heart and soil
Ida Drapkin is one of those rare people who spot a particular flower or cactus or fern or tree or succulent in the right light on the right day, lose their heart to it and then devote the rest of their life to winning it back, in the meantime paying a lot for potting soil. For Drapkin, it was a small fuchsia named Swingtime, which she spotted by chance on a breezy Palos Verdes day in 1970. It was the first fuchsia she had ever seen--a flounce of red sepals blown upward, the white corolla below emerging like a popcorn bud, its delicate stigma flitting in the wind--and today all she can say about that moment is, “Something about it just hit me.”
The Drapkins had recently retired to Palos Verdes, yet as an Army wife, Ida had already grown all types of plants in all sorts of places. She grew mangoes and bananas in Hawaii, and daffodils and tulips in Germany, and cucumbers and tomatoes in Niagara Falls when chicken manure could still be had at 25 cents a bushel. In desolate El Paso, she says, she grew sand.
But after Swingtime, she became something of a fundamentalist, and the Word was fuchsia. The flower stepped into her life and became her obsession, and soon enough she was crossbreeding her own hybrids, occasionally naming them after family members. One flower’s resemblance to her sister’s beautiful alabaster skin prompted the moniker Ceil, for Celia. Sid Drapkin, named for Ida’s husband, has a salmon complexion and a mild infestation of mites caught after hanging out for months in the couple’s Palos Verdes backyard. She is not, however, particular to kin. Dr. David Chan, which has a peachy complexion with flecks of orange and red, is named for her favorite oncologist.
It may be unfair to say that the fuchsia is your mother’s plant, something spotted outside a Palm Springs retirement condo in a terra-cotta pot, but there is an aura about the flowering bush’s glossy leaves and dangling, toy-like blossoms that speaks of, say, the “I Like Ike” era. If the 20th century can be divided into horticultural epochs, fuchsias would have ruled the earth when ivy hedges and Bermuda grass and Hawaiian luaus dominated the primordial backyard. They are, in fact, much older. The first written description of the plant appeared in 1703, when Father Charles Plumier described the Fuchsia triphylla flore coccineo in what is today the Dominican Republic and named it “fuchsia.” In Antarctica, Drapkin says, core drilling has unearthed fossilized fuchsia pollen that is about 35 million years old.
Fuchsias are particular to the Western Hemisphere and the Americas, but they are not exclusive; in New Zealand there exists a 45-foot fuchsia tree. Most are much smaller and infinitely more varied. Drapkin herself has written that fuchsias can be grown as “shrubs, bushes, trees, baskets, half-baskets, wall pockets, espaliers, cordons, cones, pyramids, rings, topiaries, window boxes and even ground cover.” The list overlooked fuchsia soup, the professional woman wrestler Fuchsia and a Methodist sister ministering in Tennessee, one Fuchsia Pickett.
One would think a plant of such versatility must boast legions of species, but there are actually only about 100. In fact, there are more than 12,000 fuchsia hybrids and cultivars. Their numbers make Ida dizzy and her mind reel. “It’s getting harder and harder to know the fuchsias,” she says, “because their names are getting harder to pronounce.” This year alone has seen the hybridization of Hertogin van Brabant, De Acht Zaligheden, Frau Vreni Fluckiger and Ector’s Loze Vissertje.
It happens that Ida is partial to the Americans: Cindy Robyn (“she’s got a peachy color”), Texas Longhorn (“a huge wingspan”) and Archie Owens (“a beautiful pink”). Cindy and Archie and the Texan were all bred by Annabelle Stubbs, whom Ida describes as “the best there was--that is, until she entered a home this year.”
This is a problem: The fuchsia enthusiasts are aging. Ida herself is 78 and spending a lot more time than she’d like to with the human David Chan. “Flowers have a moment in time, and that has happened with the fuchsia,” she says. Like an aging teen idol, the flower’s fan base is dissipating; where once there were almost two dozen fuchsia enthusiast clubs in Southern California, today there are just three. Even Ida has taken on help for her backyard collection, but the truth is, there are probably more fuchsia-adorned tea cups and fuchsia needlepoint canvases in her house than buds in her garden. “But I have a memory,” she says. “I can still remember what I saw in 1970, and when they ask where my husband is, I still say he’s in the backyard, hanging out.” *
By their own evaluation, horticulturists Don and David Harris look like a pair of desert rats. In addition to their shared resemblance, the twins also work together, live together, vacation together, obsess over agaves together and finish each other’s sentences, as in the following exchange:
“The thing about an agave is it isn’t pretty like a fuchsia or a palm--you can’t go up to one and . . .
“You can’t hug one. They’re not good around kids or old people who might wander or fall into them because . . .
“They have spikes, and there’s a little bit of danger to them because you can get poked, and they have colors that . . .
“That really stick out. In Mexico you find agaves on slopes in these stately pine and oak forests, and as natives they just . . .
“They don’t fit in--they look like they’re from another planet . . .
“Which is another reason we’re drawn to them.”
In the end, one wonders if the Harrises are talking about the agaves or themselves. This is because in stately Montecito, where they often consult, the Harrises are the equivalent of two 10-foot spiked blue succulents in an oak forest: Desert rats at the Bellagio.
This eccentricity may be why garden lovers are drawn to them, but the Harrises say their popularity probably has more to do with the commercial success of tequila, and how every margarita drinker in Montecito seems to want an Agave americana in the backyard.
The rubbery succulent was not nearly as popular two decades ago, when Montecito’s Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church asked the Harris brothers if they wanted to pull up some of the property’s big agaves because the spiky leaves were puncturing children. They knew next to nothing of the agave but found a shared empathy for the succulent on collecting trips in Mexico, where they discovered agaves that looked like artichokes, cabbages, octopi and spider webs. Using the equivalent of the Thomas Guide--Howard Scott Gentry’s “Agaves of Continental North America”--they tracked down the succulent’s 136 species, and claim to have located four-fifths of the world’s agave population. In Oaxaca, at 10,000 feet, they found agaves as high as houses, with flowering spears for weather vanes.
