Spring on Display in Annual Tour

Pacific Palisades Garden Club Garden Tour

Sunday, April 17, noon to 4 p.m., rain or shine. Plant Market, noon to 4 p.m. at 13545 D’Este.   Tickets ($25 in advance; $30 on tour day) are available at the Sunday Farmers’ Market and the plant market on the day of the tour, Gift Garden Antiques (15266 Antioch, next to Noah’s Bagels), Yamaguchi Nursery (1905 Sawtelle Blvd.) and Merrihew’s Nursery (1526 Ocean Park Blvd.), or by mail to the Pacific Palisades Garden Club, 550 Lucero Ave., Pacific Palisades, CA 90272.   The six distinctive gardens on the tour are spread out and include homes in the Riviera, the Alphabet streets and Marquez Knolls, plus a Brentwood and Santa Monica. Proceeds from the tour benefit community education and beautification and student gardens at public schools.   Please, no dogs in the gardens. For more iInformation, call (310) 459-4084 or (310) 472-3374..

Chautauqua Boulevard I

  Some of the most successful gardens evolve from collaboration between the client and designer. In the case of this garden, the homeowner working with FormLA achieved a reorientation of her house following feng shui principles. This ancient Chinese art of placement encourages the beneficial flow of chi (energy force), which affects health, wealth and relationships.   The approach to the house, located on this very busy street, is lined with an interesting variety of native plants, including lion’s tail sage, deer grass, juncos (ornamental grass) and the Australian grevillea (evergreen flowering plants in the protea family). The parkway features red fescue, a long grass that waves in the breeze like a field of wheat.   As soon as you pass through the gate, the landscape, the home and the surrounding trees create a private, calm world. The home itself is oriented east to west, so the homeowner moved the front door from the east wall to the south wall for maximum good luck. In addition, the water feature located in the front symbolizes prosperity and creates yin energy.   Golden bamboo shields the perimeter of property along Chautauqua and provides privacy for the expansive yard that includes a children’s play area within. A path leads around the house towards the back, and 180-degrees view of Rustic Canyon and Santa Monica Bay. Designers used ipe, a sustainable hardwood from South America known for its beauty and endurance, for the gates and outdoor furniture.   The backyard makes for a perfect entertainment venue, complete with tables, chairs, picnic table, Viking barbecue and a fire pit.   Trees anchoring the design include western red bud, pittosporum, persimmon and saucer magnolia. Paddle plants and Myers asparagus provide texture and color in the bedding areas. ‘ LIBBY MOTIKA

Evanston Avenue

  An old Brentwood garden is a rare sight these days and a treasure of specimen trees and bushes. The house stretches east-west along Evanston, so the garden travels along the perimeter of the street until you reach the formal entry. Truly a fairyland opens up both left and right. To the left, an impressive grove of camellias, abutilon, begonias and azaleas co-exist happily under large cedars. Lily-shaped lights line the path of pavers, artfully placed on top of a gravel matrix. Every so often, a seating opportunity pops up, inviting the visitor to seat, read or just daydream. Some are wrought iron, another is stacked Bouquet Canyon stone. The homeowner is fond of whimsical garden features’a fairy tea party here, a butterfly there.   The backyard is to the right of the main garden entrance. An ornamental fountain, designed by John Barnes and stocked with koi, signals the way towards the secret garden beyond. A potting shed looks every bit like a Beatrix Potter watercolor. ‘ LIBBY MOTIKA

Chautauqua Boulevard II

  The lush grove of assorted palms bordering the circular drive on Chautauqua’tall stately queens, tidily symmetrical sagos, spiky fans and fat, leafy bananas’shades a vibrantly dense undergrowth of green, sparked by the white of plants like variegated aspidistra and the vivid, glossy scarlet leaves of coprosma. There are few blooms, but they are not missed here amidst the voluptuous texture. Visitors cross a small, spare bridge to reach the front entry, passing by two tiny sentries, turtles happy to have claimed a sunny rock amidst the chubby, well-fed koi in the big pond below.   Those who wander around the low-slung contemporary home to the back will find a carefully curated collection of colorful blooms, including clivia, grevillea and kangaroo paws, organized in relatively spare tableaus around the freeform pool. Landscape designer Jo Ann Bright of AAA Plantscapes says she acted as a sort of curator for the garden, which was too crowded with random selections when she took on the project about three years ago. She organized, condensed and shifted plant material from front to back, crafting themes among the mayhem. A copse of tall palms in one corner offers an echo of the front entry and a lovely spot for a hammock.   The back of the house is definitely designed for indoor/outdoor living, with plenty of comfortable groupings to lounge or dine under the shady overhang that runs its length and admire the wide-open view across Santa Monica Canyon. ‘ELIZABETH MARCELLINO

