Nurturing a Landscape Plan to Full Flower

Los Angeles garden designer Robert Cornell first showed me Amanda Goodan’s garden near the Arroyo Seco in Pasadena in 1993. It was near the end of a six-year drought, and he had just finished Part 2 of the garden--a water-thrifty frontyard, with its small lawn surrounded by tough plants.

To spread out the expense, Goodan had Cornell design and plant the small backyard first, in 1992, and then the larger and more ambitious frontyard a year later.

I saw the garden again a few weeks ago, on a tour that benefited Pasadena’s Grace Center, and I was impressed by how gracefully the garden had aged.

Designers often cringe when they walk away from a finished garden, wondering if it will survive the year--much less nearly a decade--once it is out from under their wing. But Goodan was a different kind of client: She could hardly wait to take over the garden’s care.

She and her husband, William Koelsch, had just bought the one-story Spanish-style home in 1991 when Goodan joined the Diggers Garden Club, a Pasadena institution known for its avid and informed gardeners. Then, she joined the Fanatic Gardeners group, after spending three years on the waiting list to join this popular class taught by gardening guru Jan Smithen at the Arboretum of Los Angeles County.

Goodan certainly fit the profile of a Fanatic Gardener, spending, by her count, three to four hours a day in the garden and keeping a garden log so detailed and precise that it lists what’s in bloom each month, what she planted, what fruited and what was pruned. She confesses to being a “late gardener” who may not be out in the garden with the birds in the morning but finishes some chores by moonlight.

Goodan says that she comes by gardening naturally. She’s a member of the Chandler family, best known for publishing this newspaper, but Goodan claims that while half of the family excels in business, the other half is great “go for it” gardeners. Of former Publisher Harry Chandler’s eight children, four were avid gardeners--Ruth von Platen, Helen Chandler Garland, Harrison Chandler and Amanda’s grandmother May Goodan.

“Grandma was the best gardener I know,” she said. “So many of the Chandlers are great gardeners. That’s the side no one knows.”

“Grandma even made her own compost, in a three-stage pile that got so hot you could boil an egg in it,” she added. “Really . . . as kids we tried it.”

Goodan is very fortunate to have a husband who gladly does all the weeding. He even bags the snails, putting them in plastic bags and into the trash.

But it is Goodan who does most of the garden work, including all the pruning (her favorite chore), planting and the toting of bags of soil amendment and granite turkey grit. The coarse turkey grit is how Fanatic Gardeners modify ordinary potting soil. It’s one of their trademarks. They add one part grit to three parts potting soil to make a potting mix for most things, using half grit and half potting soil for succulents. They find it at feed stores.

Though she still buys her own bags of amendments and potting soil, Goodan confesses that since she turned 50 this year, she now buys 1-cubic-foot bags instead of the larger, and heavier, 2-cubic-foot bags.

Her grandmother May began gardening around a large expanse of lawn, “but by the time she was finished, the lawn looked more like a path, surrounded by flowers. She kept making it smaller and the flower beds bigger.”

Room for Only a Small Lawn

Amanda Goodan didn’t even want a lawn in her deep frontyard, but designer Cornell talked her into having a small one, knowing that every garden needs a little open space--a meadow-like clearing in the forest of plants.

“If I had to have a lawn, I wanted it to be an oval, like a 1960s swimming pool,” she added, though it’s more like an oval broach surrounded by living jewels.

The showstoppers on the garden tour were the giant alliums, Allium giganteum, with huge ball-like clusters of lilac flowers on 5-foot stems. She bought the bulbs in the fall and refrigerated them for six weeks, planting them in January.

But the lawn is surrounded by many interesting and dramatic plants. Goodan jokingly calls it her “Dr. Seuss Garden,” in honor of all the bizarrely shaped or colored plants she has collected there.

Growing next to the alliums is Melianthus major, with dramatically big, silvery, serrated leaves. The flowers are oddly colored, “like a scab,” suggested Goodan with a mischievous smile. All around the base of the melianthus grow Verbascum ‘Jackie’ with their distinctly tan or brown flowers, next to other yellow, orange and peachy flowers.

One of the peach-colored flowers is a bearded iris, named ‘Goodan’s Peach,’ introduced by grandmother May. It has been passed around among gardeners since the 1940s, and I was surprised to see that it was the same peach iris I grow in my garden across town on the Westside, though I have never known its name or origin.

