In Eagle Rock, a Jungle Land

“Don’t duck, just push your way though,” suggests Elmer Lorenz from somewhere up ahead. The narrow path I’m following is choked with bamboo palms, gingers, anthuriums and other subtropical treasures, which have been growing happily in this Eagle Rock backyard for 53 years.

Lorenz explains why his garden is such a jungle. “I’ve always been interested in the tropics and in jungles but figured I’d never get to travel there,” he says, still buried in the vegetation, “so I decided to grow my own.” Because so many of these plants grow under trees in their native jungles, Lorenz has covered half his property with shade cloth, though I hardly notice it overhead as we fight our way though the leafy vegetation.

I can barely keep up with him because I keep stopping to look. There is so much to see, like the huge staghorn fern that’s firmly attached to a palm trunk. Not only is this epiphytic fern holding tight, it is strapped to the truck by the aerial roots of a Philodendron ‘Evansii’ that grows above it. It’s like being in a Tarzan movie. I could probably grab onto one of those roots and swing across the garden.

Lorenz originally had a whole acre to play with but the California Department of Transportation swiped half of it for a freeway offramp. Bummer, I think, but he quickly adds, “Too bad they didn’t take more,” only half-jokingly. Caring for a jungle, it seems, is hard work.

The octogenarian does most of the work, repotting, moving plants around, weeding, watering large areas by hand, strengthening the shade structure. Shirley Kerins, who’s in charge of the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens’ plant sales, beams when she talks about Lorenz. He volunteers there every Friday, helping with preparations for the sales. “He’s so amazing,” she says, “he’s in charge of the shade plant section, which means he schleps all the plants, and he’s 88 years old!” She doesn’t stop there. “He’s one of the most devoted plantsmen. He’s a treasure!”

Lorenz was a founding member of the Bromeliad Society and a past president of the group and the Southern California Horticultural Society. He was a member of the legendary Leafeaters, a group of plant fanatics that included UCLA’s Mildred Mathias, designer Midge Davis and other horticultural notables. As we walk, he stops to pinch back some coleus that are trying to bloom because letting them flower at the end of summer will quickly end their stay in the garden. He points out all the work that needs to be done this fall, including the replanting of entire areas. It makes me tired just thinking about it.

I keep stopping for closer looks, this time at the long sprays of tiny Encyclia tampensis orchid blooms that arch into the path at this time of year. He has a number of unusual and really lovely hybrids. Lorenz says he prefers small-flowered orchids like these encyclia, and he has quite a collection. Most are hardy outdoors in his Sunset Zone 21 banana-belt garden, including this species from Florida.

Lorenz recently dismantled a large greenhouse but there is another smaller one for those plants that can’t take the cold of winter. The temperature once dropped to 29 degrees. “I begin to get a little nervous when it drops to 32 or 31,” he says. While all of the orchids spend summers outside, a few must be brought into the greenhouse in cold weather, and little red plant labels sticking out of the pots remind him which need protection in winter.

Most of the plants are from subtropical jungles like those found in Australia and Costa Rica, so they can take a little cold. The majority of plants are grown for their dramatic, tropical-looking foliage, which he is especially fond of, and this is why it’s so hard to see very far. I stop again to look at some handsome and incredibly long and narrow leaves on two kinds of anthurium, growing in hanging pots. Their flowers are not much to look at but the leaves are like nothing I’ve ever seen. They must be 3 feet long and only a few inches wide.

He says one problem with a jungle garden is forgetting about individual plants. “I’ll make a mental note to see the flowers on something, then forget all about it until the blooms are past.” So he has set up a display area, next to a small patio, where he hangs some of the orchids that are flowering so you don’t have to go searching for blooms.

His half-acre is home to an astounding 6,000 plant species. Years ago he began a list of “accessions,” as newly acquired plants are called at botanic gardens, and he now has an inch-thick stack of sheets on a severely strained clipboard with the thousands of entries. “I don’t know how he remembers all the names,” said his wife Joyce, though Lorenz claims he doesn’t.

