It’s His Time to Stop and Smell the Roses
I’m supposed to be the gardener, but while I’ve been busy doing other things, my wife, Iris, has slowly taken over the garden chores and has become a disturbingly good gardener in the process. It’s time to wrest back control. Our garden in West Los Angeles needs some serious redoing at this point in its life.
So I’ve decided to try early retirement to have a little more time for gardening and other projects. Before I can tackle any of those, I must finish a book for The Times, but then I plan to get my hands off the keyboard and into the dirt. After all, the reason I started writing about gardening in 1966 for Sunset magazine was to find some way to make my passion for plants pay for itself.
Taking leave seems like a good time to look back at past gardens and plants that have become personal favorites in my own garden during the last 25 years.
Gardens have changed dramatically during this time. In the 1970s, a “garden” consisted of a lot of lawn and a few junipers.
First inspired by the English, gardens have become much more complicated and creative, though two droughts helped Californians come up with their own vision of the plant-filled garden, one that is bolder and sleeker. Today, the English often look to California for good garden ideas.
When I joined The Times to write about architecture and gardens for the Sunday Home magazine section in 1976, I was living in what was then the middle-class hamlet of Pacific Palisades. My garden was a challenging one with a frontyard as level as any lot in the San Fernando Valley; the back sloped steeply down into Temescal Canyon. The soil throughout was a horrible sticky clay that was nearly impossible to dig in.
I worked hard to improve the ground in front where I grew exotic subtropicals that I had not been able to find when I lived in the Bay Area, where I grew up. I planted exotic flowering trees, bananas, gingers and other subtropicals.
Of these, the gold medallion tree, Cassia leptophylla --named for its huge trusses of yolk-yellow flowers--became a favorite, as did the smaller golden trumpet tree, Tabebuia chrysotricha . I am always surprised when I hear of someone planting a ficus tree because Southern Californians can grow so many fantastic flowering trees.
Luxuriating in their dappled shade were orchids, bromeliads and a collection of staghorn ferns. These epiphytic ferns are very useful plants because not many things will grow attached to walls, and in the shade at that. Several moved with me to West L.A., where they have become monsters. I am sure they will stay with this house as I see no way now of prying them from the walls.
The backyard in the Palisades was quite a different kind of garden, a steep hill that I planted entirely with California natives, except for a level patch at the bottom. Natives usually prefer unimproved soils, which makes them the perfect choice for a slope. Some of my favorites on the hill included the brilliant blue-flowered Ceanothus ‘ Concha’; several native iris; a white bush monkey flower; the prickly, fuchsia-flowered gooseberry, Ribes speciosum; and the odd, stumpy Coreopsis gigantea , native to the Malibu bluffs.
In my current garden, I can grow few natives because the lot is so level. I miss these chaparral plants and someday hope I will again live where they will grow happily. Nothing looks so right in a California garden, or smells so sweet.
On the flat area at the bottom of the Palisades slope, the farmer in me found room for a peach, an apricot, a cherimoya, a sapote and two macadamias. The apricot didn’t have a chance of bearing fruit because it was so near the beach (we could see the surf), even though it was a special low-chill variety, but the rest did great, and macadamia trees quickly became another of my favorites--elegant and reasonably small with the tastiest nuts imaginable, and lots of them.
There was even room at the bottom of the hill for a small vegetable garden and a chicken coop, if you can imagine chickens in Pacific Palisades. The coop became the inspiration for perhaps the oddest issue of the old Home magazine, devoted mostly to the building of a backyard barnyard. I’m still amazed the editor let me get away with it.
We moved in 1981 to the house in West L.A., where the ground was level and the soil a lovely silty loam. After those years in heavy clay, working with this soil was like playing in a big sandbox. Gardening suddenly became real fun, and I tried all sorts of new things, primarily roses and perennials. The new yard was going to be a glorious, cottagey flower garden, and my columns for the new Los Angeles Times Magazine suddenly veered in this direction.
