Go to Your Rooms!
When a garden is divided into “rooms”--a classic landscaping ploy--each takes on its own identity and purpose, making the whole more interesting and useful. Chopping a garden into pieces doesn’t necessarily make it feel smaller. It often has the opposite effect, since there are now places to go and things to see around the next hedge, or through the next portal.
There are at least seven distinct garden rooms in Judy Horton’s 60-foot-wide by 80-foot-deep back yard in Windsor Square, adjacent to Hancock Park. Hedges and fences are the walls between the rooms; arching roses, trees or sky are the ceilings overhead.
Even smaller gardens can be divided into rooms, though the hedges and other “walls” are best kept on the short side, and there would be fewer garden rooms. The sense of enclosure and discovery, however, can be just as dramatic.
It is not hard to think of the enclosed spaces in the Horton garden as actual rooms in a house. You can spend time in the “living room,” relaxing with the dogs on that big rug called a lawn, or get busy in the “kitchen,” where the ‘Golden Dorsett’ apples and the bronze fennel grow. Maybe you need to get some things done out in the “garage,” where all the pots and potting supplies are stored, or sit back with a good book in the warm formality of the “study,” also called the Mediterranean garden.
It’s a little harder to attach a name to the centerpiece of the garden, a grand 12-by-36-foot pergola that is smothered in roses like the giant ‘Mermaid,’ ‘Jaune Desprez’ and ‘Glorie de Dijon.’ The pergola predates the 1910 house and was one of the first design challenges for Horton and landscape architect Frances Knight of Pacific Palisades. They had to come up with ways to make the pergola, with its 12-by-12-inch posts, work with the house.
The pergola was once part of the garden of a neighboring house. The lot was split, and the present Craftsman-era house was moved there in 1945. “They simply dumped the house in front of the pergola,” said Horton, and if you look closely, you will see that no part of the pergola aligns exactly with the house. “They don’t go together.”
Horton had been drawing plans for the backyard since 1983, when she bought the property, but she just couldn’t make up her mind and kept drawing new versions. “I needed someone with a strong hand to reign me in and come up with a workable plan,” she said. “I knew I wanted garden rooms, and I wanted seasonal change,” said Horton, who credits Knight with the elegant and organized design--”the good bones” of her garden. Horton has continued to refine the plan, most recently redoing the lawn area to make it more formal.
Horton, 56, is now a garden designer herself, with an office in the Larchmont area. At the same time she was finishing up her garden, she went back to school to study design and horticulture--after years as a librarian for the Los Angeles Central Library. She notes that, as a librarian, she was head of the art and music department, which oversees the collections on landscaping and design. “Undoubtedly, they influenced me.”
She is also an avid plants woman, constantly trying new things. She seldom settles for the usual but, rather, tracks down uncommon plants that she has read or heard about. She will stuff seeds into her purse while vacationing in England or France. She will bring back plants on the plane from avant-garde Northern California nurseries. She once missed three flights in a row, while searching frantically for a company that would pack and ship back all the plants she had picked up.
She has been gardening since “I planted my first radish” in her dad’s vegetable garden on two acres in Northern California. “But I’ve been gardening in the Hancock Park area since we moved here in 1959, except, of course, when I was a teenager,” said Horton, whose father, Jack Horton, was head of Southern California Edison. “Does anyone garden when they are a teenager?”
Her current garden is now 10 years old, finally getting planted in 1990--seven years after moving into the house. It is an ongoing project. “People tell me it looks different every time they come,” said Horton. It is constantly undergoing change, being a laboratory for her work. Here is where she tries things out, or even raises hard-to-find plants that eventually end up in clients’ gardens.
For instance, the patio under the pergola is filled with containers of a handsome “morning glory-blue” agapanthus named ‘Elaine’ and big pots of blue hydrangeas. When the hydrangeas get too big for the 18-inch pots (it takes about five years), she plants them out in the ground in clients’ gardens. New little plants she has raised from cuttings take their place in the pots. She has also increased her small supply of the lovely, tall ‘Elaine’ by frequently dividing those on the terrace.
The patio is also populated by large, 22-inch pots of what she calls “myrtle cones”--Mrytus communis pruned into cone shapes--and “box balls”--Buxus microphylla japonica pruned into perfect spheres.
