Where the world is abloom

There are people who garden in California, and then there are the true gardeners. True gardeners have mulching dreams. Their eyes tear up when they get a pair of Felco pruning shears on their birthdays. Most of all, they love Los Angeles. They make hay when the sun shines, and they garden in Los Angeles precisely because the sun shines almost 365 days a year.

In this, the fairest of all settings, one would expect true gardeners in every home and glorious gardens behind every sidewalk. But this brings us to the most perplexing of Southern Californian paradoxes: Good gardens, the simply magical variety, are as rare in L.A. as well-dressed people in airports.

It’s not about money. There are plenty of immaculately kept grounds around and many communities so heavily irrigated that their gutter runneth over. It’s not about taste, high versus low. One of the most delightful gardens in Central L.A. used to belong to a woman who saw no good reason to take her Christmas wreath down, even when her Easter lilies were in full bloom.

Rather, it seems that the gardeners are outnumbered. So many people flock to Los Angeles from cold, wet places, bringing cold, wet traditions, that too often gardening here can seem like little more than a battle to keep the lawn green.

For apartment dwellers, the problem is how to stop the terrace plants from wilting between breakfast and dinner. Big chain garden centers compound the confusion by offering the same impatiens for South Carolina as Southern California.

But ask any California gardener: Once you start using the right plants in the right place, and those plants thrive, gardening in Los Angeles becomes a way of life.

As evidence, I give you 27 gardens open to the public for the next three weeks as part of the Garden Conservancy’s Open Days tour. Every one of these places amounts to a love letter to Los Angeles, to its sunshine and fabulous houses, be they mock Tuscan villas, Spanish estancias, bijou bungalows, cliff-top houses on stilts or square-on ranch houses with a basketball hoop over the garage door. But more basically, they are celebrations of the land and climate. Talk to the homeowners and you find that tending their gardens has tied them to California. Not to the New England of Martha Stewart or the Virginia of the American Horticultural Society. To here.

The tour begins in two of the oldest quarters of the city, in the 1920s mansions of Hancock Park and around USC, a neighborhood called West Adams, but whose heritage-minded residents insist on referring to the Craftsman district as “historic West Adams.” The following Saturday, it moves to the bungalows and cliff-top houses of West Los Angeles, Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades. You’ve heard of Beverly Hills; meet Beverlywood. The following weekend, it concludes along the mansions and crunching gravel paths of Pasadena.

What sets this apart from some of the snootier garden tours is that it is about the gardens, not the addresses. Since it started in L.A. in 1998, it has largely been given by gardeners, for gardeners. They go from house to house in order to admire, and then steal each others’ best ideas: interspersing expensive quarry slate with old concrete and pebble filler for an elegant walkway, where to find variegated bamboo, ingenuous ways to rig trellising, or to learn the right rose for every spot.

In many cases, the ideas are professional-caliber. Most of these gardeners either hired landscape architects to work out the plotting of the beds, or they are landscape architects themselves. The house of Nancy Goslee Power, the designer behind the Norton Simon Museum garden, is on the tour. Other gardens are by Robert Cornell, Katherine Glascock, Judy Horton, Thomas Batcheller Cox and the Westside husband and wife team behind “Flower to the People.”

Very occasionally, it is a case of the owner of a landmark wanting to share a notable property with the public. The Peace Theological Seminary, a swell 1910 building that in less meditative times used to be Busby Berkeley’s house, is opening its Peace Awareness Labyrinth and Garden. In Hancock Park, the stunning Renaissance-style garden of Italianate villa of 1920s L.A. architect Pierpont Davis is a one of the city’s most genteel secret treasures.

It is also the home of Larry and Clara Yust, who bought it from the Davis family 17 years ago. After digging the backyard out from the brambles, they found the makings of a classic Tuscan garden: laurel hedges, olive trees, a fruit orchard, herb garden, wooded lane and formal rose garden.

It would take a book, which the conservancy will gladly sell to you for $5 at the sign-up centers, to describe each of the gardens. But what makes this tour so special is the sheer breadth of the personality of the gardens.

