Living Lightly on the Land

Sitting in what landscape designer Jay Griffith calls his “living room”--actually a breezy patio in his Malibu backyard--I’m a bit distracted by the view. A misty Zuma Beach is visible just over some low hills of drying grasses that look as soft as sheepskin in the hazy ocean sun.

We’re sitting at a big dining table, with a centerpiece of colorful, rotund bottles. A long sectional sofa made of stacked hay bales with fabric cushions stands against a tall, softly colored plywood wall. The furnishings sit on an “area rug” of plain concrete pavers.

It’s all very modern, airy and comfortable. Griffith, well-known in the United States for his innovative and often daring gardens, considers himself a “modernist.” “There’s nothing complicated about my designs,” he says, “It’s all very simple. I like simple, simple things.”

The bearded 51-year-old garden designer, with a twinkle in his eye, calls himself an “elegant hippie.” But he is often called a landscape artist by others. “I like to think of myself as a cross between designer Tony Duquette and landscape architect Lockwood de Forest,” he said. Duquette, who died two years ago, was known for his wildly imaginative assemblages in the 1970s, and De Forest was one of California’s most land-sensitive garden designers in the 1920s. “My style is to hit people over the head. Gardens are supposed to be fun. You should be able to go outside and play in the yard.”

But his fun is not at the expense of the land. His designs always make horticultural and environmental sense. His gardens are as carefully thought out as they are contemporary and clean of line. He works to make his gardens “Earth friendly,” as he puts it. He sees environmental issues as the big challenges of 21st century garden design.

“Most gardens are not friends of the environment,” he says, because they ignore the site and its inhabitants. “We try to make gardens that are friendly, while they are also graphic, beautiful and compelling.” He considers himself “a great recycler” and even saves and reuses paint.

I keep wondering where I have seen that color on the plywood wall, which is an intriguing soft brown. Finally realizing that it’s the color of the low hills I’ve been staring at--covered with the drying seed stalks of anise and Spanish grasses--I ask Griffith what this wonderful color is named. He answers “amalgam,” because it is actually a mix of leftover paint he wanted to use up.

If a client wants to tear out a concrete patio, Griffith will reuse it to make a bench. “The best design,” he says, “has its foot in some practicality.” Halfway down his hillside there is just such a garden bench, a massive, elegant thing made out of thick slabs of broken patio, with a big gap left in the seat for a colony of sassy succulents.

“Concrete is much maligned and misused,” he says of his favorite material. Griffith uses plain, uncolored concrete throughout the landscape--pulverized, broken, as pavers or poured as big monolithic slabs. All of the drive-on paving on his property is recycled roadway, ground asphalt and concrete, which makes a handsome and gravelly paving material.

A broad expanse of concrete, broken only by two tall Hillside pottery urns, greets visitors at the front door, and the patio we are sitting on uses simple concrete pavers that are merely set on sand, so they are not permanent. He likes his gardens to tread lightly on the land.

“This garden is collapsible,” he says, pointing out that even the plywood panels are screwed--not nailed--to their supports so that the built part of the garden can be folded up like a tent and moved, without leaving an indelible scar on the landscape. “Here in Los Angeles, we’re always tearing everything down and starting all over,” he says. “We should be designing for the property, not posterity,” he says with characteristic wit. He doesn’t understand why so many feel they must leave their mark on the land.

His property is quite amazing. It’s actually three big lots strung together--a quarter-mile hike from one side to the other. He began in 1995 with one house on a large lot, then bought the lot next to it a few years later because it had a better view. The single Griffith was going to build on that one, but when he found out how much building in Malibu can cost, he hesitated. Then still another property next door, with a house on it, came on the market, so he bought that instead of building. He figured that two houses and three lots were cheaper than building on one.

He didn’t mind one bit that both houses were nice, inexpensive examples of 1950s modern architecture, classic enough to be Case Study homes with their strong horizontal lines and loads of glass. He has repainted them with organic colors that melt right into the hills. One is painted the green of a euphorbia flower. He even convinced a few neighbors to do the same: “I hate white houses.”

Griffith lives only part time in Malibu. He also has a complex of properties in Venice, where he has a home and office. His firm of 25 people is headquartered there. He recently changed the name of his 30-year-old design business to Griffith & Zarraga, adding his friend and construction foreman, Alfonso, to the firm’s name.

Many of the smaller gardens he has designed in his Venice neighborhood have formed the backbone of the annual Venice garden tour. Held early in May, this walking tour (driving is discouraged) is considered one of the Southland’s most interesting. His Malibu garden will be the site of a $200-to-$500-per-ticket benefit tour and party for the Santa Monica Museum of Art on Saturday.

While he picks up a phone call concerning one of his three godchildren, I find myself looking at the shiny glass flowers that dance above the rosemary, westringia and artemisia. Griffith’s designs can be very witty.

When he gets off the phone, he says the flowers are actually glass ashtrays and candy dishes--but of course--that he found at garage sales. He epoxied pairs together and then fastened them to stems of pipe. In all sorts of glassy colors, from bottle blue to clear orange, they are quite striking.

I didn’t ask where he picked up all the old beaters--surfboards that have seen better days--but he tells me that after he’s accumulated enough, he’s going to make a picket fence out of them. All of the hubcaps spotted in one of the horse barns will be used to decorate a tree. Oversized clusters of clear plastic grapes--destined for an arbor--fill another small barn.

As lovely as his mesa-top Malibu property is, cut by two shallow canyons, he points out that most of what grows on these hillsides is actually weeds, introduced by the Spanish and grazing cattle. And although they may look lovely from a distance, there is something discordant about these invaders when seen up close. And many are of little use to the animals.

He’s putting back native plants in a painterly fashion, always looking at nature for inspiration. New groves of native sycamore and willow (“one of the most underutilized plants”) are taking hold in the canyon bottoms, replacing the invading eucalyptus, and there are big stands of matilija poppy and sage where only anise used to grow. Carefully placing a grove of native sycamores here, a clump of willows there, he borrows a vista from a neighboring property while carefully obscuring another.

He even lowered the chain-link fences around the property to just 2 1/2 feet, then covered them with mounding California lilac so they disappear. At this height, they are no longer a barrier to animals, which can easily jump them.

His Malibu garden is still an unfinished canvas. When he’s done, he’d be happy if it all looked like a scene from the early 20th century Laguna school of California impressionist painters.

Griffith took horticulture and landscape classes in Los Angeles public schools. An instructor pulled him aside in high school and asked him not to take any more classes but to immerse himself in art, which is what he did for the next six years at UCLA, Pasadena Art Center College of Design, California Institute of the Arts and finally at Instituto Illene in Mexico.

Much like a painter, he plants in bold strokes, broad diagonal bands of plants marching up and down the slopes like animal trails. This is how he sees nature doing it. He doesn’t employ lots of different plants but, rather, uses lots of a few select kinds. He doesn’t plant one of this and three of that, but plants colonies. Why put in two agaves, when you can plant 20, or 30, as he did across the front of his property? “I grew up in the Valley and remember agave growing everywhere, so you’d think I’d be sick of them, but what did I plant all over my own garden? Agaves.” He even has signed many of his garden canvases with the X-shape of an agave.