Sow and Behold

Until early next month when the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels opens, the best view available to the public is afforded to westbound traffic passing through downtown on the 101 Freeway. For actual inhabitants of downtown, the view of the cathedral from its location at Grand Avenue and Temple Street is limited to its concrete back and sides, and cut off completely at street level by a network of high and higher walls.

One might well wonder: Is it a cathedral, or is it a correctional facility?

In early September, it will be consecrated, and the gates to those walls will open. The public can come, worship, or just snoop, and decide for itself what it thinks. Hate the outside, love the inside, hate the light fixtures, love the pews, love love love the cool stillness that so many tons of stone and marble can buy. For better or worse, slowly people will begin to break it in.

Getting the measure of the grounds will take longer. Much longer. It will never be part of the green space walking corridor beginning with the Mark Taper Forum and Dorothy Chandler Pavilion along Grand, and continuing past the new Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Museum of Contemporary Art. The citadel-style walls reject the formula of interconnecting gardens of virtually all of the buildings on Bunker Hill.

It won’t even have the whispering shade trees of most of downtown, at least for some time. The planting around the Our Lady of the Angels is so young, it will take years to attain the kind of scale that will cast a cooling shade.

In many instances, the planting has been left undone--deliberately, according to husband-and-wife landscape architects Douglas and Regula Campbell. The request not to finish the job came from the chief proponent of the project, Cardinal Roger Mahony. “The Cardinal gave us a timeline to project over 200 years,” Douglas says. There is no rush to finish a timeless job. “The Cardinal likes to joke that the job has been in the works for 2,000 years.”

The Campbells have been on it for seven of them, inventing a new SoCal cathedral garden style, borrowing motifs as they went along. Angelenos who have not heard of the designers have probably seen the work of their 21-year-old Santa Monica firm, Campbell & Campbell, elsewhere around town. It includes the landscaping in front of the Los Angeles Central Library and the linked courtyards of the Beverly Hills Civic Center. They did the Carousel Park at the Santa Monica Pier. In Pasadena, the deliciously witty stone garden with the two sycamores set opposite a water feature and plinth topped by a cop badge motif at the police station is theirs. The lush, almost comic jumble of jacarandas, azaleas and lilies now lining Washington Boulevard in Culver City clear from Fairfax to the Sony complex is theirs, too.

“They’re a very smart architecture firm,” says Bruce Coats, an art historian and authority on church architecture at Scripps College in Claremont. “They often take on very difficult sites and come up with thoughtful and convincing solutions.”

The challenges posed by the cathedral site include the diverse audience to be served by it: Southern California’s 5 million Catholics, who celebrate Mass in no fewer than 38 languages. The Campbells’ assignment was to invent a style to suit all of them. That is no small order when there are no hard and fast rules for what constitutes a cathedral garden in the first place.

Monasteries, yes. Churches, yes. But cathedrals, no. Landscaping around monasteries has a long tradition dating back to the Middle Ages and involves vegetable gardens, graveyards, a medicinal herb garden, orchards and stables. The orchards might double as cemeteries, the idea being that a grove of fruit was paradise. Christian cloister gardens, thought to hark from ancient Paradise gardens, were typically crisscrossed into quarters, and might have a fountain at the center flowing in four directions, said to represent the four rivers of Eden.

European church gardens also had their formulas, with cemeteries for parishioners and often “Mary Gardens” with roses and lilies associated with the Virgin. Here in California, European and Mexican missionaries brought a mixture of Moorish, Spanish and Italian traditions to the American West, along with their classic repertoire of plants: citrus, olives, grapes, rosemary and sage.

So there were associated themes but precious little precedent for cathedrals. In Europe, cathedrals are often set in dense urban environments without any garden, Coats says. In England, beautification societies might or might not have added trees in the 19th century. The arching shade trees down at the L.A. archdiocese’s former home, St. Vibiana’s, the fomer cathedral, sheltered a small, church-scale garden. This could never accommodate a vast festival audience. The new cathedral begged for a sweeping plaza for gatherings, such as the blessing of the animals, but our heat and landscaping styles demanded greenery.

The Campbells describe the process of begging and borrowing different styles as “revisioning.” Douglas thinks they made up the word. “It just seemed the right way for us to imagine our work,” he says.

This “revisioning” begins around the perimeter on the street level, where the Campbells placed two coast redwoods, which will grow to more than 100 feet tall, next to the bell tower on Grand. The idea was to answer the architect’s symbol of grandeur with nature’s home-grown retort. They couldn’t use giant redwoods, Regula says. “Obviously, because of smog, we had to be realistic.”

