Wade Graham's California Garden

Times profile of Wade Graham, Los Angeles-based landscape architect who plants Bearss lime trees because the fruit “makes the best vodka tonic you’ve ever had in the world” and is

the type of gardener who plants a thicket of privacy shrubs around the perimeter of the property. “Americans, in general, want to see inside you,” he said. “We want people to have no skin but just, like, Plexiglas. We want to know about their private lives and stuff. I don’t want to know about anyone’s private life.”

Graham considers gardening a form of self-expression:

We ask our gardens “to speak for us,” Mr. Graham writes in a book introduction, “often assigning them certain lines in the play that we write about ourselves.”

This tropical California fantasia is not at all my sort of garden, but then I am nothing like Wade Graham. I share his belief that a garden should be a personal thing that expresses something about the creator. Which is why mine is an overgrown mess full of the most traditional European flowers.