The Getty Cen­tral Garden

I am priv­i­leged to live near the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Ange­les. Set on a promon­tory above the city with a view to Catalina Island, the Getty Museum is a repos­i­tory of art and archi­tec­ture. The gar­dens there could be con­sid­ered a uniquely home grown piece of art. The cre­ator, Robert Irwin, is actu­ally an artist, not a land­scape archi­tect. He chose to look at the design of the gar­dens as an ever chang­ing liv­ing sea­sonal sculp­ture, cre­at­ing some­thing very spe­cial in the world of landscapes.

My sense is that this gar­den is unique in the world. The plant­i­ngs seem very slap­dash but actu­ally meld seam­lessly. It’s dif­fi­cult to describe and even harder to pho­to­graph. A gar­den of con­trast and a gar­den of con­tra­dic­tions, most of the plants would never be near each other in nature, yet some­how it all works beau­ti­fully. If this post whets your appetite, I hope you will be able to visit some­time. See­ing this gar­den really loos­ened me up and made me want to exper­i­ment with tex­tures, col­ors and unusual combinations.

I need your help as I really want to list every nurs­ery in the coun­ties of Los Ange­les, Ven­tura, Orange County and San Diego on my web­site. Please use my form on the left side of this post to Sub­mit a nurs­ery that have been missed! The first per­son to sub­mit a nurs­ery I haven’t listed will receive the book Plants in the Getty’s Cen­tral Gar­den, by Jim Dug­gan. It con­tains four hun­dred descrip­tions of the grow­ing habits and char­ac­ter­is­tics of some of the fan­tas­tic, unusual plants planted by Robert Irwin in the Getty Museum’s Gar­den, all of which can be used in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia.