Portrait: Frances Liau

Note: I wrote the following essay eleven years ago, but for various reasons, never published it. I was thinking about it today as I wandered through my own garden. I don't have pictures of Frances's garden, but it lives in my head, and maybe, after reading about it below, it will live in yours, too.

I pull up to Frances Liau's house on a weekday morning, and she greets me from her front step. She tells me that today is a good day to come as that very day she had paid her final installment for her mortgage, and the house is now 100% completely hers.

Thirty years ago, when Liau moved in, the whole front yard was lawn, punctuated by a eucalyptus. The east edge had a giant bamboo hedge running the length of it. Now, the lawn is gone, replaced by a collection of natives—weaving across the yard in shades of silvery gray and chrome yellow, the eucalyptus is now a tall, white-armed goddess, and the bamboo hedge still rushes like water in even the slightest breeze.

As we talk and get to know each other, Liau, the former President of Theodore Payne, leads me through the front yard, pointing out the water catchments she's built from the sidewalk drainage and her favorites of the California native plants that populate her dry front yard: St. Catherine's Lace, Channel Island poppy, Dudleya, California Brittlebush. She likes the natives not only for their interesting architecture, but also for the way they take to the slight slope and create their own rhythms of texture without help from her. Her garden is, she says, "Laissez faire. Sometimes less is more, you know." Other succulents—Cotyledon, Cuban Oregano, Bulbina—play supporting roles to the California native stars.

Close to her front step, Liau has a collection of potted food plants. She likes to let the plants go to seed and find their own places to live from year to year.

She leads me along the side of the house, where the shade is deep, cool, and wet-sounding from the giant bamboo. We pause at the corner of the house where Liau points out a dead bamboo stalk leaning against the building: it's riddled with woodpecker holes. She explains how insects colonize the dead stalks, then woodpeckers feed on the insect colonies. And, just as if he knew we were talking about him, a woodpecker starts to work on a stalk above us, rattling the hollow, dry stem like a rainstick. When I ask her about bamboo's reputation as being impossibly invasive, Liau smiles. She finds a young shoot she doesn't want and easily snaps it out of the ground. "It's a grass, after all," she says. Later, when we return in our conversation to the topic of bamboo, she tells me that the plants grow in circles and create interesting shaped roots that she cuts off the dead stalks when she pulls them out of the grove. In the corner of a shady terrace, she has stuck bamboo roots she calls "bamboo root spirits" upside down into the ground. The roots have bird-like heads, or look like moose, or are phallic. In this moody corner, some with glass marble eyes glued in evocative places, the root spirits carry on a magical conversation.

Past the side yard, we reach the back patio, soaked in dense shade. This is the type of place one could sit for hours, reading the long-wished for perfect novel or sipping coffee or cocktails. It's a place made to spend not minutes, but halves of days. None of the patio furniture sings the same melody but each piece harmonizes comfortably; a woodpile in the corner hints at cool nights; a table on another corner houses a collection of swan planters with miniature succulents growing in them; and, facing away from the house, every direction offers green vignettes. In that cool space, the constant rustle of the bamboo is a calm-inducing white noise.

Just past the patio is a shady eclectic woodland where spider plants tangle with heucheras, and a path circles a collection of abutilons in many colors, including one perfect red miniature specimen. A pitcher sage blooms near the path, its foliage fragrant and blossoms crystalline. To the left, five young oaks bow over a bench in front of where her cats are buried. One, Zina, is a clear favorite, with extra gifts decorating her memorial.

The back yard is deep, and C. S. Lewis's refrain from The Last Battle, where the protagonists reach the series' promised land echoes in my head: "Come further up, come further in!" There is so much to discover in this garden, and the turns in paths and corners behind shrubbery offer surprises. Two thirds of the way back through her yard, a dying ash tree stands sentinel to the woodland. A few years ago, Liau had a beekeeper remove a bee hive from the tree. Now, she tells me the tree is loaded with honey, and sometimes, while she's out in the garden, it drips on her from above. The stout-trunked tree creates a tall center with a puddle of lawn underneath, the only place, it appears, where sun directly shines. Pomegranate, loquat, irises and daylilies skirt around the sides of the tree, creating hiding places and living "rooms" for Liau's grandchildren to play in. The daylilies are from her lifelong friend's New England beach house. They've never bloomed in the dry shade, but cover the ground with pleated vases of green leaves, and every time she sees them, her friend is there with her.

Liau tells me she makes her gardening decisions by "fragrance and form." Two banks of Cecille Brunner roses, along west and northern fences, reinforce her point. She plucks an unwhirling bud from one of the rose banks and hands it to me. The form is all elegance, but the scent is sweet, spicy, exotic. While fragrance and form play an absolute role in this garden, I think Liau is selling herself short when she attributes her garden's wonder and magic to those factors.

This is an organic garden in every sense of the word. It grows from experiences, not plans; decades, not blueprints. Each corner is a snapshot: "Here is where my husband used to meditate," "Let's stop and sit here a while, where I have buried my cats," "This Roger's Red grape is shared between me and my neighbor. We get fruit from it every year." The garden has tendriled out of Liau's brain, weaving its way in and out of her life, growing so thickly it becomes impossible to determine between the life and the garden which is the vine and which is the trellis.

I've never been anywhere remotely like it. Paid off or not, this place belongs entirely to Frances Liau.