ESTATE OF GRACE
With its smoky olive trees and clipped hedges, the garden of Jean and Charles Shriver would be right at home in Tuscany. In fact, when the couple visited the region in 1985, soon after they bought their Palos Verdes house, they saw the same plant combinations that noted landscape architect A.E. Hanson had dreamed up for their property back in 1931. In its early years, the four-acre piece the Shrivers now own was called The Farmstead. With its horse stables, servants’ quarters and kitchen gardens, the property was planned as the working part of a great estate, but the Depression left it unfinished. Prominent architect Gordon B. Kaufmann, whose credits include the Times Mirror building and Scripps College, designed the elegant Tuscan-style farm buildings, and Hanson added a proper frame: three formal boxwood mazes, a citrus orchard and a reflecting pond. In 1953, the estate’s original 40 acres were divided into smaller parcels, and by the time the Shrivers bought The Farmstead, its gardens were a shambles.
“The clearing process has been three-fourths of the job here,” says Charles, a retired management consultant who, Jean reports, “likes to dig and whack at things.” Over the years, he has unearthed a grove of vine-choked pepper trees, located brick borders under myoporum and kept Chinese elms from overtaking the reflecting pond.
Meanwhile, new planting has been largely left to Jean, a writer, and Marianne Shriver, her daughter-in-law, who lives on the grounds with the Shrivers’ son and their grandchildren. Laboring separately on different flower borders, the two women have discovered blooms that peacocks--the scourge of gardens in their area of Palos Verdes--don’t eat. Marianne has planted callas, gladioli and jasmine. Jean has gathered vintage agapanthus and bearded iris from around the property and massed them for bold effects.
Further peacock-proof picks--artemisia, buddleia, true geranium and campanula--were brought to Jean’s attention by Julie Heinsheimer, a Palos Verdes landscape designer the Shrivers hired in 1996. That was the year they decided to overhaul a neglected side garden and build an outdoor dining room for their extended family to share. Charles, who had grown grapes as a child, wanted a grape arbor to roof this garden room, which Heinsheimer modeled on an existing lath house nearby. She then added a bit of lawn and worked with Jean to punch up an accompanying perennial bed. Now a planting of mixed penstemon, society garlic, day lilies and lavender, splashed here and there with silver dusty miller and artemisia, is flanked by gravel walks. Also in view of the open-air dining room is a small rose garden that features ‘Climbing Sally Holmes,’ ‘Climbing Iceberg’ and ‘Golden Showers’ on iron frames around a birdbath.
But the garden’s glory remains the grand sweep of its early vision, one that saw in Southern California the charm of central Italy. “We’ve tried to keep it as it was,” says Jean, “and just make it more usable. It still feels the way it did when we saw it first--like an enchanted kingdom, far from the world’s ills.”
Notes on a Native Son
One of the preeminent landscape architects of California’s Golden Age of Gardens in the 1920s, A.E. Hanson designed the original blueprint for the Shrivers’ garden. Taking inspiration from Italian and Spanish estate gardens he’d seen on his travels, he is perhaps best known for his vision of “country homes for city people,” which he later developed as the communities of Rolling Hills on the Palos Verdes peninsula (1932-1941) and, just after World War II, Hidden Hills on the western edge of the San Fernando Valley.
A Southern California native, Hanson was self-taught as a landscape architect. At 23, he went to work for the well-known pioneer grower of California native plants, Theodore Payne, and later apprenticed with Paul J. Howard, whom he called “the most prestigious man in the landscape business of that day.” After a stint as a serviceman in World War I, he returned to California to work, designing mostly what he called “city backyards”--about 400 of which he completed during his years as a landscape architect.
Throughout his life he was inspired by the parallels between Southern California and the Mediterranean--the smiling climates, the proximity to the sea, the wide array of similar plants that would thrive in both places. Continuing the idea of formal, European-inspired architecture and garden structure, such as paths, walls, courtyards and pergolas, Hanson used landscape design as a way of ordering the exuberant California paradise.
