LAGUNA BEACH : Idea of Staying Grows on Him

After the October, 1993, firestorm destroyed his Canyon Acres home, Bruce Macmillan agonized over whether to rebuild in the rustic community he had come to love.

It wasn’t the fire that made him consider leaving. It was his yearning for a bigger yard.

When his next-door neighbors moved down the street and offered to sell him their incinerated lot, Macmillan decided to stay. Since then, he has transformed the blackened parcel into a tiered garden bursting with flowers, vegetables, herbs and fruit trees.

On Tuesday, as an earthmover readied his other lot for the construction of a new home, Macmillan toured his garden, pointing out scorched strips of pipe welded into a trellis for his vines, bricks collected from the ravaged community to make planters and the rosebush he rescued from across the street after the fire.

“I put it over here, out of harm’s way,” he said.

Part of what makes the scene striking is Macmillan’s decision to leave the foundation and rear walls of the house intact so that plant life spring cheerily from the ashes. Apple trees now grow in what was once a bedroom.

“That’s where the kitchen was,” he said, pointing. “There, where the cherry trees are.”

Macmillan, a pharmacist who works in Santa Ana, has named his garden The Ruins.

Rebuilding is rampant in Canyon Acres and other fire-ravaged neighborhoods in town, with about a dozen homes under construction along Canyon Acres Drive. More than 400 Laguna Beach homes were damaged or destroyed in the firestorm.

Macmillan said he is happy with the way the community is coming back together.

The homes, he said, “are going to reflect the individuality of the people building them.”

Macmillan’s newly acquired lot reflects his personality.

No expert gardener, Macmillan, 43, simply started with a general design for the garden and then improvised, he said, gathering tips--and plants--from neighbors and relatives.

The garden is a work in progress. Basil, oregano and chives rest in tiny pots, waiting to be planted, as do some trees. Wildflowers burst from a patch of clover, and a daisy bush and cabbage patch nestle side by side.

“It’s going to be a lot of years before it matures and becomes what I want it to be,” he said.

Eventually, Macmillan said, he may even build tiers farther up the hillside, making way for grapevines, hops and beehives.

“That’s going to be my yard,” he says of the blossoming parcel. “That’s the only reason I’m building back on the street.”