GRAND DESIGN IN FULL BLOOM AT GETTY CENTER GARDEN : SPECTACULAR LANDSCAPING ENHANCES COMPLEX'S ARTISTIC BEAUTY FROM THE GROUNDS UP.

Byline: Elizabeth M. Cosin Daily News Staff Writer

It can be difficult to remember Los Angeles sits on a desert. Succulents and cactuses feel at home, grasses and hills fade to brown easily. Tropical palm trees, remember, were brought here.

Yet, above the San Diego Freeway (405), where the Getty Center complex is quietly rising in a magnificence of stone and glass, an Eden of sorts is being sculpted out of those ragged, dry hillsides.

Three-quarters of the six-building, 110-acre site worth $733 million will be green space and gardens, the focus of which will be the Getty's central, 134,000-square-foot garden. Like the museum and cultural center around it, this garden is part of a grand design by the Getty Trust to create a spectacularly visual and educational state-of-the-art project.

The garden, designed by California artist Robert Irwin, will feature a walkway crisscrossing a gently winding, tree-lined stream marked by colorful flowering plants that increase in intensity along the path. The stream flows under a teak bridge and cascades downward into a shallow pool.

The walkway opens into a landscaped amphitheater with three levels of specialty gardens, and walking and resting areas that encircle the pool, the center of which is a geometric maze of flowering azaleas in varying shades of red.

The garden is scheduled to open along with the museum in October 1997. Many Getty Trust employees are already at the site, and Monday will mark the first day the Getty's research institutes will be consolidated there.

``The whole point of the garden is that it is a retreat,'' says Irwin, known for working in public spaces as father of California's light and space movement. He wanted this design to be a soft, pleasant counterpoint to the hard angles, smooth lines and rich stonework of architect Richard Meier's buildings.

``Going to a museum is hard work. After spending an hour standing and moving and looking at paintings, you could use a break. The garden will be that, a kind of refuge for those who work there and visit there.''

Work on the gardens began nearly four years ago when Irwin first put pen to drafting paper. But the hard part has been making those plans a reality. It has been painstaking trial and error for Irwin and the Getty's Richard Naranjo, who are culling and cultivating the mix of flowers, trees and grasses that will bring Irwin's concept to life.

``It's been a wonderful collaboration,'' says Irwin, who has commuted to the project from his home in San Diego three days a week for two years. ``Richard (Naranjo) has been terrific. He's been very, very helpful. We've had to work together on all the planting, making sure everything is going to work, and he's going to be working with it on a day-to-day basis.''

If Irwin is the artist, Naranjo, the manager of grounds and gardens for the Getty Trust, might be considered his paintbrush.

For nearly two years, the central garden maze has been a work in progress at the Getty Museum in Malibu. Behind the classical museum in a drying field of grass and some trees, Naranjo has been constructing the maze within a fenced-in area the size of the new garden pool.

``We've been all over the West Coast, all the way up to Oregon, visiting nurseries,'' says Naranjo. ``It's been quite a project. Bob (Irwin) is the designer, but he doesn't know whether what he wants to use will actually work. That's what he relies on me for. We've had many long discussions of the plants and what will work and what won't.''

Naranjo, a native of San Fernando, began working for the Getty in 1974 as head gardener for the museum when there were only about 35 employees in the whole trust. Now he oversees a staff of 31 gardeners, though more will likely be needed as the big planting begins in the next few months.

The maze was created in 8-foot-long sections of planters, each of which will require four workers to move.

They eventually will be set in ``boxes'' sculpted at the bottom of the pool, giving the azaleas the appearance of floating on the surface of the water.

The plantings along the stream and around the sides of the amphitheater will include more than 500 species of plants, among them a variety of perennials and native foliage such as princess flower, garden hydrangea, floribunda roses, garden nasturtium, fleabane, sages and deer grass.

Irwin and Naranjo settled on London plane for the trees that line the path along the stream. Irwin likes the trees for their sturdy character and elegance.

The trees surrounding the amphitheater will be crape myrtle, a Chinese flowering tree that is delicate and, as with the London plane, attractive with or without leaves. All the trees will be sculpted geometrically on the outside and allowed to grow uninhibited toward the inside. The effect is to give them symmetry with the strong lines of the buildings and not take away from the ``progressive harmony'' of the garden's evolution, Irwin says.