Like many good gardeners, she moves plants constantly to see how they look or work in a certain spot, and with other plants. In the perennial beds on either side of the lawn that is just off the pergola, only one plant remains from the original plan. “I’ve moved everything two or three times,” said Horton. But that’s one of the benefits of garden rooms. You can rearrange plants inside the rooms like they were furniture, as long as the walls and ceiling remain the same. In this big garden room, the walls are a fence and a myrtle hedge, the sky is the ceiling and the lawn the throw rug (if the lawn looks a little worn, blame her two dogs, Rose and Bud, who are generally quite thoughtful of plants).
The perennial plants in this big garden room are arranged so the north bed is dominated by orange, red and purple flowers, while the south border is full of strong pinks, soft oranges, blues and whites. Plants with burgundy foliage like Euphorbia continifolia and its namesake, the purple smoke bush (Cotinus), tie the two borders together.
Through a portal covered with more roses, including ‘Snowbird’ (her favorite climbing white hybrid tea) is the Mediterranean garden, so named because the plants in it are mostly from that region and need much less water than the plants in the perennial borders. This is yet another good reason for garden rooms--you can give the plants in each decidedly different care. There are lavenders, rosemary, bearded iris and figs growing in big pots. Succulents are tucked into spaces between the stones that outline the beds. Many gardens in the Mediterranean were traditionally outlined with stones or seashells.
This garden room has a wall that Horton calls a “tapestry hedge,” since it is made up of several kinds of plants that grow together to make a loose hedge. It is not pruned severely but is left “pretty woolly,” according to Horton. About 12 to 15 feet tall and 6 to 8 feet thick, the hedge is made up of two kinds of pittosporum, holly, elaeagnus, Prunus caroliniana and two kinds of pyracantha--one with red berries and one with orange. She first saw this kind of mixed hedge in the late Phil Chandler’s tiny Santa Monica garden. Chandler was a knowledgeable gardener who hosted gardening get-togethers for other plant people.
Stay on the path through the Mediterranean garden and you’ll end up in the potting area, where there is a work shed, piles of pots and a big compost heap hidden behind the shed. Lots of what Horton grows is in pots, and she mulches the whole garden 2 inches deep with compost, so this work area is put to good use.
At this point the path doubles back toward the house, meandering through an area that is filled with fruit trees, vegetables, herbs and lots of self-sown flowers and grasses. “It’s my country garden,” said Horton. A walk down its path is like a hike in the grassy countryside, except you won’t get foxtails in your socks.
At the end, you pass beside a fence made of espaliered ‘Beverly Hills’ apples and a handsome small weeping mulberry. Most of the trees in Horton’s garden are fruit trees of some sort, even if they don’t bear edible fruit (like the elegant ‘Radiant’ crabapple in the kitchen garden, grown not for its tiny fruit, but for the reddish-bronze foliage).
Her trees are also small, because Horton wanted plenty of sun to garden in. And many of the trees are deciduous, since she likes seasonal change in a garden. Lots of her plants were chosen for their seasonal interest--like flowers that come only at certain times of the year, or colorful fall foliage, or dramatic seed heads. Rose hips are a favorite, and she grows some roses just for these fruits, like the hybrid musk named ‘Erfurt.’ ‘Lilac Charm’ and ‘Penelope’ are two others with great hips.
You exit the final garden room under an arching ‘Climbing Iceberg’ rose, that curves overhead like a cathedral ceiling, springing from a graceful mayten tree. The path has now come full circle, and you are back on the terrace under the old pergola, which is where you--and the garden--began.
In how many urban gardens can you take such a stroll?
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Garden at a Glance
Gardener
Judy Horton
Location
Windsor Square, in Sunset Zone 22.
Land
Mostly flat 60-by-210-foot lot.
Soil
Clay covered by a 2-inch mulch.
Watering
Automatic irrigation supplemented by hose-end sprinklers.
Fertilizing
Cottonseed or blood meal used two or three times a year.
Labor
Has lots of help from gardener--whom she shares with clients--about two times a week.
Favorite plants
‘Reve d’Or’ rose-Climbing Noisette with good pale yellow flowers, great hips. Pomegranate ‘Wonderful’-fruiting kind but grown for “magical” spring growth and yellow fall foliage. Chaste tree (Vitex agnus-castus)--long purple flower spikes on small blue-green tree.
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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.
