Her wild side
THAYA DUBOIS opens the wooden door that leads through a tall eugenia hedge, under the purple-flowered sandpaper vine and into her private world. “I hope you like dogs,” she says, nudging Rufio the English bull and Freddie the poodle off the path. “They think it’s their garden.”
Actually, she says, rethinking her choice of words, the garden is for the dogs, the birds, the butterflies, the raccoons, the bees. “They’re all invited.”
It’s a philosophy that makes sense, coming from a woman whose first garden was designed for gorillas.
For 15 years duBois was a biologist and assistant director of research at the Los Angeles Zoo. In 1986 she created the innovative Gorilla Garden at the Sepulveda Garden Center in Encino to provide interesting foods to bored captive creatures. Working with volunteers, she grew and harvested fruits, shoots, roots, flowers and seed pods -- all akin to the gorillas’ diet in the wild. Giant sunflowers, banana leaves, corn stalks (sans cobs) and sweet potato vines were popular fare with the animals.
“The gorillas sniffed and ate the roses,” duBois says. “It was almost as if they craved being around greenery as much as they craved eating it.”
Aided by volunteers and grasses expert John Greenlee, who would become her mentor, she filled zoo enclosures with flora that evoked the animals’ native habitats.
“Thaya was good,” says Ralph Crane, former assistant director of the L.A. Zoo and longtime gardener at the Sepulveda Center, a community garden operated by the city. “She applied her knowledge of animal science to a garden that provided not just food but also activity and play for many zoo animals. These days, it’s a big thing in zoos to keep the animals occupied.”
Crane, who is also past president of the Southern California Horticultural Society, sensed duBois’ potential as a horticulturist. He was right. DuBois eventually left the zoo and has become an emerging garden designer with a naturalistic style that manages to be traditional yet wild, restrained yet run amok.
Walk through her Studio City home garden, and it’s clear her previous life as a biologist informs her new career. The space is a colorful, sweet-scented sanctuary for family, pets and urban wildlife. No primates in sight, but it’s no accident that butterflies touch down on the verbena, and mockingbirds fill the night with noisy song.
Meadows are her passion. The sprawling frontyard, designed and planted with Greenlee’s guidance, is a rowdy mix of sedges, grasses, bulbs and flowering perennials, a field of continual movement and changing textures throughout the year. Spent flowers and fat seed pods are left where birds and the wind find them.
“As a plant nerd, it’s fun and satisfying to have Thayas out there,” says Greenlee, who considers duBois a friend and a talented designer. “You’re looking at a meadow with all its inhabitants, and you think: ‘Isn’t this amazing?’ You hope someone else feels the same -- that these plantings are good for people, birds, bees, moles and all the other of God’s creatures.
“Thaya gets it. She’s part of the revolution.”
DUBOIS was one of six daughters (the “bossy eldest one”) who grew up in Santa Cruz. Her father taught biology; her mother taught foreign languages and special education. DuBois has vivid recollections of her grandmother’s house in Santa Cruz, “a wonderful old Mission-style home on top of a hill with redwoods behind, ocean below and fruit trees,” she says. Irises, pelargoniums, a climbing Cecile Brunner rose with tiny pink rosebuds and an enormous cream-colored angel’s trumpet (Brugmansia) tree filled the landscape.
“The grown-ups would tell us children never to fall asleep under the angel’s trumpet because breathing the plant’s perfume would put one to sleep forever, which, of course, made it all the more enticing,” duBois says. “I’d sneak up on the flowers, inhale slightly, then run away.”
Plants, duBois says, connect us with places and people, which may explain why she now has three angel’s trumpet trees in her backyard and a Cecile Brunner outside her son’s room. Small patches of sword fern and German iris hail from her father-in-law’s garden.
DuBois majored in biology at UC Santa Cruz, where she met her husband, David Ehrman. Her graduate studies at Rutgers included a stint researching monkeys in the Caribbean. Tired of academia and just short of her doctorate, duBois moved with Ehrman to Los Angeles, where she would visit the L.A. Zoo, sit on a bench, watch the monkeys and imagine she was back in the Caribbean.
While Ehrman worked as a television writer, duBois volunteered at the zoo and eventually landed a job in the research department. The couple and their two kids later settled in Studio City, in an airy, 1935 English country-style house with a rambling garden.
“I pulled weeds, trimmed shrubs and became acquainted with the writings of eccentric English gardeners with wonderful names like Penelope Hobhouse and Gertrude Jekyll,” duBois says. “I became a serious amateur gardener.”
In 1998 she enrolled in UCLA Extension’s gardening and horticulture certificate program. “I went from fauna to flora,” she says, developing a love for the sciences of botany, taxonomy and soils. With bolstered confidence and Greenlee’s help, her frontyard became the meadow.
“I remember John telling me to landscape the way Mother Nature does,” duBois says. “That means in natural-looking plant drifts that blend into each other -- much the way you see plants and grasses growing on a hillside or prairie.”
Step into the back garden and you’ll find a pool edged with lavender and rosemary, a sloping lawn dusted with jacaranda blossoms and an herb-filled aromatherapy garden. Pathways end in two hidden corners with meadow sedges: a cool nook with tropical plants and a green-and-white garden with an old fountain and birdbath.
AS a designer, duBois prefers to refurbish and renovate existing landscapes rather than fill an empty space. “Give me rundown gardens that need punching up,” she says.
She loves unusual plants: lemon yellow and pale peach cannas, aspidistras with stripes and speckles, rare azaleas. Every section includes seating, a chance to rest and take in the view, scent and sound.
A garden, she says, should always make its presence felt, even indoors. “That connection with nature confers a state of well-being,” she says. From inside the house, vignettes of her landscape are framed by each window.
DuBois wishes she had space for a “proper” vegetable garden, now relegated to a bed along the driveway. Her son worries that Mom’s tomatoes are polluted by car exhaust, and her daughter drove over the arugula. “I can show you the tire tracks,” she says, laughing.
“That’s one other thing about Thaya,” Greenlee says. “She has the most infectious, slightly mischievous laugh. At the end of the day, gardening should be fun, and it’s refreshing to be with someone who laughs.”
There’s no doubt duBois is enjoying herself. “My first experience with gardening was an attempt to enrich the lives of zoo animals,” she says. “Now, many years later, it is gardening that enriches my life.”
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Lili Singer can be reached at home@latimes.com.
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How the grass grows
One of Thaya duBois’ passions are meadow grasses. Some tips for growing your own:
Planting: A meadow can be planted anytime except during a heat wave, but it’s easiest to install one in the fall and let winter rains and cooler temperatures help the grasses and sedges to get established.
Watering: DuBois waters her meadow of sedges, grasses, perennials and spring-flowering bulbs twice weekly for about 10 minutes during the warm months, weekly in winter if rain is scarce.
Maintenance: DuBois trims vines and clears pathways periodically, assisted by helper Alex Resendiz. “We cut back the big grasses in late fall,” duBois says. “I rather like the garden looking bare in the winter because the spring explosion of growth is so dramatic.”
-- Lili Singer