The oval lawn is protected from the street by a dense stand of wildly colored kangaroo paws and green-flowered euphorbias that “look like spectators watching the garden grow,” Goodan said. A path that runs though the stand of euphorbias is lined with the reddish succulent Echeveria ‘Afterglow,’ a nifty contrast of colors.

Since the garden was begun during a drought, much of what surrounds the tough, tall fescue lawn is drought tolerant and there are quite a few native plants in this water-thrifty stew. The fall-flowering California fuchsia (Zauschneria) with its ember-like flowers grows with native gooseberry, rosemary, lavenders, cerastium and blue oat grass. Much of this was put in by Cornell, but Goodan has been busy adding more kinds of salvias and lots of other lavenders--her two favorite groups of plants--plus plenty of exotic and unusual plants.

A Natural Bog of Heavy Clay

The most difficult section of the garden is what appears to be a natural bog, perhaps caused by an underground stream heading for the nearby arroyo. For every plant now growing in this area by the garage, “there are 10 ghost plants that didn’t make it,” Goodan said. The soil here is a heavy clay that is almost always wet, in blazing sun in summer and total shade in winter. The plants that have managed to survive in the ooze and muck are the ‘Green Goddess’ callas that came from the Huntington Botanical Garden sale, zephyr flowers (Zephyranthes candida), a variegated hydrangea and the climbing Hydrangea petiolaris, coral bells, an azalea named ‘Little John’ with burgundy leaves, a bog iris and the little blue-star creeper.

The many defeats in this swampy part of the garden have not dampened Goodan’s wit--she has two concrete alligators partially submerged under the blue star creeper, peering menacingly at the plants on the bank while serving as stepping stones.

Throughout the garden the natural soil was hard clay but is now quite nice thanks to Goodan’s mulching practices. She doesn’t fertilize the garden, but once or twice a year adds about 2 inches of redwood compost to the soil--not digging it in but simply placing it around the plants and letting the worms do the mixing work.

Near “the bog” are some imposing sunflowers sculpted of rusted iron. She tried the real kinds, but the critters in the garden--raccoons mostly--kept breaking them down, so she switched to steel sunflowers, which make a handsome rust-brown backdrop for poker plants with their yellow and orange flowers and a towering Pride of Madeira.

Dozens of plants in pots are clustered on the driveway almost blocking the entrance to the little plant-filled courtyard just outside the front door. One particularly handsome pot holds a new dwarf alstromeria named ‘Inca Moonlight.’

On the other side of the driveway, a narrow strip of baked ground holds “the best driveway plant ever,” the semi-succulent Bulbine. Not only does it tolerate bad soil and no water, but it will thrive in those impossibly narrow strips of ground often found beside driveways. Flowers are tiny and yellow but almost always present.

In the backyard, two huge white Lady Bank’s roses cover the arbor off the living room, and from the porch you can look down a slight slope to a garden bench, almost buried under lavenders and rosemary that make an undulating, fragrant meadow. Roses, including the fragrant, amber-colored ‘Whiskey Mac,’ grow by the terrace. Goodan won’t grow a rose, no matter how pretty, if it isn’t fragrant.

Various citrus line the back fence for privacy and food value, her favorite being the blood orange named ‘Moro,’ which makes the best and brightest juice.

Goodan is quick to give credit to Cornell for designing the garden from front to back, but the designer is quick to credit Goodan with making it her own.

“What Bob did was give me a fantastic palette to play with,” Goodan said.

She’s obviously been having fun ever since.

*

Write to Robert Smaus, SoCal Living, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053; fax to (213) 237-4712; or e-mail robert.smaus@latimes.com.

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Garden at a Glance * Gardener: Amanda Goodan

* Location: Pasadena,

Sunset zone 21.

* Land: Slightly sloping, 65-by-225-foot lot.

* Soil: Clay made manageable with frequent mulching.

* Watering: By sprinklers, once a week in summer, less at other times.

* Fertilizing: Only on lawn and in pots.

* Labor: Has help on lawn but does rest herself.

* Favorite plants:

Salvia apiana--for fragrance and matte, chalky-white foliage.

Helleborus argutifolius ‘Janet Starnes’--”doesn’t look real” variegations are striking.

Echium fastuosum--”Dr. Seussy” with electric-blue flowers.