Laure Joliet for The New York Times  Wade Graham, the author of âAmerican Eden,â in the garden (âdesigned for beastsâ and privacy) of the California house that now belongs to his ex-wife, Mitie Tucker. More Photos »  THE last time he appeared in a home-and-garden photo spread, Wade Graham was luxuriating in a redwood hot tub in the hills above Santa Barbara, Calif. His blond companion, perched on the lip of the tub, was wearing a green polka-dot bikini. She was trim, tan and girlish.  In fact, she was a girl — Mr. Graham’s 10-year-old sister, Lakin. Mr. Graham was 7. The year was 1974 and the image ran in Better Homes & Gardens.  The hot tub was the ne plus ultra of his parents’ modern ranch house, a baptismal font of the West Coast lifestyle, with its “outdoor rooms” and patio parties.  Now 44, Mr. Graham recalls his family’s California dream in “American Eden,” an animated and ambitious history of four centuries of American gardens published earlier this year by Harper. Through the open glass doors, he writes, “guests sporting leather vests and mustaches enjoyed tumblers of wine and trays of hors d’oeuvres that we’ve since forgotten: roasted water chestnuts or chicken livers wrapped in bacon, smoked oysters, cream puffs and crab dip.”  The hot-tub time machine lurched forward to a recent Saturday morning: Mr. Graham was standing in his own garden in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, beneath a Bearss lime tree. The bountiful fruit “makes the best vodka tonic you’ve ever had in the world,” he said.  It’s easy to imagine Mr. Graham, who hangs his shingle out as a garden designer, pitching this citrus to his Hollywood clients as a kind of carefree cocktail-party-in-a-tree.  “I am not interested in gardening, basically,” he said. By which he meant, the right kind of garden practically grows itself.  But the handsome koa tree next to the front stair tells a different story. What kind of lazy gardener hikes 7,000 feet up the Hualalai Volcano, on the Big Island of Hawaii, to collect a cold-hardy seed? Who casually amasses three dozen aloes from southern Africa and likens his native plantings to a kind of Amazon ecosystem for butterflies and ground bees? (Who has even heard of a ground bee?) Beyond the $30,000 he spent on grading and masonry, Mr. Graham created this idyll almost single-handedly.  As he writes in the introduction to “American Eden,” we ask our gardens “to speak for us, often assigning them certain lines in the play that we write about ourselves that we are hesitant to utter in our own voices.”  “The drama of self-creation isn’t straightforward,” he continues, “but full of deviations, diversions, dodges and impersonations.”  In other words, a garden can be a complicated place. And Wade Graham’s garden is more complicated than most. For one thing, it belongs to his ex-wife.  On this particular morning, the home was empty. Its owner, Mitie Tucker, a 44-year-old event producer whose clients include Gucci, Prada and Barneys New York, was vacationing with the couple’s two children on Fishers Island in New York.  The divorce, which took place two years ago, was harmonious, as divorces go, Mr. Graham and Ms. Tucker agree. Presumably, not every woman would allow her ex-husband to give a tour of her home.  Mr. Graham speaks freely and enthusiastically about sharing custody. (“There will be two of everything,” he told the children at the time of the divorce. “We’ll have more instead of less.”) But beyond that, let’s just say Mr. Graham 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.”
The author of âAmerican Edenâ created a dramatic garden at his (well, his ex-wifeâs) Los Angeles home with a panoramic view.