Giving Shape to an Inviting Garden of Art

The new sculpture garden at the remodeled Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena is a romantic rhapsody of a fluid, Monet-like lily pond, groves of sycamores in flowing paths of decomposed granite, and great plant combinations like brilliant pink canna lilies growing with orange lion’s tail and gray euphorbias.

The comfortable, earth-colored paths are more like Sierra trails that lazily follow the water’s edge, and in places let you peer into the pond’s crystal shallows. They also lead to various pieces of sculpture, some deliberately placed so that they demand second and even third looks.

Tree ferns, giant cycads, calla lilies and bold angel’s trumpets cling to the mounded terrain beyond the pond--where much of the garden sculpture is located--and the areas around the pond are slowly growing into unmown meadows.

This may be what garden enthusiasts were hoping to find at the Getty Center when it opened nearly two years ago. As tasteful as parts of that museum’s grounds are, and as whimsical as the Central Garden is, the glare of those limestone museum walls overpowers the garden, at least at this early stage. Many hard-core gardeners have come away disappointed, wishing they had worn sunglasses and complaining of unrealistic plant combinations and the too little space set aside for gardens.

But at the Norton Simon, just the opposite is true: The new garden is not overwhelmed by the architecture, and the two nicely complement each other. And visitors obviously like the garden, since often more people are wandering around the grounds, or sitting by the pond, than are in the galleries.

“There’s no reason a public garden can’t be a real garden,” said the designer, Nancy Goslee Power of Santa Monica, who, by the way, happens to like the gardens at the Getty. Gardeners will find that the Simon garden is filled with compatible plants intelligently used inside creative spaces, what I called a 100% certified, Grade A garden. As one visitor commented, “I could do this, right?”

The garden sits cozily between two wings of the museum (which, unfortunately, do not block the street noise). It’s a redo of an earlier plan, so it has plenty of big, mature trees and welcome shade. The previous garden was mostly lawn and shrubs around a rectilinear concrete fountain, “that was very corporate,” according to Power.

It also was uninviting. The new garden is more like a siren song, beckoning, even seductive, and wide new doors directly opposite the entry make it easier to enter.

There are paths where there were none to take advantage of every part of the garden, according to Power. And to make sure the sculptures ended up in the right place, Power and director of art Sara Campbell moved full-size cardboard cutouts of each piece around the garden to see what they would look like, where. The crown jewel of the garden is the stunning all-new water feature that now dominates. It is a glistening, 250-foot-long naturalistic pond packed with aquatic plants. It’s a breathtaking sight, and you will wonder how they keep the water so clear and the aquatic plants so lush.

Even the bottom of the pond is covered with vegetation, like Lake Castaic. The secret? The pond has a vinyl liner that is covered with a layer of clay soil, so no concrete shows, nor liner of any kind.

The whole effect is quite natural and wonderful, and very European, owing to the lack of concrete and asphalt.

Power is quite a plantswoman so you’ll get some fresh and useful ideas from this 2-acre garden. Note how she used cannas, planted conventionally in the ground, but also grown in the pond with their roots in the water. They do equally well in both places.

There is a huge planting of an electric-blue tropical waterlily, a variety named Tina Uber, and the largest planting of water thalia, a tall aquatic with reddish stems and leaves, that I’ve ever seen. Makes you want to go home and put in a pond, real bad.

Power said the garden is organized a bit like a painting by J.M.W. Turner, an English landscape artist, with hot colors--in this case a big coral tree--at the center of the garden, that fade into milder hues. The garden is further divided into little themed sections--what Power called the “yellow, spring garden,” the “California-hot garden,” the autumn garden and others. The plants are not identified in the garden, but the reception area inside the museum has little handouts identifying the parts of the garden and some of the plants, such as the gorgeous, drooping Kashmir cypress on the eastern side of the pond.

Now the garden is surprisingly colorful, and the warm, autumn weather has the aquatic plants feeling their fittest. What will happen as the garden slides into winter and most of the aquatics go dormant?

“It will be very quiet in winter, a beautiful reflecting mirror,” said Power, until the whole garden reawakens with bulbs in spring.

Norton Simon Museum, 411 W. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (626) 449-6840, https://www.nortonsimon.org. Open Wednesday through Sunday, noon-6 p.m. (open until 9 p.m. Fridays). Admission: $6.