Silver Lake’s sweet pea surprise

THE turquoise truck in the driveway reads more artist than soccer mom, but otherwise Tara Kolla’s house resembles its neighbors on this Silver Lake cul-de-sac. Nothing, not even the exuberant scarlet passionflower draping the front windows, prepares a visitor for the view from the rear.

Sweet peas, a virtual forest of them, stand ruffled, scented and 10 feet high in a dozen long rows. Forget patios and pool parties: This is a growing field. The scene might be from 90 years back, when Theodore Payne raised wildflowers along Los Feliz Boulevard and local housewives supplemented their grocery money by hybridizing petunias.

Kolla, workmanlike in sweats, rests -- momentarily -- on a low wall overlooking the garden. During the past three years, the Los Angeles native with a pronounced British accent has become a familiar presence at farmers markets downtown and in Silver Lake. In an era of iron-stemmed lilies sold in convenience stores, sweet peas tempt by their very fragility, and hers come in colors seldom seen in local backyards: soft tangerine, deep maroon, white with cherry stripes. Their presentation too has the artless charm of a country garden. Blossoms are sold from canning jars grouped in iron carriers that recall a milkman’s gear; a bouquet might be set off, Victorian style, by geranium leaves.

Kolla’s own romance with the frilly flowers is of more recent vintage.

“I picked up this magazine,” she says, jumping up to remove a flat of seedlings from a tray of water and replace it with another. “It was Garden Design, the February issue of 2003, and on the cover was this beautiful sweet pea flower, and it was blue, and I just fell in love. I came out here and tested the soil -- took a little home tester kit. Now bear in mind I knew nothing about gardening.”

What Kolla, 41, did know about was problem solving. She had studied modern languages and information theory at Bristol University in England and worked as a systems analyst at American Express. By the time sweet peas caught her attention, she had been running her own public relations firm for 10 years and was ready for a new challenge. The daughter of an English mother and an Indian father, she was also, thanks to a childhood that included stints in Minnesota, France and Ireland, ready to put down some serious roots.

Kolla and her husband, Beat Frutiger, a Swiss-born art director for film, bought the Silver Lake house in 2001. They knew it had an oversized lot -- 21,000 square feet -- but the seller, an aging widow, had let it run wild. Ailanthus crowded out the plum trees and hid the stone terraces on the north-facing hillside. Once cleared, the yard’s Olympic-size dimensions might have inspired some couples to dream of a swimming pool. It was not an option, Kolla says, that either of them considered.

Instead, armed with the soil test’s “perfect” results -- “sandy loam,” she says, “pH about 7.1, sweet peas love an alkaline soil” -- she and Frutiger put in 19 rows. Silver Lake Farms was born.

Down in the rows, Kolla reaches for an ivory specimen with a faint lilac flush. “You have to smell ‘April in Paris,’ ” she says. The plump perfumed beauty was bred in New Zealand. She grows other varieties from England, Maine and Northern California, but one that farmers market customers won’t see is the turquoise flower that first caught her fancy: Lathyrus sativus azureus. It’s an antique species whose single blossoms are much smaller than modern hybrids.

Kolla begins sowing in September, and by now the earliest plants are showing their age with shortened stems. In a good year, by planting through the fall, she has blooms from Christmas to June.

“I learned it all the hard way,” Kolla says with a laugh.

Heat waves in spring 2004, her first growing season, taught her why professional flower farmers love shade cloth. That same season also produced a bumper crop of aphids, soon followed by a leaf-deforming mosaic virus. The bugs, she explains, carried it with them from a nearby patch of clover.

Kolla doesn’t use pesticides, so two whole rows had to be ripped out -- a task so dispiriting she had to ask a friend to do it. These days the clover has been eradicated, aphid-eating ladybugs are well established, and Kolla has planted wooden boxes at the end of each row with flowering coriander to attract other beneficial insects.

Despite the setbacks, the mini-farm’s first season was riotously successful. Kolla had the foresight to contact the city about her plans to grow flowers commercially. (“This is a garden,” she remembers the inspector saying. “I don’t see why not.”) Armed with a wholesale and retail license, she was able to sell her surplus to local florists.

Another problem revealed itself in the wet winter of 2005. The rows were so close together that they prevented the air circulation necessary to forestall powdery mildew. Kolla has since planted fewer rows, farther apart. “Are locusts next?” she jokes.

Even without plagues, farming is not for the faint-hearted. Kolla rises at 4 a.m. on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, straps on a headlamp, pulls up her socks (she worries about spiders) and goes out to cut flowers. The nights before she has washed out her carriers and set them near the door. When the jars are filled, she loads them onto the vintage pickup along with her selling table and awning and drives to market.

The rest of the week is busy too. Silver Lake Farms’ current configuration consists of 12 rows of sweet peas. The soil must be rotated -- by Kolla, using a spade -- every two years. The rows are separated by beds devoted to warm season annuals such as sunflowers, strawflowers, scabiosa and zinnia, whose seedlings crowd the flats by the garden wall.

Eventually, Kolla aims to sell flowers in the farmers markets year-round. Already a patch of chrysanthemums by the compost pile is promising softball-size blooms for the fall, but the summer flowers are behind schedule. Their planting was delayed by Kolla’s school schedule. She has been studying soil science and landscape design at Pierce College in Woodland Hills.

So when does she get a vacation? For a moment Kolla is uncharacteristically speechless.

“Ah,” she says at last. “When it rains, I guess. And if it’s really hot, you have to sit indoors and wait.” She pauses to select some more sweet peas -- blues and lavenders -- for the bouquet she’s making.

“I tell you, it’s changed me as a person -- going at the pace of nature and waiting for things to naturally show themselves, or fix themselves, or grow,” Kolla says, adding that compared with previous jobs, in which work always moved at a frenetic pace, growing sweet peas has been a real test. “But,” she adds quickly, “in a good way.”

Ariel Swartley can be reached at home@latimes.com.

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Keep ‘em blooming

Tara Kolla sells flowers Saturdays at the Silver Lake farmers market at Sunset Junction, 3700 Sunset Blvd.; Wednesdays at the downtown market at 650 W. 5th St.; and Sundays at the Atwater Village market, 3250 Glendale Blvd. Kolla’s season is winding down, so she may not be present each week.

If you do have cut sweet peas -- hers or your own -- here are Kolla’s tips for getting the most out of them:

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Add a teaspoon of sugar

to the water.

Don’t place the flowers

near ripening fruit.

Keep them out of direct sun.

Change the water every day.

-- Ariel Swartley