There was a drawback to having a soil that is so easy to dig in--we became fickle gardeners. When we tired of some plant, it was all too easy to take it out and plant something else. As a result, we tended to have a completely different garden every few years, which gave readers of my columns the false impression that we actually had a very big yard, not that we were constantly changing the same small one.
The garden is small enough that we constantly have to take out plants because many shrubs have grown way too big, though there have been a handful that have stayed at their promised size, or that have been easy to prune. Handsome and reliable shrubs that are still with us include Arbutus unedo ‘Compacta,’ corokia, correa, Osmanthus fragans, Pittosporum tobira ‘Cream de Mint’, Westringia ‘Wynyabbie Gem’ and a number of camellias. I can recommend all of these for a small garden--they have served us well.
We have gone though dozens of roses, sometimes treating them like annual flowers. Early favorites were ‘Double Delight,’ ‘Pernille Poulson’ and ‘Iceberg.’ Current favorites are ‘Blueberry Hill,’ ‘Lady of the Dawn’ and ‘Mary Rose.’ ‘Mary Rose’ is one of the first of the fluffy English roses but it is still one of the best in our garden.
The roses that remain are the ones with real landscape value, such as my favorite, the huge and drapey ‘Lavender Dream’, or climbers such as ‘Dortmund,’ a crimson-red pillar rose that has remained tidily over our front door for nearly two decades. Or the lovely apricot-flowered noisette named ‘Crepescule’ that grows high in a small, twisted eucalyptus.
Most of the roses grow in the backyard, where they are surrounded by other flowering plants. We keep changing these too, though a few have been here from the start because they are too dramatic to take out, such as the tall white spikes of Verbascum chaixii album , the several colors of tall alstromerias, or the several kinds of blue bearded iris. The sticky, gray-leafed Salvia discolor is another of our all-time favorites, as is Geranium ‘Biokovo.’
We keep trying new plants. Several blooming right now look promising, including an elegant many petaled new Romantica rose from France named ‘Rouge Royale,’ and a new geranium from England called ‘Rozanne.’ We are a little concerned that this true geranium grows to more than 5 feet across in summer, then has to be cut back to a foot-wide ball in winter because the foliage dies back, but the large purple-blue flowers are abundant. Every fall or spring, we must hack back one of our all-time favorites, common heliotrope, H. arborescens , because it outgrows its spot so quickly. We put up with this behavior because it never stops blooming and it is the best butterfly-attracting plant.
About 10 years ago, we added a lily and goldfish pond to the backyard and the many lilies in this elevated pond are certainly among our favorites. Summer would not be the same without them. I’ve written about this pond on several occasions, but many people still don’t believe how easy it is to take care of. No pumps, no filters, no fuss--I just add water as it evaporates. However, it started leaking this summer so that is one of my projects after I “retire.”
There’s very little lawn in our backyard--thanks to the pond and the flowers--and there’s no lawn in the front. Our most recent project, which we started seven years ago, was to turn the frontyard into a hard-working garden, a project I documented four years ago.
This garden has been the most fun to date. It has two snail-proof raised vegetable beds that are surrounded by herbs and drought-resistant shrubs. We’ve tried many new plants and have discovered some real winners, such as the lovely lilac Orthosipon labiatus , which flowers in late summer and fall, or Calyophus drummondi with it’s bright yellow flowers in summer, or the light-blue summer flowers on Salvia chameleagnea . This is where we discovered how incredibly tough and shade tolerant Salva chiapensis is, and that it never stops flowering. These plants are so new that they have no common names as yet.
All of them are also very thrifty with water, getting irrigated about three times each summer, and they have a look that is similar to our own native vegetation, perhaps a little greener. But if you found one growing in the hills you wouldn’t say “What’s that doing here?” When I tackle the redo of the backyard, we will grow lovely or tasty stuff in a garden that unquestionably belongs in Southern California. Wish me luck.
It’s been a delight to share my love of gardening with you. The Times will continue garden coverage, and I’ll try to do a column every now and then to keep you posted on my progress.
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Robert Smaus can be reached by e-mail at rsmaus@earthlink.net.
