Literary Landscape

For Jean Gardner, a photographers’ rep, books and gardens are inextricably linked and indispensable to life. “To quote Cicero,” she says, “ ‘If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.’ ”

Gardner, the daughter of a landscape designer and a book printer, has built much of her life around plants and books. The living room of the 1930s Streamline Moderne house she bought in Silver Lake in 1994 is lined with carefully collected volumes, from novels to art monographs. A chaise longue for reading fills a windowed nook that commands a hilltop view. Below is a three-tier garden threaded with paths that wind and vanish under trees.

But Gardner doesn’t just admire plants from afar. When her book club meets at Gardner’s home, it’s out in the garden, where they relax, embraced by green. “We take our shoes off and stretch out. We drink wine and lounge on pillows. It’s peaceful but stimulating.” She does admit, “The conversation tends to ramble. After a while, we might forget about the book.”

On her own, she wanders up and down the paths, looking for spots that need attention: Maybe a skunk has uprooted an ornamental grass. Maturing trees have been shading out her cassias. An arbutus hedge is getting leggy. On her garden rounds, she often takes a book, and when she’s tired of pruning she settles down in a chair on the top or middle terrace, or on the lawn below. “I camp on the lawn with blankets. It’s like going to the park,” she says.

These three distinctive garden rooms, all reader-friendly, all linked by dramatic diagonal sweeps of silver and green leaves, were the basic elements Gardner and her landscape-designer friend, Melinda Taylor, laid out when they started to work on the slope several years ago. What existed, Gardner says, in addition to the stone patio behind the house, were pittosporum and eugenia hedges, avocado and tangerine trees and a silver “widowmaker” eucalyptus, so called because the bigger branches tend to snap off. Its beauty saved it from the ax, and the other trees stayed too, their graceful canopies adding shade to the evolving scene.

“We conceived a non-flowering ‘green’ garden,” Gardner explains, “with foliage textures moving toward and away from you at whatever level you’re on.”

They transformed a straight flight of stairs, curving it around the tangerine tree and mimicking the shape of some existing steps. Gardner also erected retaining walls to shore up the slope, create planting beds and keep water from draining downhill too fast.

As for plants, she says, the emphasis was on “color, texture, form and toughness. They had to survive.” Unthirsty shrubs that could be used en masse fit the bill: Plectranthus argenteus, Helichrysum petiolare ‘Limelight’ and artemisia ‘Powis Castle.’ In extra-shady spots she resorted to aspidistra and liriope. Where sunlight managed to penetrate, she added pots of succulents and flowering or variegated plants. To jazz up the lawn on the lowest level, Taylor suggested cutting in a swath of variegated St. Augustine grass. Although it never grew to the women’s satisfaction (and has since been replaced with spider plants and tumbled glass), they both enjoyed the experiment.

“Plants grow, they die, they’re dynamic,” Gardner says. “You don’t just dig them in and walk away.”

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Resource Guide

Melinda Taylor Garden Design, Los Angeles, (323) 666-9181.