This is most vividly demonstrated when different gardeners are working around identical houses. Susan and Sonny Estrada live in a 1914 Craftsman bungalow in Hancock Park, which is set almost back to back with an identical house occupied by Thomas Macias and James Pepper.

As a theme for their garden, the Estradas decided on living chintz. The result could be straight out of a Beatrix Potter novel, right down to their tousle-haired 3-year-old daughter, Eliana

Meanwhile, Macias and Pepper, a couple with a newborn son named Adam, went for what they call a “Pacific Northwest” look. But out back, it is pure California: a garden designed for year-round outdoor entertaining.

The Estradas chose a hard place to be soft. Their bungalow overlooks Wilton Place, a road so busy that it is an unofficial alternative to Western Avenue. The shallow front garden banks steeply up from the road, giving them a small space to accomplish a lot of screening.

Estrada, himself a garden designer and habitual scavenger, started the conversion by building a retaining wall from old concrete that he collected after the 1994 earthquake. He created a rubble version of an old English dry-stone wall. Once there was a series of terraced beds, planting began. Then more planting, until there was a mad profusion of flowers and flowering shrubs: sweet peas, lantana, assylum, fuchsia, nasturtiums, tulips, daffodils, abutilon, pittosporum. For good measure, he topped this all off with a flowering tree: a purple-topped jacaranda.

Amid the exultant jumble, there are some understated but resonant plant choices. In an unusual play on the tradition of planting rosemary or lavender by the front walk to brush against the legs of visitors, and thereby dousing them with perfume, Estrada used silver-leafed Artemisia Powis Castle. When casually brushed, this decidedly feathery shrub exudes a wild, scrub-like perfume reminiscent of a California hillside after the first winter rain.

Estrada calls the style “ordered disarray.” This is design-speak for crowding. In a small garden, Estrada fit in what he estimates are 200 different rose bushes. Beneath the jacaranda, there is even that rarest of specimens: a shade-tolerant rose, Darlow’s Enigma. In back, the wonderland theme only intensifies with a sweetly scented yellow French rambling rose, Ghislaine de Feligonde covering an arbor fashioned out of an old ladder.

Out back, the main feature is a gold fish pond that has attracted frogs, hummingbirds, orioles and dragonflies. The best seats in the house are on a back porch strung year-round with white Christmas lights.

Tips? Buy the lights just after Christmas, he says, when they are $2 a box.

Around the corner, his neighbor Thomas Macias is standing in his “social garden,” a 150-foot-long parkway running alongside his house that he has planted with roses, salvia and poppies. Neighbors stop and call greetings to Adam. Macias isn’t sure how long it takes him to tend the public cutting garden, now. Before Adam was born, he would “be out here all day,” he says, “but I would probably spend three hours chatting with neighbors.”

By the entrance to the bungalow, a handsome stand of Canary Island Pines gives the house what Macias takes to be a Pacific Northwest effect. But once out back, one is not only in California, but in a deliciously well-appointed corner of Los Angeles. Macias and his partner, James Pepper, understand entertaining. It’s their business. They own the entertainment supply store the Good Life.

The garden is so comfortable, they tend to “vacation at home,” says Macias. It has two dining terraces, one out back and one around the side. If this sounds frivolous, it merits noting that two terraces are indeed handy when one spot is hot at lunch and the other cool, or in that particularly L.A. dining emergency: when the perfume of a Madagascar jasmine overpowers the food.

The back garden is small, lush and lyrical. A frilly podocarpus hedge, a citrus allee and long wisteria-covered arbor enclose a small patio, pool and densely planted garden. To the rear, a winding path lined by blooming calla lilies leads to a guest house.

“I love these,” Macias says, pointing to the calla lilies. “They’re the California tulip.” But Macias concedes that he is no plantsman. “For me it’s not so much knowing what the plant is, it’s the satisfaction I get from the plant,” he says.

He selects plants for color, particularly reds and oranges. When he spotted the Altissimo, a blowsy French rose at Huntington Botanical Gardens, he had to have it. Out front, an ochre rose called Brown Velvet has been so beautiful, it’s stopped traffic, he says.

