Walking in her footpaths

JUST try to coax Ruth Shellhorn into talking about that photograph of her at the White House more than 30 years ago, accepting an award from Pat Nixon. What was the award?

"I don't know," Shellhorn says.

At 95, it's understandable that a few details from a career spanning seven decades might grow fuzzy. But spend more time with Shellhorn -- one of the designers credited with shaping two quintessentially Californian places, the shopping mall and Disneyland -- and it's clear that modesty, not failed memory, is at play.

She really just wants to talk about the work. Shellhorn ushers visitors to the drawing board in her Redondo Beach home office and is soon awash in blueprints. As she unrolls yellowing, 50-year-old plans for a new amusement park called Disneyland, she remembers choosing elm trees for Main Street USA because they're vertical and space saving. She flips through old photographs and describes how she softened the look of blocky department store buildings with lacy espaliers.

"I miss it a lot," says Shellhorn. "It was my recreation."

It also was a legendary career, says Los Angeles landscape architect Kelly Comras, who co-wrote a profile of Shellhorn for the second volume of "Pioneers of American Landscape Design," to be published next year by McGraw-Hill. Comras also will deliver a public lecture on Shellhorn's work in October at UCLA.

Despite such renewed attention to her work, these days Shellhorn employs her eye only to design altar arrangements at Christ Episcopal Church in Redondo Beach, where she takes her turn picking up wholesale flowers and arranging bouquets for Sunday services. In her day, her supporters say, Shellhorn was a leader in landscape architecture, someone who shaped modern landscapes for a generation that no longer donned hats and gloves for shopping trips downtown, but rather had a suburban sensibility -- stylish but relaxed.

"This is the landscape architect's landscape architect," Comras says. "She was ahead of her time."

Even Shellhorn's alma mater, Cornell, only recently caught up with her. This summer the university awarded her a belated 1933 degree in landscape architecture.

"I was just floored. I've been retired for 15 years," says Shellhorn, who left Cornell four credits shy of graduating under circumstances complicated by the Great Depression and a dean's notions about women's academic frailty.