Richard Neutra's vision -- with a tropical touch
THE CALIFORNIA GARDEN
The Nesbitt house's garden isn't the Japanese oasis that was originally planned, but it captures the Neutra spirit.
WHEN Richard Neutra designed the redwood and brick Nesbitt house in Los Angeles in 1942, he envisioned a tranquil Japanese front garden, anchored by a pine bonsai surrounded by spreading junipers and Pittosporum tobira. A California pepper tree, one of six on the site, would stand next to seven ponds. A row of pines was to line the parkway, according to plans in the Neutra archives at UCLA.
Today there are no pepper trees, bonsai or that pittosporum. The 30 hibiscuses and 24 nandina sketched for the backyard have disappeared. Only a lawn, smaller than originally planned, remains of Neutra's vision.
Gardens -- even those with the imprint of a great architect -- change over time. Plants become fashionable, then fall out of style. Or they die and get replaced. The park-like grounds at the Nesbitt house are no different: radically changed from Neutra's original plan but perhaps no less effective.
Strolling more than half an acre, visitors feel as though they have stepped back to a time when Los Angeles gardens were unashamedly lush. Late spring through summer, the landscape is saturated with the fragrance of Madagascar jasmine vine, its leaves twining through a fence and winding around 5-foot-tall pyramid-shaped wooden tuteurs. The perfume shifts at an espalier of the glossy-leafed Osmanthus fragrans, or sweet olive. At night the huge yellow flowers of the Hawaiian cup of gold vine broadcast their scent too.
"Although a client invites an architect or garden designer into his or her life to do the garden for them, they are giving up some of their personal power and initiative," says Pasadena landscape architect Thomas Batcheller Cox, who designed the Nesbitt garden for Pippa Scott, an actress and film producer.
"I'm pretty sure that clients, as soon as they can, want to make the house and garden their own."
SUCH is the case with Scott, who bought the Nesbitt property in 1992, beating out a developer who wanted to tear the house down. Neutra's original California-Asian landscape already had been replaced with a profusion of tropical plants, and though she had studied landscape architecture at Cal Poly Pomona and architecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles, Scott knew she needed professional help. Cox still remembers her call.