Irwin picked trees that would change with the seasons in dramatic ways, giving the garden a different look throughout the year.

``We wanted the garden to be constantly changing,'' he says. ``The blossoms will just enhance the whole thing. Nature has its own harmony about it. The blossoms will come and go. In the winter, the bones will show through, and in the summer the opposite will happen and the garden will take over.''

Many of the trees, including several thousand native California oaks that will be planted around the 110-acre site's perimeter, were purchased and temporarily planted off-site, where the long process of trimming and sculpting already has begun.

``When we finally begin to move things up to the site, we will have already started training them,'' says Naranjo. ``The hope is that when the museum opens to the public, the gardens will have started to develop and won't look new and bare.''

The process also has helped weed out trees and grass and flowers that weren't compatible or didn't grow well on the site. Olive trees were nixed because Naranjo was afraid they would stain the travertine stone pavers, and the gardeners went through several varieties of azaleas before they settled on the three types being used in the maze.

Even the stones for the pathway and the stream have been carefully selected. Irwin planned the stream so it will run quietly along until it picks up velocity and flows vigorously over a flat plaza and down a chadar, or slope, into the pool. The water will flow over a wall of carnelian granite, which is reddish black in color and has been split, not cut, to give it a rough face.

The path will zigzag in a series of switchbacks across the stream. Made of blue stone from Pennsylvania laid in a herringbone pattern, it cuts into the grassy hillside with retaining walls of varying heights made of Corten steel. The stream it crosses is clad with a stone called kinnesaw that Irwin found in Montana, and the large boulders in the stream will be of green chirt, which comes from California gold country.

The raised beds in the azalea pools will be finished in black slate from South Africa.

``The architecture is the thing, the piece de resistance of the whole site,'' says Irwin. ``I like the scale of the garden, and the elements we have used I think work very well with the buildings without getting lost.''

A painter until 1960, the 68-year-old Irwin has taken to his vast canvas with relish. The Los Angeles native found the medium of paint limiting. Much of the work he did for public spaces during the next 20 years or so earned him status as father of the art of light and space movement, but many of those pieces are gone, having been created for specific spaces.

Getty Trust president and CEO Harold M. Williams was intrigued by Irwin's work on a redesign of Miami International Airport in the 1980s. (The work was scuttled when new leadership was installed at the airport.)

Williams saw an opportunity to bring a unique, artistic touch to the public green space of the new Getty Center, and Irwin saw the job as a wonderful way to create a permanent, living work of art that would have a chance to grow and evolve. It was the canvas he had always been looking for.

``This has been an extremely exciting project for me,'' Irwin says. ``The gift of this project is the Getty's willingness to maintain it once it is completed. ... All these public plazas we have are concrete and steel. A real hostile environment. ... It takes a real tree a while to grow and develop. You can't just stick palm trees in. Here we have the opportunity to do something quite special.''

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9 Photos

Photo: (1--2--Cover--Color) Surrounding the Getty Center complex, an Eden of sorts is being sculpted out of the hillsides above the San Diego Freeway. The centerpiece of the garden is a geometric maze of flowering azaleas, complemented by exotic stone landscaping.

(3--Color) ``It's been quite a project,'' says Richard Naranjo, manager of grounds and gardens for the Getty Trust, who for nearly two years has been constructing the central garden maze.

(4) A cement pit has been poured as the foundation for the site that will hold the garden's azalea maze.

(5) Grounds manager Richard Naranjo inspects plants to be used in an overhanging flower walkway in the Getty's central garden.

Andy Holzman/Special to the Daily News

(6--Color) The central garden, designed by California artist Robert Irwin, features a stream flowing under a canopy of London plane trees. The stream crosses a flat plaza and falls over a slanted wall of carnelian granite into a reflecting pool.

(7--Color) An aerial view of the Getty Center includes, clockwise from left, the research center for art history and humanities, a restaurant, an auditorium, an information institute and Getty Trust administrative offices, and the conservation institute.

(8--9--Color) A model, below, depicts Getty's central garden, designed by Robert IrwiWn. The model at left shows the garden's chadar wall.