Urban Jungle

At her Los Angeles house, garden designer Judy Kameon has introduced definition and shade to a plot with a series of tired terraces and verdant, drought-tolerant plants.

- CAROLINE DONALD

Were it not for an early love of dogs, the landscape designer Judy Kameon’s life might have taken a very different turn. It was the Eighties and she was studying fine art when she asked her painting professor if he knew of any property for rent that had a yard for her new Great Dane puppy. He told her of a house to let in Elysian Park, a neighbourhood in Los Angeles. She rented for a year, eventually bought it, and – more than three decades on – she is still there.

The house is a Spanish-colonial style bungalow and it came with enough land on the upwards sloping site for Judy to build an artist’s studio behind it. In the early Nineties, she also bought the adjacent empty lot, as there was a beautiful 100-year-old pepper tree on it that she had long coveted. The first thing she did was install an egg-shaped pool at the bottom of the enlarged garden. She then created a terrace around the pepper tree, and the garden grew – literally – from there. ‘The bungalow was tiny and I love to entertain,’ she explains. ‘The outdoor space had the potential to be the biggest room of my house.’

Lack of horticultural knowledge was not going to hold her back. ‘I’m self-taught, but I’ve never let that get in the way of my doing something,’ she says, as we sit under a leafy canopy with Zoey, the family dog, nuzzling me for attention. ‘I proceeded with great excitement, enthusiasm and ignorance – I became completely obsessed.’