It’s a Jungle Out There
Fond memories of El Yunque, a pristine Puerto Rican rain forest, may have inspired the lush backyard jungle of Robert Marien Hernaiz in Pasadena, but herculean effort was required to build the garden’s centerpiece--a waterfall tall enough to walk under and a pond deep enough to swim in, though only fish get the opportunity.
The 47-year-old native of Puerto Rico loved to hike and explore the huge forest reserve located outside San Juan when he was a teenager. His favorite spot in El Yunque (which means “the anvil”) was a waterfall that he could walk behind.
“It was so remote and quiet and smelled of damp earth and moss. It was just enchanting,” said Marien, who moved here in 1980 to study at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, where he made an award-winning film on jungle ecology.
To recapture that feeling, he built Paseo del Angeles, the garden that was the star of this spring’s Hortus Nursery garden tour. The garden is dedicated to Marien’s late father, who allowed his teenage son to build a similar but far less ornate version at their home in San Juan. Their neighbors called that garden El Yunquecito, or the little Yunque.
Some who have visited the Pasadena garden have asked him to create something similar for them. Marien, a professional photographer after stints as a Spanish-speaking tour guide at Universal Studios Hollywood and a producer at the Telemundo network, has now begun designing gardens.
Water features are all the rage right now, but this is no pre-fab backyard fountain. Building this water-filled garden was an epic adventure, the kind Cecil B. DeMille would have liked. It started with a few drawings that he showed several contractors. When they told him it would cost $50,000 or more, he thought, “I could build it myself for a lot less,” and he headed down to the local Home Depot “to buy a shovel.” It was to be the first of many, many trips.
He took snapshots of the whole process and kept track of everything. By the time the backyard project was done--a year after it began--he had purchased 2 tons of sand, 3 tons of pea gravel, a ton of river gravel, 45 bags of plastic cement, 65 bags of mortar mix, five bags of thin-set mortar, five of lime, 12 panels of wire-stucco paper, 35 panels of mesh lath, 1,000 feet of No. 14 wire, one 30-by-50-foot roll of 45-millimeter rubber liner, 500 feet of rebar, 700 feet of PVC pipe, 390 feet of electrical wire, 130 feet of electrical conduit and 400 feet of electrical wire.
Marien figures that he spent around $20,000 at Home Depot.
Sometimes, when he’s standing in the house looking out at the waterfall and garden, he thinks, “I still can’t believe I did that! I thought about it for so many years and there it is.” Though the pond is hidden by lush greenery, the waterfall in the far corner of the yard stands tall and proud and is dramatically lighted at night.
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He and partner Steve Cathell bought the 60-by-200 foot property with its ranch-style house in 1995, and “I couldn’t wait to get started on the garden,” said Marien. One month after moving in, he began digging a hole for the 20-by-30-foot pond, with his new shovel. . Unfortunately it was January and the rainy season was about to begin. “As Steve and I dug, the pond kept filling up with water after each little rain.” he said. In March, the skies opened up and completely filled what had become a very large hole. .
They had to bail out the 9,000-gallon pond with buckets. “Then when the ground finally dried out, it was as hard as concrete,” added Marien, but luckily they were almost done digging.
First they lined the hole with a rubber pond liner, then they covered it with concrete and reinforcing wire. They realize now that either rubber or concrete would have been sufficient.
The 7-foot waterfall was more complex. In designing it, Marien recalled his days at Universal when he saw how stage sets were constructed. .
The trickiest part was building the dramatic overhang of mock rock, over which the water flows. He devised a projecting ledge balanced by a counterweight hidden behind the rock. Marien first built a wooden framework, then covered it with expanded wire lath, added some rebar for additional strength, then slapped the first coat of concrete onto the framework overhead, “which went right though the lath and dripped onto my face.” It took him several months to figure out a formula for cement that would stick to the lath and could be shaped. Like any good artisan, he will not reveal his secret concrete formula. He will only say that, when properly prepared, “it’s like sticky dough.”
All of the rock work was carefully sculpted by hand--”like they do at the zoos and amusement parks”--and each stone was individually painted using common latex paints. The rocks are so lifelike that visitors keep tapping and prodding them to see if they are real. To keep them guessing, a few real rocks are stuck with Liquid Nails adhesive among the fake.
Behind the rock is some serious plumbing. “I had no idea how much pond plumbing had changed since I was a kid building my first one,” he said. He thought he’d just need a pump, but a koi expert told him he needed a big pump, a 100-gallon biological sand filter, an ultraviolet algae lamp, timers and lots of control valves. “I kept coming home and telling Steve, ‘Now I need a skimmer!’ ” But all this gadgetry keeps 40 big koi, two albino catfish and countless mosquitofish happy as clams.
(For those contemplating their own, more modest pond, only koi require all this pumping and filtration. Common goldfish and mosquitofish need nothing and can live in the same motionless water for decades.)
Marien recently added another water feature--a winding stream that bubbles out of the ground at the beginning of the garden path. If you follow the stream, it takes you around a big tangerine tree and under king palms, bananas and bottle trees (Brachychiton) to the waterfall and pond.
At the waterfall there is plenty of room to walk behind the curtain of water without getting wet. The feeling is quite magical. Marien grows some mist-loving plants behind the falls. “I wanted it to be like a mossy grotto under the waterfall,” said Marien, “so you could view it from any direction, including from behind.”
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Many visitors think that Marien’s water bill must be astronomical, not knowing that the water is recirculated. “Sometimes I can’t resist telling them that the spring comes from Mount Wilson,” which can be seen in the distance. The water garden probably uses less water than the typical lawn.
Once the water features were finished, he put in a circular patio--Patio de La Luna--by the pond, and a large deck in an area that had been the staging area for pond construction.
The garden is landscaped with tropical-looking plants though most are actually subtropical. New Zealand flax grows beneath Australian tree ferns that grow under South African giant bird of paradise. Everything is irrigated with sprinklers from high overhead, so the water comes down like a tropical shower.
The big-leaved plants make a convincing jungle--good enough to fool his cats, Mina and Melvin, who stalk the grounds like little cheetahs. The only thing missing in this jungle environment are the whistling coqui, the little tree frogs that are native to El Yunque.
* Robert Marien Hernaiz will talk about his garden at 2 p.m. Aug. 20 at Hortus Nursery in Pasadena and afterward lead a tour of his water garden. Call the nursery at (626) 792-8255.
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* Write to Robert Smaus, SoCal Living, Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012; fax to (213) 237-4712; or e-mail robert.smaus@latimes.com.
