Symphony of Colors

Since it was first conceived 14 years ago, the Walt Disney Concert Hall has had a number of different garden plans by big-time designers. But since construction began four years ago, the person behind the hall’s gardens has been Melinda Taylor, a little-known designer with a two-person practice over a cell phone store in Silver Lake.

As preparations begin for the garden’s installation this August, the vision of this unknown garden designer will become part of a new downtown Los Angeles landmark when the hall formally opens for the concert season of fall 2003. If Taylor’s style of urban gardening catches on, it may redefine landscaping rules for downtown skyscrapers.

It all started quite casually, Taylor recalls. She came in on the job as architect Frank Gehry was deciding to switch the building’s cladding from stone to stainless steel. “They were thinking of doing something really simple,” she says. “They were going to do a couple of oak trees in a field of decomposed granite. They asked me to choose the trees and I said, ‘Sure.’”

Then Gehry began thinking that he might like some color reflecting in that steel and started firing questions over to Taylor. What about this tree? That tree? Before too long, the plan was to garland the neck of the galleon-like structure with ever-changing flowering trees and shrubs.

The commission is a big leap for Taylor, so much so that she’s sensitive to charges of nepotism. Her husband, Craig Webb, is a partner of Gehry’s and co-designer on the concert hall. That’s why the tree questions started flowing her way in the first place. She came in after a number of other designers, including Philadelphia landscape architect Laurie Olin and Nancy Goslee Powers, who did the Norton Simon Museum’s garden, had come and gone on the job.

Gehry spokesman Keith Mendenhall explains Taylor’s selection this way: “Basically it was Frank’s choice, and he chose her.” In a formal statement, Gehry says, “We thought that this would be a wonderful opportunity to get Melinda involved with our work and to give her a chance to spread her wings a bit, and the collaboration really seems to be turning out well.”

Taylor thinks she got the job precisely because she wasn’t a power landscape architect schooled in industry norms. “I’ve mainly done flowering gardens,” she says. “That’s why Frank wanted me.”

Colleagues add that Gehry not only likes her work, he also likes her. This 44-year-old woman is smart, funny and just a bit madcap. Born in La Jolla, raised in the Bay Area before moving to Los Angeles in 1980, she completed an English literature degree at UC Berkeley. She laughs at incipient hippie tendencies, confessing, “I like macrame!” But unlike so many Bay Area transplants, she’s above taking digs at Southern California. “I like L.A.,” she says. “I find it more architecturally arresting than the Bay Area.”

After completing a course in landscape architecture at UCLA Extension in 1990, she has done mostly residential gardens. Her current obsessions are the importance of public greenbelts and how to maintain them. Ah, and sage. As she lights on Betsy Clebsch’s “A Book of Salvias” (Timber Press, $29.95) she cries, “I love this book!”

Rather than waste any more breath defending her right to be on the Disney project, Taylor leads a tour of some of her past work. She drives her 10-year-old black pickup truck like she talks: Fast. As she screeches to a halt in front of a cottage-style garden in a well-irrigated section of Pasadena, a neighbor emerges, squinting suspiciously.

There’s no parking there, says the neighbor, but her frown transforms into a delighted smile as she recognizes Taylor’s small, 5-foot-2 frame spring from the truck. “Hi, Melinda!” There, just beyond Taylor’s freshly laid skid marks, is a cottage garden overflowing with roses, salvia and lavender. It is storybook lovely.

Not far away, in a slightly more exclusive estate garden, there is a miniaturized version of San Simeon with stately Italian cypresses and a tiled pool. There are more delighted calls of “Hi, Melinda!” A few guns of the engine, and the tour is in Los Feliz, where pink tabebuia trees are now in full bloom along Virgil Avenue. The choice of tree was hers, Taylor lets drop. The job perhaps closest to her heart is the playground for the mid-Wilshire Pilgrim School, which her 9-year-old son, Phineas, attends. A crop of wheat encircles the play area. Soon the children will harvest it and make bread. “It was deeply satisfying to do this. It’s the same with the Disney garden. It’s going to mean a lot to a lot of people.”

Catherine Babcock, marketing director of the Music Center, says the Disney garden is to be a new downtown public space for the entire community, not merely for the benefit of concert-goers. “Frank has a line,” she says. “He hopes the new concert hall will be ‘a living room for the city.’ Hopefully with this garden there will be a new level of accessibility that will make everyone feel very welcome.”

