If the wild show wanted to film in the middle of Los Angeles, Casa Apocalyptica—a vertiginous jungle of native plants, abundant wildlife, soothing waters, and salvaged debris—would be a great place to land.
Here, slender salamanders scurry through foliage beneath robust stands of Santa Cruz Island buckwheat and California fuchsia. Dozens of bright red flame dragonflies dart around the hand-dug pond and rubble-strewn stream.
By day, birdsong is as ubiquitous as Muzak in a mall; frogs serenade at night. Near the house, a couple of koi the size of human cubs roll out of their long raised pool to stroke their heads and their favorite treat – watermelon slices.
Aside from a few fruit trees, nearly every plant in the country is native to California, including Roger’s Red grapes, which grow in lush tangles on tree-lined terraces, cool temperatures well below 10 degrees—and all thrive without regular irrigation.
Koi fish munch on a watermelon in the backyard of Chris Elwell and Kory Odell’s Mid-Wilshire home.
Top view of koi pond.
And most notable: All of this part-art, part-wilderness adventure is contained within a 12,000-square-foot, sloping yard that surrounds a grand 1910 Craftsman home that Chris Elwell and Kory Odell renovated after the couple bought the dilapidated property in 2003 in the small Mid-Wilshire neighborhood known as Oxford Square.
Their rich native landscape, emerging from 100 years of debris transformed into garden treasures, has earned them a mythical status in the native plant world, and for more than a decade they have made them an essential part of the Theodore Payne Foundation’s spring garden tours. .
“Casa Apocalyptica imagines our original ecology returning in ruins after humans leave,” the couple wrote in this year’s explanation of the garden tour. But nature got a lot of help from both men, and if they had known how much work it would take, Elwell said, shaking his head, who knows if they would have gone for it.
Except listening to him talk is clearly a job they enjoyed.
They wanted to move into a neighborhood of old houses in 2003, but the massive Craftsman mansion they chose was in terrible shape. Bars covered all the windows, the plumbing and electricity didn’t work, and all the natural wood was painted white. The yard was full of rubble.
“Our friends and family thought we were crazy. They were like, ‘Why are you putting all this time and effort into this old wreck of a house?'” Elwell said.
Kory Odell, left, and Chris Elwell in their backyard at Casa Apocalyptica.
“But Kory grew up working on houses, and we wanted a project and a big yard for a garden,” he added. “The house was more than we expected, but we were obsessed with building something ourselves and making it authentic to us. And I like the beauty of things that are overlooked. I felt like we had all these great neighborhoods right in front of our noses and everyone was ignoring them.”
The restoration took up most of their free time, but it was also therapeutic, an artistic outlet after a stressful day at work, Elwell said. “But the garden sat for a while because we had so much on the house.
They didn’t start the yard until 2007, Elwell said, and both still worked full-time. Odell, now part of the executive team building the Metro Purple Line, worked with a mid-sized construction firm. And Elwell, now retired, was head of television distribution at Sony Pictures.
Their free time went into a transformation again. The front yard was a dense thicket of “freeway refrigerator” that required several trash cans to be hauled away, and the bare dirt sloping backyard was full of interesting trash that people had been throwing away for 100 years — “old motorcycle parts, water heaters from the 1920s, horseshoes, lots of bottles of whiskey and lots of old cobblestones and bricks and building materials.’
In their eyes, the “waste” was strangely awesome, and it gave them a theme: post-apocalypse LA, with native plants growing in and around the broken ruins of society.
A rusted metal object sits surrounded by plants.
Plummer’s Mariposa Lily.
The candlestick rests at the bottom of the pond in the front yard.
Rescue must be a bit of a joke. Odell’s firm was doing repairs after the earthquake, and during the demolitions at the site he discovered some new artifacts, such as industrial-sized valves that may have been used in the oil fields, or boxes of long rusty files. “So I’d be at work,” Elwell said, “and I’d get this text with pictures of something like an old radiator, followed by this question: ‘TREASURE?’
Neighbors also got in on the action, inviting the couple to look at things their elders had hidden away decades ago. “They said, ‘Dad hasn’t opened that door in 20 years; let’s see what’s there.’
The landscaping was part inspiration and part experiment, driven by fun, Elwell said, and a lot of mistakes.
One of the first was to go the whole hog into native plants without understanding anything about them. Odell, for example, loved the manzanita trees that grow abundantly around his family’s 40-acre ranch in Shasta County.
