by Laura Read

Homestead Magazine

In 1998, when Liisa Primack first viewed a residential lot for sale at the foot of California’s San Gabriel Mountains, in a space where some people might have seen only a mess of scrub and dirt, she envisioned the garden of her dreams.

The 1.25-acre property existed in one of the nation’s busiest places, Los Angeles County, on the edge of the tree-shaded town of Claremont. To the south, a mix of neighborhoods, shopping centers and college campuses sprawls toward the dense population of Los Angeles. A few miles to the north, the energy of suburbia releases into the San Gabriel’s wooded slopes, where nature offers an escape for hikers, skiers and cyclists, and the landscape shelters the usual array of Southern California animal and birdlife —mountain lions, coyotes, bobcats and the like.

Primack and her husband, Andy, who is in the business of manufacturing aluminum alloy, had three children, one in grade school, one in middle school, and one in high school. The kids needed more play space and Primack needed a place to entertain friends and to garden. The property was perfect. “It was a blank slate,” Primack says. “And it was just the right time in life for us.”

Primack’s love of gardening runs deep. “I must have been 5 when I grew my first flowers,” she says. “They were Zinnias. I would come home every day from school to see how much they had grown. I watered them by hand.”

After the purchase, the Primacks got to work building a house and landscaping the yard. First came the hardscape — the pool, the patios and a sport court where they could play paddle tennis, volleyball and basketball. They installed grass for the kids and planted a vegetable patch and a bed of roses, but put Primack’s flower garden dream on hold.

Time passed, and it was 10 years before Primack was ready to create the backyard she wanted. She knew she couldn’t realize all of her ideas alone. One day after talking with a flooring contractor she and Andy had hired, she discovered that help was just around the corner.

In 2010, the landscape designer Karla Stahlman was launching a second career. After raising a family and managing her husband’s flooring business for 16 years, she studied garden design and then worked for a landscape architect. Now she was going solo.

It was a lucky match — a homeowner with a kaleidoscope imagination, and a designer able to coalesce many ideas into a harmonious composition. “Karla translated my vision into a workable project,” Primack says. “Others want you to do it their way. She was so willing to work with someone who wanted to be part of the process.”

Stahlman was equally thrilled. “This is a family who really celebrates life,” she says.

Hacienda style, the Primacks’ U-shaped one-story home hugs the ground. From the family room, French doors lure visitors into a formal courtyard framed by the house’s two wings. At the far end of it, a whimsical arch of ceramic shapes, made by the artist Leslie Codina, marks the shift from the rectilinear environment defined by the home to the curvilinear garden defined by Primack’s imagination.  

Beyond the arch is where expectations end, for nothing about the Primack garden is commonplace.

The backyard is a symphony of visual dissonance and resolution, every surface a play of color and light, every shape either a companion or foil to the one next to it. The pool centers the yard. The rest of the design pivots on several features, or “destinations,” as Stahlman calls them: a bocce court, a duo of palm trees bursting skyward, a chunky guest room cabana framing the backside of the pool, the vegetable patch and the sport court. A puzzle of winding paths and flower beds connects the parts.

A recent tour with Primack started with the most current work-in-progress — the rose garden. Primack planted the garden in a grid pattern years ago when she laid down the sod. She didn’t pull out the roses in the new revision, but instead introduced a winding path to soften the grid.

Stahlman’s influence made all the difference here. The path’s scale is important, for instance. “It is an intimate garden path, a one-person path,” Stahlman says. “The width of it says ‘meander here alone.’” The surface of the path was also an opportunity. Primack scattered marbles there, and their sparkles tempt people to lean close and inspect the small ribbed globes they probably didn’t notice while standing.

Behind the rose garden, in the back of the yard is the fenced-in vegetable patch. Instead of painting its fence a traditional white, Primack made an eye-catching rainbow by coating each picket a different pastel hue. The rainbow palette continues inside the veggie patch in a wall mural painted by Shannon Olsen, a young woman whom Primack hired after getting to know her at the Los Angeles County Fair. A chicken-shaped mailbox mounted on the fence serves as a storage place for tools.

Beside the food garden is a chicken coop. A wall of fruiting passion vines keeps the busy birds screened off from the rest of the yard. Primack and Stahlman took inspiration from how traditional Mexican haciendas have gardens that produce everything a family needs for living. The veggie garden and chickens are part of that. You can also cook and eat in the yard. “In the summer I often unload groceries into the backyard refrigerator,” Primack says. The roofed cabana patio covers a dining table and an outdoor kitchen. More formal dining will someday take place in the bocce court after Primack installs some decorative lights there.

Despite all of the garden’s spaces for grown-up activity, its overwhelming quality is as a playground, teasing out the child in everyone. “This garden fills your soul in so many ways,” Stahlman says.

Who wouldn’t want to be in a yard that makes you feel like a kid? One way Stahlman and Primack accomplished the effect is by incorporating compositions of decorative tile Primack collected in Mexico. Primack asked a tile company to custom paint pieces to match the bocce court bench and other features.

Another is by the juxtaposition of big and small scale — “Alice in Wonderland” style. An overlarge chair, a gigantic folk donkey sculpture, and giant reflective spheres pop out beside arrangements of smaller scale plants. “An oversized chair makes you feel young,” Stahlman says.

The garden also encourages contemplation. One out-of-the-way corner contains a fountain and a giant mermaid mosaic inspired by the luscious figure on the Carlos Santana “Supernatural” record album cover. A bench encourages people to settle down and listen to the trickling water. Primack takes a seat. “I love sitting here,” she says.

She doesn’t sit for long. She has plenty to do both in and out of the yard. As a certified Master Gardener and a Master Food Preserver, she volunteers to teach at low-income schools.  She also organizes garden tour fundraisers to benefit the Claremont Community Foundation, and volunteers at the Los Angeles County Fair, where this summer she’ll demonstrate a solar dehydration device that harnesses the sun’s natural energy in order to dry fruit.

After the private tour is over, before heading off for the day Primack kneels down next to some lime-green Echeveria, pushes her hands into the soil and yanks free some wilted leaves.