Bride and Bloom : Garden at Sewage Treatment Plant Is a Popular Wedding Site
Tears of joy aren’t all that is flowing when brides and grooms meet at Los Angeles’ most unexpected wedding spot.
That’s because a sewage treatment plant is the newest destination for couples seeking an unforgettable place to pledge to love one another through thick and thin.
They recite their marriage vows from a bridge above a pond filled with effluent at the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant. Then their friends gather across the way from sludge-settling basins and chlorine contact tanks to toast the newlyweds.
The unlikely setting is a Japanese-style garden at the city-owned treatment plant in Van Nuys. The 6 1/2-acre grounds are filled with meandering lakes and carefully cultivated stands of bamboo, delicate shrubs, grasses and groves of trees.
The garden was designed and planted 10 years ago by the late landscape architect Koichi Kawana as a way of beautifying the sewage plant and showcasing uses for reclaimed water.
But as its trees and vegetation have grown, so has its popularity among couples looking for a place to tie the knot. Nearly 200 have been married there since 1985, when the first bride and groom surprised city officials by asking permission to take their wedding party inside.
These days, officials have a months-long reservation list. They charge a $661 fee for a four-hour wedding and reception.
Couples say the garden’s beauty overshadows the unsavory image associated with sewage facilities.
Still, most are careful to write “Japanese Garden” on their wedding invitations--not “Tillman Water Reclamation Plant.”
When Mary Boden listed the plant on a map sent to the 90 friends invited to her May 26 wedding, people thought she had misspelled the name of a water recreation plant.
“Those who asked said, ‘Oh, oh,’ when I told them,” said Boden, who married Keith Boden of Northridge. “But I said they’d be surprised when they got there. You don’t see any equipment, just a beautiful garden and a lake.”
Guests at the June 16 marriage of Jennette Tapp and Kendall Walker of Northridge had no idea that 54 million gallons of raw sewage are pumped each day through the plant.
The couple were shaded by a stately weeping willow tree as they stood on the wooden bridge and were pronounced man and wife by Shelley Gale, a Los Angeles Police Department chaplain.
“There are a couple of places you can walk and get a whiff of a little odor,” said Jeff Ambrose of Westlake Village as he strolled along a pebble-lined pathway past flowering cherry trees and pink azalea shrubs. “But this place is well-maintained.”
Mark Pedersen, also of Westlake, said he mistook the roar of rushing water from the treatment plant for the sound of a small waterfall near a corner of the garden.
“They don’t have any place like this back home,” marveled the bride’s aunt, Jackie Fraser of Elmwood Park, N.J. “People don’t like sewage plants near them back in Jersey.”
There’s no place like the Tillman plant anywhere, said Gene Greene, a city landscape architect who is in charge of the garden. And as lush as it looks, the place isn’t in full bloom yet, he said.
That’s because of the drought.
Although millions of gallons of reclaimed water are within arm’s reach, officials still use precious drinking water to irrigate the garden’s Chinese wisteria, dwarf periwinkle, ferns and thousands of other plants.
Greene said continuing construction at the plant over the years has made it impossible to guarantee an uninterrupted flow of reclaimed water for irrigation. But expansion of sewage-handling equipment is finished and garden sprinklers will soon be switched from potable water to reclaimed water.
At the Japanese nuptial garden, the end of water rationing is the best wedding gift there could be.
