Artist Aimed for Spiritual Experience

Tucked between glass office towers and a parking garage near South Coast Plaza, a unique landscape garden known as the California Scenario sits, an homage to the state’s environment.

Created by renowned Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, the quiet, 1.6-acre retreat is at Park Center Drive and Anton Boulevard in Costa Mesa, effectively detached from the bustle of mall shoppers.

It is an artistic glimpse of California’s ecosystems: a small creek flows down a 30-foot-tall granite sluice lined with pebbles before finally vanishing under a stone pyramid; a small grove of redwoods and wild grasses is nearby; an “island” of gravel contains cactuses and desert plants. The sandstone pavement is lined with white granite benches and large flat boulders. “The Spirit of the Lima Bean” is a sculpture of 15 bronze-colored granite rocks precisely cut and fitted together, dedicated to the Segerstrom family’s nearly 90 years of agricultural land use in Southern California.

Noguchi was commissioned by the Segerstroms to design the garden. Corona landscape architect Ken K. Kammeyer and his son, Ron, also worked on the project, completed in 1982.

“It was meant to be a spiritual experience,” Ron Kammeyer said. “They wanted to represent California and its water and land use in an artist’s terms. People fly out to Orange County just to see it.”

The outdoor sculpture garden is one of a handful in Southern California. Others include Little Tokyo’s Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Los Angeles.

The son of American writer Leonie Gilmour and Japanese poet Yone Noguchi, Isamu Noguchi was born in Los Angeles in November 1904. He was reared in Tokyo and Yokohama, Japan.

Schooled in the United States, Noguchi received the 1927 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, became a sculptor of the New York School and rose to prominence during the 1940s. New York remained his base of operation until his death in 1988.

Noguchi is known for his sensitive use of materials. His gardens are mostly made of granite, sandstone, metal, water, earth and vegetation, and reflective elements that humanize the environment.

The sculptor believed that his gardens were “a new way of conceiving sculpture” and of making it more useful in everyday life.