Unearthing gems for the garden
It’s a Monday morning at Inner Gardens in West Los Angeles, and every time his phone rings, Stephen Block switches the call to an answering machine. Business can wait. Right now he’d rather rhapsodize about a few of his favorite objects. When he gets to an 18th century Indian dinner bell, he examines it closely and declares: “God, I like old rust!”
Block’s enthusiasm for the antique is matched only by his passion for the handmade. He combines both in filling his 8,000-square-foot store with a global array of sophisticated garden accessories and furniture. Whether it’s $20 vintage English terra-cotta pots or an $18,000 19th century French wire gazebo, Block considers what he sells “the jewelry for the garden -- the sparkly parts that bring a home to life.”
The result is a showroom as unusual as the artifacts it houses. “Inner Gardens is the designer’s secret resource,” says interior designer Michael Berman. “It’s a one-stop shop with the most amazing one-of-a-kind pieces.”
Yet the store represents only half of the exclusive inventory. Out back, in a hillside nursery, Block also sells plants. But not just any plants -- a 25-gallon Harry Lauder’s walking stick, its corkscrew limbs a gnarly frizz; a massive succulent called “sticks on fire” that glows orange-pink; several English boxwoods pruned into perfect spirals; and a host of other large-scale exotica.
“Aren’t these great?” Block says, stopping beside the 8-foot-tall boxwood topiaries. “Some are 30, 40 years old. You don’t find that every day, so I bought what I could from this specialty grower in Oregon who had seven different varieties of boxwood. I had to have them all.”
Block, born 50 years ago in Vero Beach, Fla., has been smitten with plants since college. One fall, he accidentally broke a piece off a rubber tree, then marveled the next spring as it sprouted in a glass of water: “From that point on, I was hooked.”
Block later opened a plant kiosk in a mall and studied ornamental horticulture for a time, but then his life took a major detour. He finished his broadcasting degree only to wind up selling residential real estate in Miami Beach. In 1982 he moved to Los Angeles for a change of scene but landed back in real estate, this time wheeling and dealing in commercial buildings on the Westside.
“People used to laugh at me because, during business meetings, I’d be off to the side of the room, dusting the plants,” Block says. “I’d also been seeing an art therapist for a while. She would ask me to imagine myself someplace happy, and I would draw all these greenhouses.”
Still, it wasn’t until 1990, after Block contracted a severe case of hepatitis, that he decided to quit real estate and start a plant maintenance company out of his garage. “I went from an Armani suit in the penthouse one day to wearing jeans and a T-shirt and carrying a bucket and scissors the next,” he says. “I needed to do what I loved.”
Today, 13 years after he launched it, Inner Gardens (6050 W. Jefferson Blvd., L.A.) continues to bring Block inner peace and inspire creativity in others. “Inner Gardens is so much fun,” says landscape designer Mia Lehrer. “It’s like going on a trip abroad. I know I’ll always find great containers, especially urns, or antique benches or putti.”
Adds interior designer Michael Smith: “I use more interior plants now because, when I want something more distinctive than a classic ficus or a palm, like a Ficus triangularis, Stephen finds it for me. Before, I wasn’t happy with what I saw. It just wasn’t special enough.”
Block’s staff has expanded to 20 employees handling the showroom and nursery as well as studio rentals, landscape design, a line of reproduction garden accessories and a community program of garden lectures and art exhibitions. Block also opened a second shop (9825 Melrose Ave., L.A.) in January, but he still manages to handpick every item for the store. Where he once frequented flea markets and garage sales, he now makes regular pilgrimages across the United States and to the south of France, Brussels, Morocco, Spain and China.
Fortunately, Block’s wife, Julie, a costume designer for the sitcom “The King of Queens,” likes to shop too. Before the couple had daughters Lily Rose, 2, and Charlotte Emma, 9 months, they spent their honeymoon on a buying spree in Hong Kong, China and Bali. “I love treasure hunting and finding beautiful objects. But whatever it is, it’s got to have the patina of age,” Block says. “If a terra-cotta bust from 17th century England has no signs of age, then it really doesn’t interest me.”
Likewise when it comes to common flora. “Too many growers grow only what Home Depot, IKEA and Lowe’s can sell -- a 5 1/2-foot plant for $19.95,” he says. By contrast, Block seeks out the odd, even the imperfect. “When I go to a nursery, the first place I go is the ‘hospital’ to find the plant that got knocked over and broken. To me, that plant is going to be so much more interesting.”
