Hands-On Plan
For Tony and Mona Nicholas, house, garden and children arrived in that order. In 1992, they bought a 1950s Benedict Canyon ranch-style house. Architect Michael Maltzan was hired to pare it down and lighten it up, editing out walls, adding windows and glass doors, and updating bathrooms and the kitchen.
Two years later, with help from landscape designer Melinda Taylor, the Nicholases broke ground on the garden, and once plants were in their beds, Mona went into labor with daughter Oona, now 8. “I was gardening,” she recalls.
Which hints at the couple’s take on home improvements. Aside from drawing up plans and moving walls--jobs they hand to the proper experts--they try to do all landscaping themselves. “No one does it the way you would,” Tony observes, and Mona adds, “Especially the way he would.”
On a spacious overlook backed by fuzzy hills, Tony planted every speck of green himself, after hacking through shale soil and throwing in compost. He and Mona chose the plants, too, after Taylor plotted out the space and made horticultural suggestions. “Having never gardened, Tony went from zero to 100 in 40 seconds,” Taylor says, describing the exhaustive research, nursery-hopping and experimenting that was Tony’s gardening education.
Tony is an art collector who runs the Sam Francis estate and the Lapis Press and Circa Publishing, which has produced fine-art editions of Frank Gehry’s architectural design sketches. He compares landscaping to other visual arts. “With its layered colors and textures, a garden can be very painterly,” he says. “But it’s also fragrant and rustling and alive.” Hikes in local hills had given him and Mona, an accountant, an appreciation for native plants. Trips to Spain showed them seductive models for outdoor life, such as secluded courtyards in wild settings that enhanced the drama of the green retreats.
Taylor, who also more recently landscaped downtown’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, recalls a meeting when the couple described their early garden goals: They wanted a buffer from the street, screening for an existing kidney- shaped pool and outdoor rooms where they could dine and lounge en famille. Then they pointed to the foliage in the nearby canyon and said, “We’d like to wrap the house in that.”
They traded existing ‘50’s-era plants--yuccas, pompom junipers, Algerian ivy--for California natives, and swapped the pool’s concrete deck for Bouquet Canyon stone. They spared old Canary Island pines for shade and screening and added more pines and acacias. Architect Maltzan designed stacked-concrete privacy walls with translucent gates for the garden’s entry and similar walls to divide the pool terrace from a small round and shady lawn.
The house’s simple lines and expansive windows inspired them to plant sheltering vines. The tough soil and baking sun helped eliminate certain choices from the planting beds. Ceanothus ‘Concha,’ for example, didn’t make it, though Pride of Madeira and St. Catherine’s lace did.
So did drought-tolerant, sun-happy Mediterraneans such as santolina, artemisia and lavender. “I’ve learned patience,” Tony concedes, reciting a gardener’s credo about native plants: “The first year they sleep, the second they creep, the third they leap.”
It was in the leaping year that his son Cole, now 6, was born, and the mahonias were finally blasting off around the pool. Like Oona, Tony says, Cole is growing up immersed in the garden. “This is a way of life for us, and it has totally changed our life,” he says, describing a division of labor in which he digs and plants, Mona prunes and weeds and the children deadhead blooms and pick the dinner herbs.
“As it is, the garden’s always changing,” Tony concludes. “Whatever you plan for, you have to plan to be surprised.”
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Resource Guide
Melinda Taylor Garden Design, Los Angeles, (323) 666-9181; Michael Maltzan Architecture, Los Angeles, (323) 913-3098.
