Garden’s Creator Remembered
Amir Dialameh toiled more than 30 years with a pick and shovel to turn a scorched and barren Griffith Park hilltop into a lush, shaded grove that is visited daily by a steady stream of hikers and horseback riders.
On Saturday, more than 100 friends and acquaintances assembled at “Amir’s Garden” to offer remembrances of the Iranian immigrant and wine merchant who died last month at 71.
As visitors wandered the garden’s tangle of footpaths and horses drank from a stone trough, those attending the memorial recalled Dialameh as a man who had dedicated much of his life to creating and maintaining the garden.
“When I first came here, there was nothing,” said Dialameh’s brother, Masoud, 67. “And now, look at this. I think he was working too much here.... When we asked him why he never married, he’d point to the trees and say, ‘This is my wife. These are my children.’ ”
Amir Dialameh began working on the five-acre plot, near the Los Angeles Zoo, after a fire swept through the park in 1971. Hiking up to the ridge each day, Dialameh planted eucalyptus trees, ash, pine and jacaranda amid the charred chaparral. In several years it was a prime resting point for hikers and riders.
During the garden’s first years, friends and relatives helped pitch in with the reconstruction. Dialameh’s nephew, Farrokh Ashtiani, recalled how difficult it had been to work the hard, clay-like soil, and how challenging it had been to fashion the earth into steps and construct retaining walls.
“This soil is very frustrating,” Ashtiani said, pounding his heel against a footpath. “If you want to plant something, you will become very frustrated.”
Dialameh, however, seemed immune to such frustrations, even when struggling to pound metal stakes into the earth to hold his carefully crafted steps into place. Ashtiani said patience and good humor were what had made his uncle so special.
“You could not carry on a serious conversation with him for more than three minutes before he made you laugh,” Ashtiani said. “If you were not feeling good, he would change your mood immediately.”
On two occasions the garden was nearly destroyed by subsequent brush fires, but Dialameh and park rangers helped prevent its destruction.
“He almost single handedly saved this park by keeping it moist and green,” said Mark Mariscal, a superintendent in the city’s Recreation and Parks Department. “He was a godsend to us.”
The garden is roughly a half-mile hike uphill from the Mineral Wells picnic area off Griffith Park Drive, west of the zoo.
