where the Wild Things are
The image of Jeff Goldblum crashing through a rain forest in flight from dinosaurs gave his garden designer an idea: Why not make the “Jurassic Park” actor a tropical jungle of his own?
Considering Goldblum’s tile-roofed 1930s hacienda and his taste for heated, south-of-the-border colors, the vision was not far-fetched. And when Robert Cornell, a Pasadena designer and landscape contractor, showed him pictures of orange cannas and heliconias, he was sold. “I like things wild and untamed,” says Goldblum, whose third-acre lot was mostly barbered lawn when he bought his house 12 years ago.
The actor’s first landscape move in the early ‘90s was to hire Lory Johansson of L.A.-based Ergo Design Works to build a pool. Johansson, who also designed the interiors of Goldblum’s house, contributed other assorted outdoor details such as a purple drinking fountain, a rustic front door and splashy tile mosaics in and around the pool. Leon Massoth of XOTX-Tropico nursery provided a few exotic plants--cycads, angel’s trumpets, silk floss trees--to offset the blandness of the property.
But it was Cornell--who entered the picture in 1995, just after Goldblum had finished shooting the “Jurassic Park” sequel, “The Lost World”--who put the pieces together. He began with the pool deck, the garden’s visual heart, where his leafy stands of ‘Durbin’ and ‘Technicolor’ cannas, dark-stemmed elephant’s ears and billowing ornamental grasses evoke rampant tropical growth raging toward the water’s edge. He planted similar greens around a patio he designed outside the master bedroom, adding ‘Green Goddess’ callas and purple-leafed ctenanthe. But where he really let the jungle loose was on the hillside behind the pool, a previously unexplored slope that had been blocked by a row of ficus trees.
When El Nino hit, torrential rains sent two mammoth eucalyptus hurtling downhill, knocking out several ficus trees like rotten teeth. Suddenly, the slope appeared, and with it, an opportunity for more garden. “We took the tropics and ran with them,” says Cornell, describing a free-association weaving of plants with large and small leaves, fiery colors and shadowy accents that travels upward from a poolside retaining wall. More fat-plumed cannas went in, along with four kinds of heliconias, dainty cupheas--natives of Mexico and Guatemala--and red-leafed Asian crinum lilies.
Then in the gapped concrete of the old retaining wall, Cornell tucked water-loving bromeliads and tropical cacti and installed a misting system to keep them happy. He cut steps into the hill, forging meandering paths that lead up to a bench that offers a panoramic city view.
“This garden is no small pleasure to me,” says Goldblum, who moved on from dinosaurs to space aliens in “Independence Day” and will soon appear with Salma Hayek in the comedy “Chain of Fools.” “I’m always gazing out through the windows or wandering out to see what’s bloomed, what’s changed. It’s a nourishing paradise.”
It’s also a place of antic mystery. “As we watched it grow,” Cornell remembers, “we had a running joke. We’d say, ‘Things are getting tall, they’re getting thick. Is it time to release the raptors?’ ”
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robert cornell’s tropical favorites:
* Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, for his lush, voluptuous music.
* Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, for his “romantic, surrealist, over-the-edge compositions.”
* Ruby-throated hummingbirds: “When I started here, I vowed to make these birds so happy they would arrive in squadrons. They did.”
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