Angelenos enter their yellow period
AS a newcomer to Los Angeles in the 1980s, I was shocked by the real estate agent who suggested I cut down the soaptree yuccas in our just-purchased frontyard. True, the house was a New England colonial and the yuccas, native to Mexico and the Southwest, were emphatically not. But to me, those spiky-leaved clumps -- dating to the 1920s when the neighborhood was laid out -- were one of the details that gave the house its period charm.
It takes only a few weeks in Southern California to realize that history here is written outdoors as much as inside. Los Angeles home gardens are full of vintage plants that reflect tastes and enthusiasms peculiar to specific decades. To view the region as a vast attic stuffed with horticultural antiques is to uncover unanswered questions, unsuspected stories and not a few prejudices -- including our own.
Some styles are perennial. Many of the California plantings pictured in a 1920 article in Garden Magazine could be contemporary: a cactus landscape flanking a sunny walkway, a shaded group of foxglove and cineraria.
One photo, though, screams “vanished past.” In it, a pair of 50-foot palms are engulfed from base to fronds in twining Lady Banks’ roses (Rosa banksiae). Often climbers of that era are impossible to find, but the pale yellow Lady Banks’, still a vigorous 20-foot grower, remains widely available.
The smothered palm, however, has gone the way of Victorian relics such as the fringed velvet lampshade. Is it because later generations wanted a more streamlined look? Because the woody stems are a fire hazard? Or because 50-foot roses are a relic of a time when cultivation was relatively new to the L.A. Basin, and the alluvial soils were packed with untapped nutrients?
Gardeners often pride themselves on being above the petty winds of fashion. Our closets may contain imprudently heeled shoes, but out in the dirt we’re faced with life’s eternal verities: impacted clay soil, voracious green worms. Why would we be tempted by an imported shrub just because the neighbors have one? Why indeed? It took only one drive through West Los Angeles to convert me to the purple princess flower shrub (Tibouchina urvilleana). On certain blocks, yard after yard boasted a specimen whose velvety, saucer-size blooms made my own yard seem so pale, so tame.
According to Victoria Padilla’s “Southern California Gardens: An Illustrated History,” Tibouchina was first imported by Hugh Evans, a British-born plantsman who called it one of the finest plants he introduced -- high praise from a man whose horticultural introductions cover two large pages in Padilla’s book.
The Evans and Reeves nursery opened in Brentwood Heights in 1936 and was probably the source of most of the bushes grown in the area. Westsiders were lucky: Like many breathtaking specimens, Tibouchina is temperamental. Native to Brazil, it likes sun, but not too much. Away from the coast it turns shabby fast. It also dislikes clay soil and is massively attractive to the tobacco budworm.
PLANT fashions, like the peasant blouse, are always ripe for revival. A 1908 issue of the Pasadena-based Pacific Garden magazine contained “A Plea for the Nasturtium,” lamenting local gardeners’ reluctance to plant “this old-fashioned favorite.” That’s one problem that’s long been corrected.
On the other hand, there are plants like the cup-of-gold vine (Solandra maxima) that seem to me to be the horticultural equivalent of go-go boots. They deserve to go out of style.
At their best, the flowers of this massive vine are a dull yellow, reminiscent of 1970s kitchen appliances. At their worst -- dead, yet refusing to drop from the plant -- they resemble old baseball gloves. In the 1915 edition of “The Garden Beautiful in California: a Practical Manual for All Who Garden,” Ernest Braunton offered the defense that the flowers’ great size (“several inches across”) made them the largest of any climbing shrub. Charles Francis Saunders offered a more romantic view in “Trees and Shrubs of California Gardens,” writing that the Aztecs drank the blossoms in their chocolate. Or did he mean that they drank their chocolate in the blossoms? In 1926, when Saunders was writing, the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena boasted a multistory specimen, but he noted that so much sunlight was blocked by the vine that the hotel hacked back “literally tons of the rampant stems and leaves.”
Fifteen years ago cup-of-gold was an oddity. Lately I’ve noticed a resurgence, particularly as a focal point for smaller areas. One precipitating factor may be the 2001 revision of the “Sunset Western Garden Book.” The vine is pictured twice in the Plant Selection Guide, most prominently in a new section, “Plants for Tropical Effects.” The close-up of two blossoms gives them a buttery appearance rather than the usual mustard color and shows off the striking geometric pattern of dark brown lines inside -- a feature, the guide notes, that’s seldom seen when the plant is used on a high wall. But the text never mentions those hideous dead blossoms.
With their lavish illustrations, catalogs are powerful tastemakers, but we have an influence on them too. One of the most intriguing photos in a 1950 offering from the now-defunct Tuttle Bros. Nurseries in Altadena shows an unfamiliar shrub whose red-brown flowers look as dark as a chocolate cosmos. The catalog calls it old-fashioned sweet shrub; growers know it as Carolina allspice (Calycanthus floridus).
Tidy-leaved, unusually colored, and fragrant, it could be a garden star, but I wouldn’t plant it: The seeds can cause convulsions. Awareness of plants’ poisonous properties has spread rapidly in the last couple of decades, and many gardeners don’t like to take the chance of a curious child becoming ill when there are so many other choices.
One reason for this new awareness may be our growing passion for landscaping that we can eat -- especially herbs. In the Tuttle catalog they rate only a passing mention. Contemporary nurseries, however, have expanded their stock tremendously, offering four or five varieties each of lavender, rosemary, sage -- components of the aromatic Mediterranean garden that has become a modern Los Angeles trademark.
What else will garden historians remember as the signature plants of this decade? I would hope the pale-pink Mexican evening primrose (Oenothera speciosa) gets a mention, but I worry that it’s already going out of style. I wish the same could be said about the bronze New Zealand flax (Phormium tenax). As stiff as metal sculpture, it remains the home-remodeler’s favorite foundation ornament, though kangaroo paw (Anigozanthos) has been gaining recent ground. One thing we can count on: Someone out there is planting something we’ve never seen before -- or noticed. In a few years we’ll wonder how we gardened without it.
Ariel Swartley can be reached at home@latimes.com.
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Planting a trend
Flax today, kangaroo paw tomorrow. Some reminders about plants that have fallen in and out of (and sometimes back in) fashion:
Lady Banks’ rose: Grows tall and flowers prolifically, though petals may drop easily. Remains widely available.
Princess flower: Tibouchina urvilleana (pictured at right). Brilliant flowers, velvety leaves. Does better by the coast. Widely available.
Cup-of-gold vine: Solandra maxima. Enjoying a resurgence, possibly because of its listing in the Sunset Western Garden Book, which describes it as a “fast-growing, sprawling, rampant vine” with night-fragrant flowers that can be “spectacular” along fences.
Mexican evening primrose: Oenothera speciosa. Low-growing, delicate-looking but tough flower that blooms in pale pink. Plant can spread aggressively. Widely available.
Kangaroo paw: Anigozanthos (shown on F1). Fuzzy flower spikes can last weeks. Dwarf hybrids available in multiple colors. The new garden staple?
From Times staff