So they got a tractor and dug one up to replant in LA. “He looked great for about six weeks and then he died,” Elwell said. “We were so naive. So it became a research project – how do you make these things grow?
Their research led them to the website of Las Pilitas Nursery, a Santa Margarita grower specializing in California native plants. Bert Wilson, its founder, died in 2014, but his extensive descriptions of native plants “are very helpful for beginners,” Elwell said. “He had a good sense of humor about it, writing things like, ‘I know this plant is really tough because we’ve run it over with a tractor a few times and it always comes back.'”
Many of the metal objects in the yard have been overtaken by plant growth.
From there, they began visiting the Theodore Payne Foundation in Sun Valley, one of Southern California’s premier native plant nurseries, “and as a new gardener, I wanted to buy everything,” Elwell said. “I treated plants more like furniture than ecology. I’d say, ‘Oh, that looks great.’ I didn’t think, ‘Does it really make sense to plant something that normally grows on an alpine slope at sea level in clay soil?'”
As their knowledge grew, their focus shifted to creating habitats for regional pollinators, birds and other animals. And habitats need water, a realization that had unexpected benefits.
When Odell broke his elbow in a mountain bike accident, he quickly mastered the simple rehabilitation exercises his doctor gave him. So when Elwell said he wanted a front yard pond, Odell was immediately on board.
“He’s just the type of guy where you show what you want to do and he says, ‘OK, let’s go,'” Elwell said. “So he just dove in with a pickaxe to dig a hole and a 30-pound gouge to move the boulders” for the roughly 8-by-12-foot pond, complete with a small waterfall fed by recirculating water (flowing through an oversized recycled attachment) and a large boulder he drilled in the middle, to provide mild bathing for small drinkers. Oh, and now a large toyon and mountain mahogany on either side to provide partial shade.
When Odell returned for a check-up a few weeks later, his doctor was amazed at how well his hand had healed. “He said, ‘How did you do that?'” Odell said, “And I said, ‘By doing everything you told me not to do.’
They brought in a contractor to build spacious decks off the kitchen and living room, a long, narrow koi pond with a Medusa head fountain, and a wide pool that mimics the hillside.
A fountain with a relief of Medusa’s head flows into the koi pond in the backyard.
Naked buckwheat.
In the backyard of the house, the pool is almost surrounded by large stands of native plants.
But that’s where their “modern” landscaping ends. Instead of a lawn or small potted palms around the pool, there are oversized stands of sage desperado, a fragrant cross between white sage and purple sage that grows so wildly it almost spills into the pool.
Odell hired an excavator to cut the bottom of the slope into a cliff, supported by dirt dug for the pool along with recycled broken concrete and other rubble. He used old railroad tracks to create steps down to the bottom of the slope. He dug a narrow trench between the cliff and the steps, which became a recirculating stream that empties into a small marsh filled with frogs, butterflies, and dragonflies.
Like their home, the yard is divided into “rooms” or separate spaces, so when you’re sitting by the pool, you don’t see the koi pond with its restless fish, or the small stream bubbling just 10 feet away, or the ornate handmade pergola. which offers shade at the foot of the hill.
Walking through this yard is an adventure that slowly unfolds. Years ago mama bear manzanita (Arctostaphylos ‘Mama Bear’) they finally took hold in their side yard, which almost completely obscured the old driveway; further, a hedge of citrus trees produces lemons the size of mangoes.
Plastic flower pots collect cobwebs on a shelf in the yard.
A dragonfly lands on a plant near one of the water features in the yard.
There are a few other fruit trees on the property, but mostly it’s a bunch of native plants with enough variety that even in the summer, when many California natives go dormant, the garden is full of scent and color—bright purple wands of woolly blue curls that smell as sweet as gum; sticky yellow and red monkey flowers, tall mallows with large flowers in orange and lavender, pinkish white bouquets on narrow milkweed and sunflowers and fuchsias almost ready to bloom.
Needless to say, friends and family are now not questioning their decision. They’ve deliberately designed an outdoor space for entertaining, with a huge welcome table by the kitchen and swaying solar lanterns in the crystal-clear pool. And over the years they bought houses on either side and now rent them out to nephews and friends.
The gates between the properties are always open, and when it’s time for loved ones to gather, Elwell said, it’s just a matter of when — “where” is never a question.