All Aboard--for a Garden Tour

Hike down the switchback path, go past the big, tumbling waterfall and the aqua-colored swimming pool. If you lose your way at this year’s Pasadena Showcase House of Design, ask someone to point out “the trains,” a garden railroad of diminutive plants and chugging locomotives, designed and built by Mike and Victoria Arzate.

Outdoor railroads that run though the garden are not a new idea, but they seem to be this spring and summer’s hot ticket, bringing smiles to the faces of gardeners and non-gardeners alike, and absolutely mesmerizing children. The Large Scale Model Railroad Assn. (https://www.largescale.org), has just published a list of outstanding garden railroads for public viewing, from the Los Angeles County Fair to Disney’s Epcot Center in Orlando, Fla. The prestigious New York Botanical Gardens will feature a big Summer Train Show, opening in June.

Garden railroads put toy trains into living scenery. The trains are called “large scale,” or G scale, and they are big when compared with other toy trains--it takes two adult hands to hold one. The track, trains and buildings are made from noncorrosive materials and are meant to stay outdoors. Only the engines need protection; even running the sprinklers won’t hurt the tracks and buildings.

The Showcase railroad, open through May 20, is a collaboration between the Arzates, who own Marisol’s Nursery in Sunland, which specializes in unusual plants, and Dave Lannom of Claremont, who lent the trains, track and buildings. Lannom has his own outdoor railroad at home and happens to head the respected horticulture department at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, so he also knows his plants. He thinks outdoor railroading gives you “an opportunity to grow really small things.”

Mike Arzate thought the trains “might get people to look at the plants,” but the couple had as much fun laying tracks and building tunnels and bridges as they did planting. The shiny rails wind across a hillside, disappear into a tunnel faced in stone (made out of plastic drainage pipe), then cross a little replica of the Golden Gate Bridge made by a welder friend who “never had so much fun.”

Another friend, Juan Gallo, lent a carefully dwarfed 13-year-old rosemary that he had been grooming for his girlfriend. The 18-inch plant now stands, temporarily, in front of the bridge, looking like an old live oak.

Arzate tried to use plants that are genuinely and naturally small. “We really wanted to create our own little world with properly scaled trees,” he said, though a few trees, such as the baby redwoods he used to make a small forest, would obviously get much bigger if left in place.

Trees are crucial to a garden railroad, giving it scale and believability. Dean Lowe, who has an elaborate garden railroad in La Verne, says he couldn’t imagine his railroad without its trees.

Lowe was not a gardener when he started laying tracks. His wife Sharon is the gardener--a longtime nursery woman and consultant--but he “learned how to garden because of the railroad.” Sharon only helps by occasionally bringing home plants she thinks will be useful, or by offering nuggets of gardening wisdom. He does all the planting, pruning and caring-for, and can now spit out Latin names like a professor of botany.

His favorite trees are the dwarf ‘Hokkaido’ elms, which “look like a gnarled old tree in just two years, even when planted from a 4-inch pot.” Two kinds of false cypress, Chamaecyparus pisifera ‘Boulevard’ and C. obtusa ‘Ericoides,’ are his favorites for imitating pines.

At the Showcase garden, Arzate used the naturally dwarf Melaleuca incana and a new dwarf olive named ‘San Fernando’ as small trees. Around the trees he grows meadows of Scotch moss (which is not really a moisture-loving moss, preferring warm, sunny spots). In still another area, he used little clumps of dwarf mondo grass mixed with dwarf poppies to make an elfin wildflower meadow.

Another popular tree is the dwarf Alberta spruce. At his own railroad, Lannom can point out a forest of Alberta spruces that he and his wife Julie found half-price after Christmas one year. Next to the steel bridge in Lannom’s garden, stands another good “tree,” a naturally twisted shrub with gray stems called a corokia. Common dwarf armeria, often sold as a ground cover, makes a pink-flowering meadow in front of it.

This was the Arzates’ first railroad, but now that they’ve built one, Victoria wants another at home. She’s the one gleefully wearing the engineer’s cap at the showcase display garden, but you get the idea that Mike wouldn’t mind building another. “He kept getting more and more ideas,” said Victoria, and only opening day at the showcase stopped his working on the railroad.