In a tour full of good ideas, Pepper and Macias may just have the best: They have rigged a sink and counter outside on the patio. They don’t have to track dirt in a clean kitchen to wash up, or fill the kitchen sink with ants when they wash vegetables or trim flowers. It is not just for yardwork, says Macias. When they entertain, he clears away potting gear, fills the sink with ice and stows champagne bottles there.

And so to Arabia, also known as Larchmont. When Doug and Marka Meyer bought their 1922 house five years ago, they inherited a curious decorative scheme: a Morrocan-style house with a Japanese hedge. Out went the Bonsai-ed cypress tree and in came palms, flax, lavender and an intense show of the most fragrant and the reddest of red, red roses: Mr. Lincoln.

Anyone with a big house on a small lot should study this garden. The Meyers dealt with the tricky proportions by sticking to minimal, symmetrical planting. Ground cover is gravel. Its elegant crunch is better than an alarm system at detecting intruders and gravel doesn’t craze and crack like concrete as the clay soil swells or shrinks.

The Meyers are the truest of true gardeners. “As a working woman I don’t have time to devote on a garden,” says Marka. “I work on it about 8 hours in a weekend, and that’s about it.”

Only a die-hard calls gardening 416 hours a year “about it.” It’s worth noting, however, that forsaking lawn, and therefore the mowing, edging and stinky clippings, means that Marka’s one day a week can be spent with the most enjoyable sorts of light gardening: deadheading, planting and generally pottering. Meanwhile, Doug Meyer has taken to comprehensive street tree planting around Larchmont.

The final day of the tour begins at the Sunset Magazine Demonstration garden at the former arboretum, now re-named the L.A. County Botanic Garden, and proceeds through some of the finest gardens in Pasadena. There are rose gardens the size of a suburban yard; views to rival the Huntington’s; big pools; dogwoods; and green lawns.

But it is perhaps most useful to confine discussion here to a Amanda Goodan’s garden. She describes it with one word: “achievable.” In fact, the basic design of the front yard is so good, and so simple, that it could work for almost any ranch house anywhere in California.

Normally, the first thing you see in this style of house is the driveway and garage, and most likely a basketball hoop. Goodan’s designer, Robert Cornell, didn’t take these things away, but set a wooded garden in front of them, by creating a circular path lined with olive trees. Working with mixed shade, Goodan under-planted with lavender, salvias, euphorbia and a series of native plants that can survive what she calls her “water diet” (watering once a week).

When the garden develops barren holes, which even the best-tended do, Goodan plugs them in with comical garden sculptures, which she makes from broken garden tools. There is a crow made from old rakes, a cat rigged out of horseshoes and springs and a mosquito cobbled together from shovels.

Goodan, a native Californian, says gardening is the only real way to get the best out of Los Angeles. In her rear garden, she has a small citrus grove, including a Valencia orange, Bearss Lime, Blood Orange and Meyer Lemon.

“I have my California dream,” she says. “You walk out of your kitchen, pick your lemon or lime, walk back in and squeeze it into a glass.” She makes a squeezing motion and zzzzt sound, then bursts out laughing. “And it’s just great.”

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Tour time

The Garden Conservancy’s Open Days tour begins this weekend. Admission is $5 per house, with tickets and tour maps available on the day of the tour at the lead venues listed below. More information and details on wheelchair access are available by calling (888) 842-2442.

SUNDAY

Hancock Park: Ronnie Allumbaugh Gardens at Getty House, 605 S. Irving Blvd., Los Angeles; all gardens open 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.

West Adams: Peace Awareness Labyrinth & Gardens, 3500 W. Adams Blvd., Los Angeles; all gardens open 2 to 6 p.m.

MAY 10

Westside, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades: Flower to the People, 2816 Burkshire Ave., Los Angeles; 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Other area gardens, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

MAY 18

Arcadia and Pasadena: Sunset magazine’s Demonstration garden at the L.A. County Arboretum & Botanic Garden, 301 N. Baldwin Ave., Arcadia; 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Other area gardens open 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. (some houses until 4 p.m.).