Water Wiser

Written by Susan Heeger • Photographed by Jack Coyier
Produced By Laura Hull

Photo: Jack Coyier

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A quick filler for the empty ground around a house, a lawn isn’t always the best solution, especially in a dry climate. But four years ago, this ridgetop in Bel Air was engulfed in grass—almost 3,700 square feet of it. “It demanded so much water!” says the owner, an architect who bought the property for its glass-walled midcentury house and mountain and city views.

Not only did the environmental impact of his lawn disturb him, it wasn’t even pretty. “I wanted a garden that changed with the seasons,” he recalls. The grass was static, and its bright green clashed with the subtler tones of the surrounding natural landscape. What’s more, since his third-of-an-acre dropped off precipitously behind his home, it was unsettling to walk outside.

“The yard needed containment, security and a foreground to the mountains,” says Lisa Gimmy, a landscape architect based in Culver City and a longtime professional acquaintance of the owner. While he renovated the house, she developed a garden plan that reduced his turf-grass sea to one-sixth its original size. In the front yard, she added privacy from the street by planting ironbark and arbutus trees, a westringia hedge and a mix of tall-growing ornamental grasses. In the back, she hedged the scrap of surviving lawn—retained as entertaining space—with a zigzag of bush germander, a smoke-blue shrub that contrasts with the mixed greens and relates to the blue of the sky. Nearby, she planted succulents, and beside the house, where the ground falls away toward a neighbor’s lot, she combined South African and Australian plants—proteas, acacias, leucadendrons.

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