THE HOUSE IN BRENTWOOD IS behind a high wall, and the garden is behind the house, invisible from the street, tumbling down a hillside lushly planted with laurel and sweet gum. Sprays of pink blossoms tumble over low stone walls. A stepped walk, lined with hedges, leads you down past a serene blue pool; on another level, a gap in the hedges opens onto a circular jumble of stones that turns out to be a precious piece of environmental sculpture by Richard Long. At the very foot, sunlight splashes on a patch of lawn. Here, in the backyard of a Hollywood executive, you are reminded that humanity's first and most desirable abode was a garden--and that was before you could play badminton in them.
That was also before people imagined spending tens of thousands of dollars just moving around the rocks in their backyards. In the garden, as in the house, American affluence is fueling a burgeoning market for high-end design. Landscape architects have never been more in demand: membership in the century-old American Society of Landscape Architects is up by 20 percent in the last five years, to more than 12,000, and the society triumphantly announced last week that its members' average income ($52,886) now exceeds that of architects. In the land of the $10 million house, the million-dollar garden is not unknown; one California landscape architect tells his clients to budget 15 to 20 percent of the cost of a new house for the grounds. Pamela Burton, who designed the Brentwood garden, recently spent two weeks in Kyoto with another client, seeking inspiration for a Los Angeles house that will measure 27,000 square feet--and grounds Burton casually describes as "a whole ridge."
And a new esthetic is taking hold in a field whose highest aspiration for most of this century had been to bury the indigenous landscape under a patina of English hunt-country foliage. Out of favor now is the faux-manor look of gently rolling lawns and massed banks of perennials. Very chic is Burton's whimsical, almost literary, sensibility, with the recurring theme of wilderness and civilization in tension. She landscaped a photographer's studio in Venice with contrasting rectangles of arid crushed granite, representing desert, and "oases" sprouting California pepper trees and native lavender. She took a small backyard in Santa Monica belonging to the artist John Baldessari and divided it among olive trees and rare cactus and succulents. The aloes and agaves are for the soul; the olives will eventually get pressed into oil for the salad. "If you're just putting out plants it's not interesting," Burton says. "I want to make spaces that people inhabit."
And, ideally, spaces that can sustain themselves environmentally. The most important trend in landscape design is the use of indigenous trees, shrubs, flowers and grasses. In the suburbs of Chicago, Scott Byron seeds meadows with native prairie species--fiesta daisies, yellow primroses, yarrow, purple cone flowers and white and purple phlox. In Sausalito, the husband-and-wife team of Eric and Silvina Blasen plant deer grass and Mexican feather grass, salvia and jasmine, manzanita trees and native oaks, pursuing a striking and stirring vision of how California ought to look. Admittedly, not everyone wants to be stirred by his garden. "People like it in the abstract," says Silvina, "although when they see it they sometimes say, gee, it looks weedy, it looks scruffy. People come here from a place like Connecticut, they want big lawns and lots of flowers." They had to turn down one job for a client who wanted a lawn where several fine old native oaks stood, explaining: "We plant oaks, we don't kill them!" But even they recognize that man cannot live by manzanita alone. For a hillside home in Marin County, the Blasens devised a spectacular $150,000 terraced garden, using native grasses and flowers, plus a few selected Mediterranean species, carefully chosen for drought tolerance, fire resistance, deer repulsion and soil-binding capacity. But they planted a patch of lawn just outside the back door for the client's young children to crawl on. Scott Byron does the same sometimes: "We do," he says, "have a certain emotional tie to Kentucky bluegrass."
Byron and the Blasens, with their finely honed sensitivity to plant life, represent one end of a continuum; at the other extreme, perhaps, is New Yorker Janis Hall, whose extraordinary creations are grounded in her background as a sculptor. Her medium is earth and stone; her primary tool is the bulldozer, which she once deployed for three weeks contouring undulations into a meadow overlooking Buzzard's Bay near Cape Cod. ("I don't get it," said the puzzled bulldozer operator, "don't most people want their lawns to be flat?") Then she just threw down a bunch of grass seed and let it grow up, transforming the earth, as she puts it, into "a highly interactive membrane." She named the garden Mnemonic River. In late afternoon, in spring or fall, it is crossed by deep black shadows that can seem almost infinite, while in winter the shadows become feathery as the sun moves through the palimpsest of branches, brushing the stippled surface of the frozen ground. In an August dry spell, the grass dries to a somber orange and the earth becomes a strong, primordial thing--a sublime transformation not initially appreciated by the owner, who called Hall for advice on irrigation, which she hastily and firmly discouraged.
For a property in Connecticut that lacked that essential rural amenity, running water, Hall designed a sculpture out of thousands of stones, from fist-size to boulders, forming a long, six-foot-wide undulating path that crosses the lawn and disappears into the woods. She named it Murmuring Flow, although of course it neither flows nor murmurs. "Sometimes," she says modestly, "the implication of something is more powerful than the reality." In a phrase that might as well go on her profession's coat of arms, Hall says: "It takes a special kind of client who can appreciate spending all this money . . . to create something that looks like it was there all along."
WITH KAREN SPRINGEN IN CHICAGO