Along the path, I spotted accession No. 5921, an interesting fern with super-curly fronds that Lorenz hadn’t gotten around to planting. It’s a polypody named ‘Green Wave’ that he recently found for $4.39 at a Trader Joe’s, of all places. “I’ve actually found some really interesting plants there,” and at Home Depot, he says.

But that’s not where he found his latest acquisitions, an exquisite black ginger named ‘Midnight’ or the Chlorophytum amaniense ‘Fire Flash,’ which is a relative of the common spider plant but infinitely more sophisticated, with broad leaves that have steaks of red and coral on the stems. These two came from growers of rare plants in Florida.

Among all these plants, he doesn’t have particular favorites--”I can’t insult all the others,” he says. He does have two favorite families, however, Begoniaceae and Bromeliaceae, so there are plenty from both.

His first loves were begonias but he’s had disease and pest problems with them through the years, so it’s been an on-again, off-again thing. Now, many are covered with those nasty white filaments made by the giant white fly. He is hoping that the tiny predatory wasps that have recently been released by the state will get the upper hand. He is not spraying or even blasting off the white flies, less he accidentally destroy the wasp larva too. It obviously pains him to see his beloved begonias so covered with this pest, but he leaves them alone.

So he takes comfort in the bromeliads, which are virtually problem-free. He’s especially fond of the Neoregelia clan because their foliage is so colorful, but he also likes Guzmania for their long-lasting flower spikes. Right outside the backdoor, bromeliads with colorful foliage hang at varying heights to make a screen that looks like a huge stained-glass window. He carefully positioned the plants so the sun shines though the leaves, making them glow red and orange and green.

To grow the polypody and other ferns, the gingers, begonias, bromeliads and other shade-requiring plants, Lorenz built a large lath house just after building the main house in 1948. Through the years, he’s kept adding to this garden structure, changing to shade cloth when that became available. The vegetation is so dense you hardly notice it, and the posts are painted green so even they disappear.

Few trees shade the property because his soil is quite shallow--not what trees like or need. A few big palms, some towering cussonias, and some firewheel tree, grow in pockets of deeper soil. When he and his wife Joyce built their house, the grading contractor got carried away and scraped off the top of the little hillock while making a building pad, leaving only a few inches of decomposed granite to garden in.

Fortunately, jungle plants don’t need a deep soil. In tropical and subtropical forests, soils are often surprisingly shallow--a few inches of leaf little on top of impenetrable clays. Lorenz has added things to his decomposed granite to make it more like topsoil, homemade compost at first, and most recently, spent potting soil that he brings home from the Huntington and works into the dirt.

There are sunny spots, even a rock garden, filled with tiny little plants like a dwarf cotoneaster or a little natal plum named ‘Humphrey Variegata’ growing among small boulders that he received as Christmas and birthday gifts. “When my family was in doubt, they could always get me a ton of rocks for a present,” he says.

He also likes cactus and succulents, though he favors the subtropical types, such as the succulent euphorbias and gesterias, which fill a couple of beds and benches, or the most uncactus-like rhipsalis, that grow overhead in hanging containers, thread-thin branches dripping almost to the ground. It’s hard to believe they’re in the cactus family. Several succulent Pachypodium with their swollen trunks have grown quite large through the years, though they are still in their little pots, which gives them an almost comical look of spiny telephone poles sticking out of bowler hats. “But I’m not about to repot them,” says Lorenz, staring at the big thorns.

The retired civil servant has been able to travel to jungles, after all, in Australia, Southeast Asia and Costa Rica. And people have come to visit his jungle. As I pushed my way onward, I tried to picture Roberto Burle Marx, the late, legendary Brazilian landscape architect--considered one of the most important landscape architects of the last century--and a big fan of tropical plants, fighting his way through the garden.

On a speaking trip to California, Marx was brought here by the late Paul Hutchinson, who owned Tropic World Nursery in Escondido. Lorenz modestly says it wasn’t really a visit, just “a bathroom break” as they traveled up the coast. But Lorenz and Marx did correspond over the next few years, and Lorenz still wears a T-shirt silk-screened by Marx, as he works in the garden.

Robert Smaus can be reached at bobsgardenpath.com.