The Planted Canvas

Artist Betty Edwards didn’t set out to become a gardener. She was seduced by the precipitous hill that rose behind her Santa Monica house like a tilted canvas. Because it was more or less blank, she felt compelled to “paint” it, and once she started, she couldn’t stop. “I knew nothing about plants, but gardening grabbed me,” says Edwards, a professor emeritus of art at Cal State Long Beach and author of the best-selling book, “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.” “When you paint, you’re in control. When you garden, you’re not. This excited me--how the dynamics of growing things, weather, wind and world events get all mixed up in what you’re doing.”

Edwards began by ripping out ivy and hiring crews to dig paths and build terraces along the inaccessible slope. Once the framework was in place, she filled in strokes of color over a mix of greens. “With each step,” says Edwards, “I was building a design that only now, after 20 years, I begin to understand.”

Halfway through the project, the garden became so central to her life that she asked architect Marc Appleton of Venice to redesign her house around it. His scheme included a wall of windows that follows the landscape on its zigzagging course from the back door, along stairways and mossy paths, to a crow’s nest-like deck shaded by an albizia tree. On the way up, Korean grass, mondo grass and baby’s tears pour forth in overlapping drifts, like rippling streams. Flowers join the flow--a slip of tulips in spring, a cascade of nasturtiums in summer. “They’re not exotic; they don’t have to be,” Edwards says. “From my windows, what matters are the splashes of color.”

Over time, the garden’s palette has changed. Experiments with yellow on lower terraces were failures. These shady spots demanded the softer hues of violets and true geraniums, while the louder golds and oranges of poppies and ranunculus blaze at the sunny crown of the hill. And in areas reserved for annuals, she can change colors and compositions as easily as she might repaint a canvas.

But gardening has become so satisfying for Edwards that she stopped painting years ago. “If you’re a painter and you love flowers, but you’re not Monet,” she observes, “you can never capture the brilliance of garden colors. At a certain point, I just said, ‘OK, fine. I’m going to work with the real thing.’ ”