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There are people who garden in California, and then there are the true gardeners. True gardeners have mulching dreams. Their eyes tear up when they get a pair of Felco pruning shears on their birthdays. Most of all, they love Los Angeles. They make hay when the sun shines, and they garden in Los Angeles precisely because the sun shines almost 365 days a year.
In this, the fairest of all settings, one would expect true gardeners in every home and glorious gardens behind every sidewalk. But this brings us to the most perplexing of Southern Californian paradoxes: Good gardens, the simply magical variety, are as rare in L.A. as well-dressed people in airports.
It's not about money. There are plenty of immaculately kept grounds around and many communities so heavily irrigated that their gutter runneth over. It's not about taste, high versus low. One of the most delightful gardens in Central L.A. used to belong to a woman who saw no good reason to take her Christmas wreath down, even when her Easter lilies were in full bloom.
Rather, it seems that the gardeners are outnumbered. So many people flock to Los Angeles from cold, wet places, bringing cold, wet traditions, that too often gardening here can seem like little more than a battle to keep the lawn green.
For apartment dwellers, the problem is how to stop the terrace plants from wilting between breakfast and dinner. Big chain garden centers compound the confusion by offering the same impatiens for South Carolina as Southern California.
But ask any California gardener: Once you start using the right plants in the right place, and those plants thrive, gardening in Los Angeles becomes a way of life.
As evidence, I give you 27 gardens open to the public for the next three weeks as part of the Garden Conservancy's Open Days tour. Every one of these places amounts to a love letter to Los Angeles, to its sunshine and fabulous houses, be they mock Tuscan villas, Spanish estancias, bijou bungalows, cliff-top houses on stilts or square-on ranch houses with a basketball hoop over the garage door. But more basically, they are celebrations of the land and climate. Talk to the homeowners and you find that tending...