In a trailer at the Disney site on Grand Avenue, Gehry partner Terry Bell rolls out a plan of the site, showing how a series of stairways and public walkways has been arranged to entice the public into the $5-million garden, through its snaking gardens and to an open-air amphitheater. There is even public access right up to an observation window where visitors will be able to look in and see the Los Angeles Philharmonic play.

The garden encircles the northwestern half of the building, spanning the length of the complex along Hope Street from 1st to 2nd streets. Taylor leans over the map and delightedly traces a path from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion through her garden to the Museum of Contemporary Art. “It’s the new green-space walking corridor!”

Except it’s not going to be only green, says Taylor’s collaborator on the job, landscape architect Lawrence Moline of LRM Ltd. in Culver City. If Taylor is new to gardening around power developments, Moline is an eminence grise. This silver-haired man is one of the city’s most senior and most respected landscape architects, his firm’s specialty that very Los Angeles art of planting over parking structures.

Moline explains that much of the green spaces that seem like solid ground throughout downtown are really “captured” roof spaces above garage space, from the new Disney Hall garden to the terraces by the Ketchum Downtown YMCA, right down to Pershing Square. Navigating the Disney site, Moline shows a network of 20 planters around the concourse, many the size of backyard swimming pools, that will hold a mixture of large trees and smaller shrubs. It was Moline’s job to make sure they were arranged artfully, drained properly and leakproof.

For all the engineering prowess that goes into creating these rooftop gardens, Moline says, too often the plantings are a predictable mix of ficus trees, grass, box hedges and azaleas. Most developers just want to “green up” around a building, he says. “The Walt Disney Concert Hall will be a real departure for downtown. It will be a garden.”

That decision to put in a garden rather than “greening up” was Gehry’s, says Taylor. Gehry realized that a flowering garden might serve as a luminous accent for the building. The steel has the bewitching effect of changing with every nuance in light and color.

Around 1998, he began quizzing Taylor about trees. “The biggest component of them was they had to be flowering throughout the four seasons,” she says. She scoured the Huntington Botanical Gardens and Arboretum of Los Angeles County and then began trawling the streets of L.A. for the right mix. She auditioned, she reckons, 60 or so trees. “We would take boxes of flowers and leaves to Frank’s office. We’d say, ‘Frank, you can have this tree with this leaf and flower, or this flower or this leaf and this flower,’ and so on.”

They settled on six. For spring, they chose the Tabebuia impetiginosa, the trees with lavender pink flowers that Taylor recommended for Virgil. For spring to summer, the Erythrina coralloides or naked coral tree with lipstick red flowers. For summer, the Tipuana tipu or Brazilian tipu tree, with ochre flowers. For autumn, the Pistacia chinensis, or Chinese pistache trees with a “color play,” says Taylor, from yellow to orange, red and deep red. For late fall through winter, the Bauhinia blakeana or Hong Kong orchid, with purple flowers and pink-flowered Dombeya cayeuxii or pink ball dombeya.

To this succession of color, Taylor added almost 30 types of flowering shrubs and perennials, including five different salvias, thyme, honeysuckle, licorice plants, and Santa Barbara daisies. Of the tempo of the color cycle, she says, “it quiets way down for winter, almost pink and white, very pale. In March, April, May, more blue, white and red. In June, July, August, more maroon, and in September, October and November, more orange and fuchsia.”

Choosing the plants was the easy part. Finding mature trees was a great deal tougher. “We need big trees,” says Taylor. “Against a building that size, little ones would look like matchsticks.” She, Moline and plant brokers were suddenly scouring Southern California. Six coral trees were found in an apartment complex in Marina del Rey that was about to take them out. The Chinese pistache trees were grown to order. For the others, it was spot the tree, take a Polaroid, then approach the property owner and ask to buy the tree. Taylor gives her son five bucks for every Hong Kong orchid tree he spots.

The only other missing ingredient is, oddly enough, broken china. Plans for a section of the garden in honor of Lillian Disney were recently unveiled at a Music Center fund-raiser. “She loved Delft china,” says Taylor. “Frank wanted to do a fountain with a mosaic of Delft china.”

Taylor herself likes the idea of a fund-raiser where everyone donates figurines that they get to smash into mosaic-sized bits and pieces. But, on a more serious note, she hopes that money can be raised to hire proper gardeners, rather than mow-and-blow guys.

The problem now is not how to keep the show going, but how to open it when planting begins in six months. “It’s the most visible project I’ve ever done,” says Taylor, sucking in a deep breath. She stops, exhales, then declares with a sudden grin, “And I’m as confident as I’m ever going to be that it’s going be good.”