By Janet Eastman
April 17, 2003
BE WARNED: Brent Green, a family man loved by church ladies and known for his generosity to the community, can tempt honest Angelenos into crossing the line. He made a Sunday stroller lose all sense of propriety. Other solid citizens lured in by Green’s handiwork have found it hard to resist grabbing what they wanted – in broad daylight! – and taking off with the goods. He even had Ozzy Osbourne craving something he couldn’t get on his own.
The source of Green’s power: a garden he’s babied since he was a kid.
There’s just something about this frontyard on a tidy street in Miracle Mile that drives people to loiter and think about committing a floral heist.
After all, there are dozens of bloom-laden rose bushes leaning over the white picket fence, flowers beckoning to be cupped in eager hands. Would anyone even notice one Double Delight missing? Or a sprig of wispy pink jasmine plucked as a scented souvenir?
Green, 35, a landscape designer who transforms rigid yards into swaying parades of Technicolor, is forgiving of those who covet his creations.
Fans of MTV’s “The Osbournes” may have noticed the 15-foot-wide living staircase that leads to the much-photographed mansion. That’s Green’s invention. And in the episode in which Ozzy struggled to hunt down his cat in the backyard, tripping over mounds of soil and being whacked by ficus branches, he was trampling through Green’s $200,000 work in progress.
But most of Green’s attention is focused on a more down-to-earth property, his parents’ home on Sierra Bonita Avenue, a gently curving street of homes built in the 1920s and ’30s.
It’s there where a woman lost all self-control.
When Green and his family were driving home from services at the West Angeles Church of God and Christ, they noticed a woman walking on San Vicente Boulevard with her arms full of flowers. His dad said she must have just come from the florist; his mom thought they looked as if they had been picked from a garden.
When they arrived home, the mystery was solved: The stranger had clipped all of their long-stem roses, foxgloves and lilies. Green’s dad, a retired Los Angeles County commissioner, jumped back into the car and tried to find the culprit, but she had escaped into the city.
Unlike his father and brothers, Brian, 37, and Brandon, 28, who built careers in law, Brent Green has been a plant guy since grade school, when he put a cutting in water and, like a scientist with his own lab, watched it root.
When he moved to Sierra Bonita Avenue with his family in 1983 from Leimert Park in the Crenshaw district, he was just a take-charge teenager with a passion for things that sprout. And he had a plan to convert his new neighborhood into a block-long arboretum.
First, his home. He yanked out ball-shaped shrubs in the frontyard that looked “like tired soldiers standing guard.” He told his shocked parents that he would create a free-flowing English garden with quilts of ranunculus, cyclamen and delphiniums. And he did.
Then he branched out. At 17, he badgered the city to replace the brittle, termite-infested carob trees in the parkways. But when that led nowhere, he charmed a commercial developer into donating 44 carrot woods, two for each house.
He didn’t stop.
When he turned 30, he planted 30 trees along San Vicente Boulevard. He’s continued the tradition every year since. So far, there are more than 150 eucalyptus, California pepper, ash, redwood and tipu trees, from Beverly Hills to Pico Boulevard. He calls it “greening the area.”
His wife, Cheryl, sees him as an urban Johnny Appleseed. Elderly women at his church glow when they receive the bundles of flowers he’s been giving them after services since he was no taller than a boxwood hedge. And half of the homeowners on the block have hired his landscape design company, GreenArt, to make their yards as irresistible to passersby as his parents’ yard.
His parents’ backyard remains Green’s testing ground. He spends two or three days a week there, making fountains out of cast-off ceramics, thinking of different ways to create pathways from rocks or whatever he’s found, and nursing shrubs and flowers he’s rescued from other jobs.
He has always brought home plants the way most boys bring home stray animals. The 40-foot-tall redwood tree thriving across the street was a 2-inch sapling he found while camping in Santa Cruz. He bundled it up, carried it home, rooted it in a tin can, then placed it at the neighbor’s.
Soon, Green will have a garden of his own. He and his wife are moving from their rented townhouse into a Spanish-style house off West La Brea Avenue, where they’ll raise their 2-year-old daughter, Grace, and a floppy yellow lab named Thurber.
His wife claims that he knows the trees in the city so well that when they’re at the movies, he’ll nudge her and say, “That’s not Boston. That’s Hancock Park. I know those trees.” He also gives directions such as “turn right at the 30-foot magnolia, then
“Other people look for landmarks or street names. I see the world through greenery,” he says.
Soon after his parents bought the house on Sierra Bonita, Green put three lemon-scented gum eucalyptus trees in the backyard after assuring his dad that they would grow to only 6 feet tall. When they reached 20 feet, his dad called him at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where Green was earning his bachelor’s degree in ornamental horticulture. Brent confessed that the trees had skyscraper potential. Now, Green takes pleasure in spotting the 60-foot leafy towers when he’s driving around.
“Those trees,” he says, “are part of the skyline.”
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One man’s vision
All the gardens Brent Green creates have five elements: graceful curves, movement, foliage appropriate to the architecture, perennials mixed with annuals, and night lighting.
He prefers a free-flowing, informal look and sensuous lines in flowerbeds, with flowers spilling over. What he loves most is “when wind blows through foliage, the way it looks and sounds, and the way plants dance in the light at night.”
His best piece of advice? Use mostly perennials with pockets of annuals so you can easily change with each season. “You need the good bones, the permanence that perennials provide,” he says. “That way you don’t have to change the whole thing.”