Fanciful formality in Los Angeles - Brentwood, California garden

Sunset, April, 1995 by Lynn Ocome

The classic lines of a French garden are a surprising complement to exuberant zinnias and overgrown sunflowers

Hilary Byk's riotous Brentwood, California, garden is not the sort you ease yourself into. It cries out for attention, grabs you, pulls you in all at once. "It's not peaceful," says Byk. "It has a lot of energy because of all the yellow and red." Huge, brilliant sunflowers and a mosaic of radiant zinnias are the attention-getters, but it's the garden's design - with its tidy annual beds, intersecting pathways, and permanent plantings - that draws you in.

The garden was not always so arresting. In fact, it started out as an ordinary lawn. Byk had other ideas - a geometrically precise parterre like the ones she'd seen at Chateau de Villandry in the Loire Valley of France. To this end, she ripped out the lawn and put in a network of decomposed-granite paths intersecting six 6- by 18-foot planting beds. Each bed is ringed with a neat, clipped boxwood hedge.

Through the years, Byk has let the garden evolve, allowing exuberant flowers to push the boundaries of the boxwood. Twelve-foot-high sunflowers arch over the paths, while sweet alyssum spills from the beds. Easy-to-grow annuals and biennials add volume, texture, and color. Two of Byk's favorites are Eastern Queen Anne's lace, with cushions of tiny white flowers atop long wiry stems, and lovelies-bleeding, with burgundy-pink flowers forming dangling chenillelike ropes.

BEHIND THE SCENES

Of course, it takes a lot of planning and care to create such an enticing and seemingly casual tangle. Take, for example, the big sunflowers. Byk starts 'Mammoth' seeds at the beginning of April outdoors in nursery flats. She prefers this method to sowing in the garden because it's easier to protect the vulnerable seedlings from birds (she covers the flats with netting). The sunflowers are transplanted in early May when they are 3 to 4 inches tall; she spaces them 18 inches apart.

At the same time she also plants purchased seedlings of 'California Giant' zinnias from cell-packs; she spaces them about 6 inches apart. Both sunflowers and zinnias require full sun. All flowers start blooming in June and peak about mid-July.

Byk starts a second batch of smaller-flowered sunflowers in flats around mid-May. As the 'Mammoth' sunflowers fade, she pulls some and replants with a variety such as the 2-foot-tall 'Teddy Bear', with double-flowered golden blooms.

As for routine maintenance, Byk gives the boxwood hedges a trim every six to eight weeks during the growing season. She waters the garden consistently through the summer, and clips spent flowers to keep the garden looking fresh and to encourage more blooms. About the only things she doesn't have to worry about are pests and diseases, because the garden is not especially prone to either.

All of which is not to imply that the garden is all work and no play. Byk likes the structure of the beds and is willing to keep them at their best. But she also uses them as places to experiment, to try out new plants and planting schemes as her interests evolve. "The garden," she says, "is wilder than when it started."