Down Grand, and around the corner down Temple, liquidambars have been used as street trees, because, Douglas says, their blush of color from green to purple echoes the liturgical calendar. “They are also American cousins of the storax tree, which is used in anointing oil,” Douglas says.

(Liquidambars are controversial as street trees because of their limited benefits giving shade and producing oxygen and a suspected synergy with car exhaust. The Campbells see this cathedral context as special. “I would probably suggest that the tree used in excess is probably an issue. On balance here for the size and scale, we made that call,” Douglas says.)

Halfway down Temple, in another unusual touch, California live oaks are pressed against the cathedral’s garage wall, and the cardinal-red theme is carried on by trumpet and flame vines. Around on Hill Street, planting switches to a mixture of Italian stone pines and ginkgos. The ginkgos are customarily grown next to temples in China and Korea, Douglas says. The stone pines connote Rome. To the Campbells, the mix of plants symbolizes the meeting of East and West. “It’s symbolic of the whole world being part of the sacred landscape,” Regula says.

Inside the cathedral’s walls, through the temple entrance, the sacred landscape is largely paved. Past a fountain designed by Lita Albuquerque and inscribed with “I am the living water” in 38 languages, visitors ascend onto a plaza that on sunny days is as hot as a bake stone from midmorning to midafternoon.

At the western end of this plaza looms the new cathedral, at the eastern one stand cathedral offices, space for a gift shop and the residences for the cardinal and parish priests. A window box of impatiens already hangs from the cardinal’s balcony.

By 5 p.m., the light is angled, the glare is dimmed and heat tolerable. The scope of the plaza transforms from threatening to thrilling. A path across it leads to a shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Out on the plaza, the Campbells point to clusters of young pepper trees and oak saplings that will one day climb into the sort of shade trees left behind to drought and drunks at the now derelict grounds of St. Vibiana’s.

There is more space near the saplings, for planting by future generations, Regula says. This western half of the plaza is on solid ground. Trees planted here could reach 100 feet high in a century.

The eastern end of the plaza is roof space over a multistoried parking lot. Planting here is concentrated in raised beds. There is a small orchard of olive trees set in lawn. Grass is too wet for most olives, but this is envisioned as a children’s garden one day, though the low branching habit of the trees would make playing among them difficult.

The choice of olive trees alludes to the fruit whose oil fueled lamps of California’s missions. Except these trees are sterile hybrids, without pollen or olives. Birth control for trees is acceptable if it prevents fruit staining the plaza.

Along the southern wall, a vine-lined pergola will shade congregants as they proceed to the cathedral door. Here, touchingly, one finds the rosemary and roses of the Mary Garden and even Madagascar jasmine, a traditional flower of wedding bouquets.

At the northern wall, a fountain made from Jerusalem stone and donated by the Jewish community is being installed. Regula holds tile samples for the base. She wants gold, she says. The fountain is meant to evoke the old washing wells, public meeting spaces, of biblical times.

Behind it is the site’s quirkiest touch. An observation window has been cut into the wall overlooking the 101 Freeway and filled with etched glass depicting trumpeting angels. Another architect might have left the wall whole and asked landscapers to put in rows of tall, tall trees, say a posse of those 100-foot redwoods, on the freeway verge to buffer the traffic noise and filter the pollution.

But the cathedral’s architect Jose Rafael Moneo believes the 101 to be the city’s Seine to its new Notre Dame. Thus, he opened the vista to the freeway and walled out city residents on the street.

Douglas Campbell sees another significance. The freeway follows the route of the old El Camino Real, he says, the path the missionaries took.

Pity it was “revisioned” as the 101. At 5 p.m. on a Thursday, the air is bitter with the tang of exhaust. The roar of traffic is constant. But the Campbells are so enchanted by the site, they genuinely seem immune to it. Standing near a line of stately palms, Regula whispers, “Listen to the fronds rustle,” just as a truck thunders by.

These rustling palms mark the entrance to a pocket at the northwestern corner of the site, which the Campbells call the “cloister garden.” This is a lovely space. Its collection of native oaks, Western Red buds, Japanese maples and sycamores have been set around a koi pond in a stylish play on the earliest church garden themes. Against the northern wall, in a delightful wink to the Eden theme, a fig tree has been slipped in. Under-planting of clivia is burning now. This will lessen as trees grow and cast some meaningful shade. It’s not perfect, but it’s a kind of paradise, right for the climate, right for the place.

A long window has been cut in the wall of the cathedral, so parishioners leaving confessionals will emerge to a view of Eden updated.

Back on the main piazza, empty concrete sacks tumble in the wind as construction teams race to meet the Sept. 3 deadline. But for the Campbells, it’s not a matter of getting it finished on time, but started. As the construction winds up, the gardening has only just begun.