[ Lost in the Landscape ]

virtual garden tour

It’s high spring in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia and time for the annual gar­den tours. The Cal­i­for­nia Native Plant Soci­ety offers one, as do a lot of neigh­bor­hoods, includ­ing my own.

Rather than pony­ing up the fees and fill­ing up the gas tank this past week­end I decided to make up my own gar­den tour. Online.

I’m not espe­cially smit­ten with Hol­ly­wood celebri­ties, but thought that might be an inter­est­ing start­ing point. I ran­domly pulled up one of the pile of web­sites with addresses of celebri­ties, then went to Google Maps with the address in hand. And Google Maps has that con­tro­ver­sial fea­ture to actu­ally view at street level what you find on a map. The street view isn’t imple­mented for much of the coun­try, but it hap­pens to be in place for prac­ti­cally all of Bev­erly Hills. How convenient.

So…what does Madonna’s front yard look like? What might that tell me about her as a per­son and about celebrity in general?

First off, let me say that the Google fea­ture indi­cates that the addresses shown on the screen are only approx­i­mate. So this might not actu­ally be Madonna’s front yard. But assum­ing that it is, I guess I felt a lit­tle let down. The yard is really green. Lots of green. Some­how I thought the gar­den would be a lit­tle more…exotic? Out of con­trol shrub­beries and lurid stat­u­ary maybe? But it does say she likes her pri­vacy. No sur­prise there.

Then I went over to Mia Farrow’s.

More of the pri­vacy thing, again. But the yard seemed a lit­tle more welcoming–probably some­thing to do with the steps lead­ing up to the front wall. And I felt really good that she recycles.

Next was the late Charleton Heston’s pad, which didn’t look like the one in Michael Moore’s Bowl­ing for Columbine. Either he’d down-sized or I was knock­ing at the neighbor’s.

Nice, con­ser­v­a­tive land­scap­ing. Pri­vate, but not hos­tile. You know that tres­passers would be shot, so there’s no need for higher hedges.

And on to Jay Leno’s:

Walls again. And more hedges. These neigh­bor­hoods have abnor­mally high hedge counts for South­ern California.

Then over to Bette Midler’s.

It’s a lit­tle hard to see the yard, but it looks like it’d be a nice place to unwind with the divine Ms. M and some martinis.

Maybe the most sur­pris­ing was Har­ri­son Ford’s.

Like, where’s the killer fence and the yard for the guard dog? And the birch trees make the house look like it’s on the wrong coast. It’s nice enough, but makes me think he’s not much of a gar­dener. Or maybe this one’s for sure the wrong house. Dunno. Unfor­tu­nately, online, you can’t be the obnox­ious stalker fan and go knock­ing on the front door. I might just have to leave these peo­ple to themselves.

April 17 2008 | Categories: landscape design • rambles | Tags: Bette Midler • Beverly Hills • Charleton Heston • front yards • Google Maps • Google Street Views • Harrison Ford • hedges • Jay Leno • Madonna • Mia Farrow • privacy | 1 Comment »