Backyard Zen

IT'S a little after 8 a.m. on a slumbering block of tract homes in Panorama City, but Roy Imazu is already deep into a routine any choreographer would admire. There's not a wasted movement as he cuts up the floor with his partner, a trusty Honda power mower. He promenades briskly around the perimeter of the lawn, then closes in with an ever-tightening box maneuver. With a final pivot and push, he polishes off the last clump, leaving a tidy emerald carpet.

"When you get through and the lawn has that clean-cut appearance, that's what it's all about," says Imazu, 75, a constant gardener whose handiwork has kept homes and churches around the valley groomed for almost 50 years. At an age when thoughts turn to lawn furniture, not maintenance, Imazu continues to carry on a tradition that's played a key, yet overlooked, role in the greening of Southern California -- Japanese American landscaping.

For much of the last century, Japanese Americans were the region's unofficial groundskeepers. Tending and landscaping yards from Hollywood to Long Beach, they left a living legacy that can be seen around the Southland. There's the poodle-clipped foliage gracing the Sawtelle and Crenshaw districts, Zen gardens in Venice, and a Beverly Hills mansion with a garden straight out of a Kyoto highlight reel.

Japanese American gardeners pretty much invented the yard care business as we know it, an industry now the domain of Latino emigres as Imazu's generation hangs up the shears. They helped shape the space of suburbia, which emerged on their watch, setting standards without which we might have descended into weed-choked dereliction.

The contributions of these vanishing pioneers are coming to light in an exhibition opening Sunday at the Japanese American National Museum called "Landscaping America: Beyond the Japanese Garden."

"The history of Japanese American gardeners is a core part of the history of Japanese Americans and definitely Japanese Americans in Southern California and the whole West Coast," says Sojin Kim, curator of the show, which documents the personal stories and artistry behind these low-profile stewards of the public face on our private worlds.

Some gardeners were painters, some poets, some only interested in making a living, but all brought a tenacity to will a piece of the American Dream out of turf and planter boxes.