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Gardens in Los Angeles are more than flora and furnishings. They're stage sets. Columns come from Indonesia; kuba tablecloths from Africa; and grasses from Chile, South America and New Zealand.
In a place where almost everything grows, almost anything goes.
That's what photographer Erica Lennard discovered when she moved from Paris to Los Angeles -- "a city that is, in a sense, all about the garden," she says in the afterword to her new book, "Secret Gardens of Hollywood and Private Oases in Los Angeles" (Universe Publishing, $45).
"The idea for the book came when I realized that what brought people here to make films in the 1920s and '30s," says Lennard, "are the same reasons they built palatial homes from every architectural style and have every type of garden: It's the anything-is-possible philosophy. You can have whatever you want. It's 'Hollywood' to want it and to get it."
No one style dominates here, true, but in the 25 gardens featured -- from Mediterranean to exotic to native -- common themes emerged, says Adele Cygelman, who wrote the text: "Everyone named Lotusland in Santa Barbara and the succulent gardens at the Huntington in San Marino as their inspirations. Everyone had a statue of Buddha somewhere. All women mentioned the urge at age 40 to get their hands into dirt. And everyone thought of their garden as a retreat, a sanctuary, a place that transports them into a different world."
Jack LaLanne's former Hollywood Hills estate, which once was filled with statuary in the image of the fitness guru, is now rich with rare native succulents. Joni Mitchell's gardenia-scented property in Bel-Air...