevards in West L.A. that she began begging starts of unusual plants from her mother, including a wild freesia that still thrives under Ratner.

This garden is her fourth, if you don’t count a brief, cold stay in Massachusetts.

“I guess it could be in the blood,” she said, “but I really don’t know why I love gardening.” A retired nursery school director and teacher, she spends about 14 hours a week working in the garden, “though it might be more since I’m always dashing outside in my bathrobe to do something.”

“I do know it’s the process I enjoy, the caring for the individual plants. It takes your mind off other things and to others it might look like work, but I enjoy it. That’s why I would never have someone else do all the hard work, though sometimes, when I’m covered in dirt and getting stuck by thorns, I wonder myself why I’m doing this.”

Ratner admits that when she simply can’t reach a plant--such as a perfectly pruned but rather tall wisteria vine that spirals around a post by the entry--or can’t budge a boulder, she gets help. But that’s only about twice a year.

Despite the impeccably pruned wisteria, she considers herself “not a tidy gardener. It becomes too much like housework, which I hate.”

Her garden has a cultivated but natural look. “I’m not very good with design,” Ratner said, “so I just keep fiddling with things until they look like they might in nature.

“I have slowly learned that lining plants up in a row or alternating one of this and one of that doesn’t look good. I like designed gardens, such as the formal gardens of Italy, but I don’t want my garden to be that way.”

She quickly added: “However, gardening is a very personal thing. It should be what you like. If you only like bougainvilleas and impatiens, as a friend of mine does, they too can make a lovely garden when they’re cared for.”

She considers her garden “on the wild side.”

“There are people who look at gardening like exterior decorating. They make a plan and follow it,” she said. “Then there are those like me who start with the plant.”

She even has a photo of the garden’s first plant, a tiny thing in a gallon can. It’s surrounded by stones big enough for a rock garden; she had to remove the stones to dig the planting hole.

“I love to try new things,” Ratner said. Her garden is a splendid smorgasbord of plants from around the world, although she favors plants that can get by on little water, including our own natives and many plants from the Mediterranean, Australia and South Africa. Her back slope is only watered in winter, then fends for itself in summer.

She seems to mix plants with abandon. A native California sage, Salvia clevelandii, grows next to a rose named ‘Mutabilis.’ On the other side of the rose grows a rockrose from the stony slopes of Greece, Cistus skanbergii. She claims the rockrose needs more water than the variably colored rose, which is admittedly one of the most drought tolerant of the clan.

Plants are arranged more by color than by culture. The garden starts in front with mostly purple flowers, fades into lime green in the side yard, then erupts into yellow and orange and other brilliant colors in back.

Ratner doesn’t force plants into her garden. “I grow what will grow here. I don’t fight the soil.” Which is probably a good idea, given the soil’s intractability.

She offered to give me some clumps of the black mondo grass and the wild freesias I was admiring, and when I went to dig them up, I was astounded at just how awful this thin, black adobe soil is.

It actually glued my fingers together like rubber cement, and a mere trowel-full hefted more like a big shovelful. Dig too deep and you hit solid white shale that is also very alkaline.

In some areas of the flower beds, Ratner adds gypsum and whatever organic amendment she can find, from packaged leaf mold to fine fir barks. These areas are also irrigated automatically, about twice a week in summer.

“I usually just turn off the sprinklers in winter,” she said. “Rains usually keep the garden moist.”

Most plants make do with the native soil; grow in pots, like the yellow clivias; or grow attached to trees, like the laelia orchids or the many bromeliads.

The felty gray tillandsias, in particular, thrive here, because cool, foggy breezes come right down the street, which points directly at the ocean only a few blocks away.

Despite the garden’s nearness to the climate-moderating Pacific, it can get cold on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Just before my visit, Ratner recorded 27 degrees in one of the colder beds where she grows many traditional bulbs and perennials.

This is where she grows the faithful daffodils ‘February Silver’ and ‘Ice Follies,’ which were blooming when I was there. They come back every year. Nearby is a waxy, white Madonna lily named Lilium candidum that she’s found is just as reliable in our climate. Most lilies aren’t. They’re surrounded by true geraniums, such as Geranium ibericum, or tiny arabis and aubrietas.

On the slope in back are giant chartreuse-flowered euphorbias and Corsican hellebores with equally green flowers, blooming near a native philadelphus, P. lewisii. In a side yard are exotic South African bulbs and California wildflowers, which make a little meadow, punctuated by an orange poppy Papaver atlanticum from Morocco.

It’s adventuresome gardeners like Ratner who show the rest of us what we can grow in this favored climate, although she would be the last to take credit. She still thinks she needs an alibi.

Write to Robert Smaus, SoCal Living, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053; fax to (213) 237-4712; or e-mail to robert.smaus@latimes.com.

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Garden at a glance

* Gardener: Catherine Ratner

* Location: Hillside on the Palos Verdes Peninsula (Sunset Zone 23).

* Land: One-third acre.

* Soil: Thin layer of black adobe over shale.

* Watering: Flower beds on automatic system; hillside on oscillating sprinklers.

* Fertilizing: Done at planting time, plus beds are fed once a year in February; roses, two to three times a year.

* Labor: Homeowner does it all, except for twice-a-year help.

* Favorite plants:

--Geranium maderense: Huge purplish-pink flower heads on carefree plants with dramatic leaves.

--Euphorbia wulfenii: Green flowers, blooms for a long time, grows to 5 feet tall.

--’Lady Hillingdon’ rose: Fragrant 1910 true tea, blooms all the time, best near coast.