Grass Begone!

Arroyo Magazine. January 25, 2013. By Bettijane Levine: Grass is good. But could gravel be better? That was the question for Jeanie and Terry Kay, whose charming country French chateau straddles a small rise on a street of custom homes in La Cañada Flintridge.

Their white brick mini-villa — with its tall welcoming windows and elegant sheltered door — looks like it might be a centuries-old transplant from some nobleman’s estate in Southern France.

Cassy Aoyagi: Going Native

Los Angeles Times. December 11, 2010. By Patt Morrison: Once upon a time, California wholesaled its fabulous flora. The searing brilliance of poppies and lupines and the pale greens of grasses spread themselves like titanic picnic cloths over a seemingly endless landscape. Now, of course, much of this vast plant menagerie has been plowed or paved or plucked away to the margins, even toward extinction. Horticulturist Theodore Payne saw this unhappy prospect when he came here more than a century ago from England as a teenager; in his 70 years in Southern California, he crafted native plant legacies in gardens from Santa Ana, Exposition Park and Caltech to Descanso Gardens.

Robin’s Nest

InStyle Magazine. August 2010. By Mark Morrison and William Waldron: “When Robin Tunney isn’t sparing with Simon Baker in The Mentalist, she’s busy spiffing up her hillside home in L.A.,” including the garden designed, installed and maintained by FormLA Landscaping.