A Los Angeles Garden Rescued From Buried Cars And Oil Barrels | Garden Tour

My name is Patrick Bernance and we are in our lovely home in Los Angeles, California in the northeast section of town. So the original structure of the house was built in 1890 and it's considered a pure middle Victorian. So essentially, if you're looking at it in the plan, it's a perfect square. Even though I'm a designer, I will say that my favorite thing, my two favorite things to do is either to cook in the kitchen, which we do all the time. We are a family that cooks and we spend so much time outside in the garden. So, you know. I'm not a big person that likes to go, you know, jogging or going to the gym, but I like to just get outside and kind of work in the garden. So you'll normally find me outside either planting something in our vegetable garden or, you know, tending to the many weeds that shoot up, you know, and also just spending time with the family out there. Our oldest son loves to kind of get out there and just help me water or, you know, pick... weeds and you know it's you know it's it's fun for the family not picking the weeds but just being out there together i know we've mentioned this a few times before but our garden plays a really important and integral part to how we live in this house so i'd love to be able to share it with you so follow me so one of the selling points of the house was this incredible garden a lot of these older mature trees were here but I will say that the rest of it was a combination of old oil barrels, you know, probably a dozen abandoned, you know, automobiles and just essentially buried garbage. We still occasionally when we're planting something we'll find, you know, the remnants of an old toaster or just yesterday while we were cleaning up we found A collection of old forks and an axe. And so, you know, there's always surprises in this garden, but I think the thing that's so magical is that so many of these trees in Northeast Los Angeles are really old. So this palm tree is over a hundred years old. I mean, it just towers above the house. This is our you know magnificent lime tree which you know we use all the time for margaritas. So again like kind of have to have one of these. This staircase was originally a concrete ramp with a broken bird feeder and you know up until a few years ago it was still that but what's nice is that we were able to find some really beautiful mexican handmade bricks and then utilize stone underneath the concrete ramp for all of these planters and so we were utilizing most of the materials that were already present on the property and what's great is that it just It just feels, you know, like one solid palette and it's just a clean, warm kind of... place to hang. All of the jade, all of the aloes and agave, everything that you see that's essentially blooming with a floral, we planted. The trees were here, but all of these agaves, we planted ourselves. So some are just getting ready to explode again with um blooms, a lot have already kind of, you know, you're beginning to see them expiring, but they're so incredible. You know, my wife and her brother, you know, took these two larger agaves years ago and crammed them into the back of their car from a friend's house, and then we planted them. So, you know, I will say a lot of these plants were given by friends who just didn't want them anymore. And, you know, we had enough space that, you know, we gladly were going to put them in the garden So if we're not dining inside and if the weather permits we are outside most of the time so we're either entertaining and eating here and the kids are just running around but it's just a really nice you know outdoor patio. We're protected with this beautiful loquat canopy so we're you know it creates this really nice little intimate space but we still get really nice you know You know, natural daylight, we have a little bit of privacy and you know, we can see downtown LA, so it's a really nice little spot. Unless it's absolutely freezing, which it rarely is, and you know, even if it's raining, we're probably outside 90% of the time. What's nice about this space is that we're in such close proximity to downtown, only a mile and a half, but you wouldn't know it living up in this little sanctuary. So, you know, the kids have a great place to kind of be close to the city. But they have their own little magical garden that they can, you know, explore, go on adventures in and just, you know, do all those things that kids need to do. Thanks for watching. Go to Homeworthy.com for exclusive content and shopping guides.