Personal Edens:
The Gardens and Film Sets of Florence Yoch
March 6, - May 24, 1997

Personal Edens: The Gardens and Film Sets of Florence Yoch was organized by the Virginia Steele Scott Gallery at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens and circulated by Curatorial Assistance, Los Angeles. This brochure text is courtesy of the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens.

During her career as a landscape architect, from 1918 to 1971, Florence Yoch adapted traditional landscape designs to American needs. In her gardens. she combined patterns studied on annual pilgrimages to Europe with childhood recollections of California's country avenues, flowered meadows, and fruitful orchards. Going well beyond regional limitations, her more than 250 projects ranged from Cuernavaca to Carmel, including courtyards for historical adobes and social clubs in both Northern and Southern California, parks in Orange County and at Idaho's Shoshone Falls, the grounds for the faculty club and student housing at the California Institute of Technology, and landscapes for stately manors in Pasadena and San Marino. Yoch also designed villas for film producers and directors, such as Jack Warner and George Cukor, as well as the sets for many important movies, of which the most famous is the landscape surrounding Tara in Gone With the Wind.

For Florence Yoch, gardens brought together people from disparate worlds. At the turn of the century, she and her parents visited Arden, Madame Modjeska's estate in Orange County. to participate in a newly-formed community enthusiastic about horticulture. Eventually, Yoch's practice and the shared distinction of owning one of her gardens united a network of friends and clients across Los Angeles by overcoming divisions of geography and social background. In the 1920s and 1930s, Florence Yoch was one of the few landscape architects to work in both Pasadena and West Los Angeles. These communities supposed themselves radically different in their approaches to living. yet Yoch recognized the similarities linking people of differing tastes, backgrounds. and pursuits. To make every settler more comfortable, she transformed desert hills and plains into the places of dreams beloved homes left behind or dose that had always been wished for. She was fond of the people for whom she made gardens on both sides of the city and through her generosity befriended many. Movie director Dorothy Arzner treasured an antique sculpture that Yoch loaned her for her garden, and society doyenne Florence Banning remembered appreciatively the designer's frugality when laying out her grounds after World War II.

Florence Yoch's designs were notable for being inclusive. From her earliest to her latest landscapes she gathered many experiences into a single garden. which even on the smallest lot might contain inveigling walks in sun and shade, a flower garden. a bench for reading beneath a tree, a parterre. a well, an orchard, a grove. and a stretch of lawn. Her open-mindedness to new experiences and her travels helped her harmonize diverse garden desires into an amiable gathering. Each garden site took on a rich personality of its own.

Aiming for the unaffected, she poised the natural against the artificial and the wild against the disciplined in an allegory of temperance. Her style, countering many California myths, emphasized the tidy and under-stated over the carefree and bold. In writing notes toward a book, she jotted down, "Genuinely informal planting is not natural in our climate." Instead, she made function determine the size and spacing of garden rooms and walkways. "Let traffic carry the bonework" she proclaimed, and practical rhythms of old roads, of ambling, and of wheelbarreling set her basic patterns. Unlike other stately home garden designers, she found the most intriguing outdoor living arrangements in the patios and kitchen gardens of peasants, from which she drew inspiration even for the wealthiest clients. Her most audacious scenes mixed intimate moments with grand recollections.

Florence Yoch executed the majority of her designs during her partnership with Lucile Council, her lifetime companion. Their firm, Yoch and Council, flourished between ?1925 and 1940, and their gardens were by far the most photographed in Winifred Starr Dobyns' influential California Gardens (193 I).Their much-published work was preeminent during the period when California's climate, development, magazines, and movies elevated its landscapes into models for the rest of the country, Yoch and Council worked together with the period's best architects, including Roland Coate, Myron Hunt, Reginald Johnson, Wallace Neff and Gordon Kaufmann, whose own Bel Air garden Yoch designed. Successful women in Los Angeles gave Yoch key commissions: the rooftop gardens of the Women's Athletic Club; the garden for the Italianate bungalow of the noted soprano Amelita Galli-Curci; and the Greek temple garden for Dorothy Arzner, who introduced Florence Yoch to the movie industry,

After creating landscape settings to secure California's newcomers in their worlds, Yoch took a natural step and began to design and dress movie locations. Her earliest film work was scholarly a research trip to Africa for David Selznick, who was remaking The Garden of Allah (1936). More extensive commissions included the Capulet Garden for the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet (1936) and Tara for Gone With the Wind (1939), where the plantation demonstrates her characteristic combination of formal motifs and casual plantings. In Tara' s seemingly conservative design Yoch rejected obvious solutions tidy grass and pretty flowers for rough hillocks and gnarled trees that give a venerable presence to the O'Hara family home.

Wry humor informs the unpredictable turns in her designs, and it appears as well in the smiles of her mature portraits. Her gardens and film sets seem simple and photogenic at first glance, yet her landscape pictorialism fulfilled the movie maker's call for stunning visual effects. These gardens also repaid study. Exploratory walks unravelled witty complexities and seasonal discoveries.Through her lectures, book recommendations, nursery outings, and instruction manuals, she educated clients in the more subtle pleasures of gardening. Richness in thought and care rather than in expensive ornamentation gave her designs a longevity unusual in America, and many have endured changes of generation and ownership.

As clients' demands changed after the 1929 stock market crash and again afrer World War II, Yoch simplified plans so that unskilled workers could perform the installation and maintenance of her gardens. She began to draw more explicitly on American architectural forms, turned pools and tennis courts into major features, and let sites speak with fewer accents that recalled European traditions of landscape design. In her later years, she added simple gardens to historic adobes in Monterey, California, and prepared the grounds of country farms throughout California and in Mexico. Some plans retained her attention to sophisticated plant detailing (the courtyard for the Honeyman Ranch in Orange County, for example). Others abstracted classical forms (the 1960s Reese Taylor and Charles Edwin Davis gardens), but many allowed agriculture as well as a natural landscape to dominate. Fields of barley, alfalfa, and African grass replaced lawns on her plans, and Yoch, in 1961, admonished a friend, "do not work against local conditions and spoil the genuine desert-country-ranch look."

Unlike other landscape designers whose proud gardens announced separation from the rest of the world, Yoch strove for harmony and amalgamation. She drew freely from several landscape traditions and classes to resist a single dimension and to make room for surprises in her designs. Never predictable, her earliest projects included the division of a residential site into Spanish, Italian, and English sections, like a collection of postcards from a far-ranging trip. She also recommended that the Orange County Park in Santiago Canyon do nothing but preserve its existing stand of river bottom trees. Her later gardens balance muted and explicit conventions.Viewers enjoy the free play of association and the pleasures of the imagination within emphatically American contexts.

In the designs for the forest in which Yoch and Council had their final home together, historic forms are attenuated into a faint palimpsest, ghostly appearances from earlier plans now succumbing to the forces of nature. Yet even in Yoch's least geometrical designs, her gardens retain the memory of classical figures, recalling earlier, clearer, more defined motifs. Through these devices, the American gardens of a single lifetime came to mirror the subtleties of multi-generational gardens like the Villa Lante in Italy or Stourhead and Stowe in England. The complex harmonies of her personal Edens bridge divisions in city and state and join their owners to larger communities, new cultures, and venerable times. In each landscape, she told many stories to enlarge American dreams.

James J. Yoch, University of Oklahoma, Guest Curator
Eric T Haskell, Scripps College, Guest Curator