Palisades Avenue

  A riot of texture and color greets visitors to this Spanish-Mediterranean home in Santa Monica. The rustic Mexican tiles of the walkway match the hue of the tiled roof and are interspersed with others patterned in orange and white and pleasingly worn with age. Wisteria and roses climb arbors at the sidewalk and over the driveway, and an abundant and eclectic mix of blooms, including statice, gazanias and lamb’s ear, form a wild English garden bordered by boxwood.   Swinging open the massive dark wood doors to the courtyard, visitors confront a profusion of trees and blooms of every type’including cypress, olive and stone fruit trees and begonias, hydrangeas, grasses and succulents. Many are potted in large, waist-high pots and arranged by garden design firm Ruby Begonia. A knotty trumpet vine mingled with wisteria winds along the roof of a Monterrey-style balcony on the second floor. Amid the tranquil and tropically dense oasis of greenery and flowers sits a fountain, with a large clay pot serving as spout.   Around the corner, past a koi pond, is a pool lined with both short and tall palms and fed by a row of clam shell-shaped fountains. A raised terrace off the kitchen fronts the pool and hosts more potted stone fruit and citrus, which sweeten the air.   The back yard opens onto a series of lovely arched doorways leading to a guesthouse and coral and jacaranda trees that circle a small open lawn. One shady corner of cool dirt flanked by ferns and a lush ginger plant offers a secluded spot to sit and contemplate nature.  ’ ELIZABETH MARCELLINO

Capri Drive

  The property on Capri offers an astonishing array of gardens, with trees and plantings as carefully chosen on the far street-side border of the property as the three lovely magnolias and abundant hellebore in a boxwood frame that distinguish the formal entry. The residence’s pale buff yellow paint was chosen to match the marvelous bark of an ancient-looking tree mid-property, which may be a coral or some species of fig.   The homeowner, a hands-on gardener, is diligently attentive to everything horticultural’from the health of soil microorganisms to the custom design of wrought-iron cages for her tomato and bean plants. She has mixed classic formality and modern whimsy, perhaps most evident in a partiere, or knot garden’a typically tight border of boxwood is filled with a dense planting of colorful succulents, including zwartkop and echeveria.   The adjacent garden is devoted to vegetables’English peas are crisp and ripe and will soon be replaced by summer tomatoes. Artichokes, Swiss chard, beets and lettuce fill the series of raised beds bordered in stone and separated by wide walkways. It’s a biodynamic garden where insects and bees thrive, organized with help from John Lyons of The Woven Garden, whose specialty is edible gardens.   Yards and yards away, on the far side of the house, past a gigantically impudent snail, cast in bronze and sitting on the durable and spongy St. Augustine grass, is a terraced orchard that would make a Whole Foods manager cry with envy. Pear, apple, apricot, almond, fig, plum, persimmon, pomegranate, Meyer lemon and other citrus trees abound.   There are more surprises around the corner’the property seems full of them. As you leave again past the front fence you may be amazed, as the owner was, by a couple of mangos found growing amidst the stephanotis.  ‘ ELIZABETH MARCELLINO

Enchanted Way

  This garden, once ‘an eclectic weed collection,’ has been refashioned to suit the dream of the owner, who realized her vision with the expert assistance of Sacred Grounds designer Bruce Izmirian. The modest home in Marquez Knolls is softened in front with an assortment of grevillea species set off by a melaleuca, whose gray/white paper bark and graceful form provide a stunning focal point. The visitor is directed towards the front door through a breezeway, flanked on one side by three basalt column fountains. Their quiet bubble gently transitions the public space to the private. The real drama of this garden unfolds as the visitor rounds the southern perimeter and out to a breathtaking view of the Marquez neighborhood and the ocean beyond. Set above, with no obstructions, the backyard plantings are intended to provide a surprise in all seasons, one plant group giving way to another. The ground cover dymondia displays a luminous shiny gray sparkle, while also being practical. Lupine, from seed, rises on the south side above the fence. Bouganvillea is on its way, climbing up the walls. Joey, a great choice for gardeners who want loads of color in hot, dry spots, displays feathery clusters of pink blooms all summer long. Other plants in the pink/raspberry palette include the small cistus or Rockrose and gazania offering another dazzling display of color. On the north side of the house, a banked slope features Cape honeysuckle (tecomaria), showy with its glistening dark green leaflets, which offset brilliant orange red tubular blossoms. Ceanothus and white mandevilla anchor the slope, and at this season, white and yellow freesias are in full form. The kitchen window looks out on this garden, to the delight of the homeowner. ‘ LIBBY MOTIKA