Inspiration, mass appeal found in this meticulous garden
By Thea Steinmetz
Insights
Published July 18, 2007

The story of this exceptional garden cannot be told without first knowing about the outstanding couple that found their American dream.

Lan To in her garden. (West Life photos by Larry Bennet)

Lan and Binh To fled the communist regime in Vietnam in 1971 and came to the United States. What makes this so unusual is that the head of the family is blind. He soon managed to get a job as a janitor and thereafter was offered employment at the Society for the Blind. In 1987, having had another child in addition to the two that immigrated with their parents, they bought a house in Westlake. The mother, Lan, had heard that this community had a good school system, so that’s where she wanted her children to be educated.

Now the children are grown and gone, and the couple manage a coin vending machine business. Both are very hard workers and able to reach for the American dream.

If truth must be told, I have never reported on a neater garden. The lady of the house lives for her flowers. She single-handedly built a wonderful pond, dug the hole and carted the stones that surround the water. Goldfish happily multiply every year and make it through the winter without any problems.

The soil dug up for the pond provides the elevation for two sides of the pond. A gentle waterfall, as well as a stronger stream on the other side, keep the pond water moving. Water lilies will flourish in late summer. A few happy frogs also reside here.

White daisies have multiplied so that they are now well represented. The first plant moved to the pond was an apricot tree with its branches gently hanging over the water.  In former years there have been enough apricots for a good harvest. But, sadly, due to the late frost we had to endure, there are no apricots this time around.

A red Japanese maple, hostas, day lilies, pretty blue self-seeded alyssum and geraniums mingle with an assortment of seasonal flowers, now past their season. Even cattails stand proudly at the edge of the water.

A generous brick patio leads to the pond and here, every brick was laid down perfectly in place by Lan. Her developed sense of what needs to be done is uncanny and then she goes and does it. Even a shed was precisely erected by her. The rocks she dug up in the process are used to border a section of the side yard.

A chain link fence surrounds the entire property. A smaller section is separately fenced in for a playground for the two small grandchildren. If left to their own devices, they would feed the fish all day long.

What brought me here originally were the vegetables. A close neighbor of the couple told me that I would find unusual Chinese vegetables in this garden. This came as a surprise to Lan because she said no one ever comes to look at her garden and how did this neighbor know?

The back portion of the property is devoted to, among other greens, five different kinds of mint. They are not used for cooking, but rather are made into a fresh dipping sauce. There is spearmint, peppermint, a Mexican mint and two that cannot be identified.

Along with the chives and cilantro, they get used in a fish sauce. Although I could not identity everything, the arugula and perilla are familiar.  One favorite is an herb called rao ma, but since I had never seen it before, I don’t know what it is. The red and, here also, green perilla are regarded by us as a weed, but in the Japanese culture it is treated as a food.

Crop rotation is practiced with the tomatoes and with the ample large trees it has become difficult to find open sunlight. Every vegetable has its own small bed with the boundary set in wood. The paths between are mulched and nowhere is there a weed in sight.

The vegetable patch is bordered with wood rounds that were purchased as logs.  Lan then cut them into pieces and uses them freely all around her ambitious garden. She would have preferred stone or rocks, but said that this became too expensive since rocks are sold by the pound.

Even here flowers guard the border of the vegetable garden. Yellow coreopsis brings sunshine to green hostas and downy lamb’s ear. There is color here for every month during the summer. Nicotiana, fuchsias, Solomon’s seal and bright yellow California poppies are interspersed in the various beds. 

There are several large containers on the patio accommodating extraordinary plants. Two specimens need to seek shelter in the house during the winter. The star jasmine offers pleasing fragrance along with a multitude of small white flowers. The night-blooming cereus, belonging to the cactus family, is a precious tropical plant not readily found around here. The plate-size white blossom only blooms at night and gives off an incredible fragrance. Visitors to the tropics will tell you that people have midnight parties when this heavenly flower blooms.

There are many of us that would like to know how one woman can keep a garden of this magnitude all by herself and still be part of the daily business world?  I tip my sunbonnet in Lan’s direction.

Let’s give her the green thumb of the week. Thank you for the inspiration.