“No one else had claimed the agave as their plant before that,” says Don, “so turning into experts on it made us big fish in a little town.” Here the Harrises sound a little like the Spanish Conquistadors, who discovered the plant 500 years ago and helped spread it throughout Europe, East Africa, Indonesia and the Philippines. Mexico’s indigenous tribes were already using the agave for rope, shoes, fish poison, candy, living fences, soap and a fermented intoxicant called pulque. They fed the fibrous leaves to cows or scrambled them into eggs--in fact, there were so many uses for the agave that the Aztecs came up with an agave goddess, Mayahuel, gifting her with 400 nipples.
The agave is not nearly as popular today, but thanks in part to the recent fashion for drought-tolerant landscapes, the tony enclave has caught up somewhat with the Harrises’ sensibilities. Unlike most things collected behind Montecito’s driveway gates, the Harrises’ agaves do not mature in value as they grow in stature and beauty. Agaves flower just once, anywhere from three to 40 years into their lives, and then die. So that while a flowering agave may look beautiful, that’s not the time to buy it. At the peak of their beauty, the succulents are worth much less, a contrary phenomenon in the capitalist world.
This, of course, is another reason why the Harrises are so fond of the agave.
*
About as far north as a palm tree ever got in this world is near the head of Hamilton Bay on Kupreanof Island, just off the coast of Alaska. The Hamilton Bay groves are gone today, as are others in the Rocky Mountains, Washington state, even New Jersey, with only fossilized palms remaining. Yet if the Alaskan palms still swayed in the arctic breeze, it’s likely that there you would find Dave Anawalt, a self-described “palm nut,” taking in the landscape.
As it is, Anawalt’s thoughts tend to drift toward more southern climes. This has everything to do with a year-long sailing trip that put him in the South Seas in 1978, and that placed the palm tree firmly in his mind, ad infintum. Before his venture, Anawalt’s closest association with trees had been in their post-sawmill state. His great-grandfather founded a lumber business (today Anawalt presides over three of the five Anawalt lumberyards), and plantings on the family’s Malibu property, according to the collector, were limited to “indigenous California flora”--weeds.
There are more than 100 different species of palms on that same property today, planted with enough professionalism to include a metal-and-plastic label at the base of each trunk, and carrying enough notoriety to attract palm enthusiasts to visit from as far away as France. There is a leafy stand of chamaedorea near the house’s front door, a palm that Anawalt sailed past in 1978 while off Mexico’s Zihuatanejo coast; there is a beautiful pritchardia near the lap pool, which he would have sighted along Hawaii’s Pacific slopes; and, finally, near the front gate there is a Ptychosperma macarthurii, which Anawalt encountered when, like Gen. MacArthur, he finally waded to shore in Polynesia and met the tree that would change his life forever.
Obviously, as a son of Los Angeles, Anawalt had seen palms before Polynesia. He knew the Washingtonia robusta, the slim-trunked trees that line Sunset Boulevard, and the stouter Washingtonia filifera, the only native California palm, planted in Silver Lake’s foothills and sprouting naturally as far north as Death Valley National Monument.
Anawalt also knew of the transplants--the barrel-trunked Canary Island date palms planted along Stadium Way in Elysian Park as well as the cliffs of Santa Monica’s Palisades Park; the dark-green queen palm, whose lush, drooping fronds struggle in the smog alongside Pasadena’s Colorado Boulevard, and the king palm, similar in appearance to the queen, found in the parking lots of malls and shopping centers everywhere. In Los Angeles, the queen and date palms are the most popular among the dozen or so species grown commercially. Yet depending upon which palm enthusiast you speak with, there are another 250 or 450 or 600 or 800 species squirreled away in the backyards of Southern California collectors. Palms say “California” to Midwesterners and “Tropics” to Easterners and “home” to Angelenos, but to the enthusiasts in their backyard hammocks, they connote one word: “Paradise.”
This is true for Anawalt, who says, “I find an ambience around the palms that I can’t get in the rest of the world--a tropical connotation, an ease of life, a sense that you are in a temperate zone and don’t need to bring along a jacket. They speak to me of that year in the South Seas.”
Ironically, many palms will not grow in Los Angeles--our “cold” winters kill the heart, which sits in the tree’s crest shooting out fronds--and so re-creating Polynesia, even in a Malibu compound, is not an easy task. Anawalt’s property is filled with natives of Madagascar, Australia, Oceania, Mexico and South America. Like anything new to L.A., they have trouble adjusting. Anawalt’s palms have been shredded by Santa Ana winds, felled by mysterious fungi, have died of thirst due to misplaced drip lines and been ripped out of the ground and shredded by a sister’s bulldog. He is perhaps the only male adult you might meet in a lifetime who will nostalgically lament, “I lost my prize teddy bear palm out there--that thing would have knocked your socks off.” At least a fifth of his trees have passed on.
Yet he persists, and in that persistence to remake paradise, there is something about Anawalt that makes him a quintessential Angeleno. Los Angeles is built not out of what was already here but what could be brought. The palm, that green burst of leafy optimism, soon became symbolic of a city that stood for possibility, a break with the past, reinvention. A new arrival, spotting the palms, realized that wherever he was, he wasn’t where he came from, and that was the most important knowledge of all. Watching Dave Anawalt puttering around his front yard, you get the feeling that he is everywhere and nowhere at once, both adrift and moored, the Los Angeles Zeitgeist.
*
Dave Gardetta’s last article for the magazine was an essay on dinner parties he has hosted.
