When we bought this house in Van Nuys, California, in 2001, we bought a long, narrow, 7,000-square-foot lot with a 1,600-square-foot 1950s house on it. Nothing remarkable, but nothing terrible either. Except for the plantings. Half of the backyard was paved, and not well paved either. The rest of the backyard consisted of a square of mown weeds rimmed with some of the saddest roses I’ve ever seen. One of them had “been sprayed with the wrong thing,” the seller told us. A strange and rather frightful thing, it had bare stems with rosettes of thorns–Morticia would have loved it! There was a sow bug-infested plumbago in the corner and a stump that had once been a fig tree. Three young lemon trees abutted the patio.
The front yard wasn’t much better. A strip of rose bushes along the driveway. Two bottlebrushes planted too close to the house, so the roots were damaging the foundation and the top branches were damaging the eaves. Two junipers that someone had hacked off at about four feet. And a patch of mown weeds.
We’ve done a lot since then. We started by removing the misbegotten bottlebrush and junipers. Planted trees–six of them. Pruned the worst of the roses with a shovel and moved the salveagable ones to the driveway strip, so as to make room for 30 other roses. The house came with an enormous in-ground spa that never worked properly, and after four years, we took it out. Now it’s my tomato bed, and much more useful!
My friend Nina Rumely designed the gardens, front and back, and coached and coaxed and harassed me into becoming something approaching a gardener myself. The garden as a whole has changed considerably in nine years, but the shape she gave it is still there, more or less. We have shade now where we had none. Short-lived shrubs have died, some much mourned–Salvia clevelandii ‘Winifred Gilman’, for instance. I adored it, but it only lives five to seven years, and I don’t really have a place for more right now. Some things proved less successful than we hoped. Some proved far too successful–that Vitex, for instance. New on the market when we planted two of them, they were supposed to be four feet tall and about six feet wide at maturity. I took them out when they got to be twelve by twelve. One of them went to live at my sister’s house. It’s busy devouring her backyard.
One thing I’ve never cared much about is a lawn. We still have mown weeds in the backyard, an unfortunate mix of nut grass, Bermuda grass and whatever else happens to be growing at the moment. Nina did actually install a small Marathon lawn in the front yard, mostly as a path into the beds. You know what? There’s damned little Marathon grass left in it. It is–you guessed it–a patch of weeds. But it is paradise too.
