A Rooftop Retreat and a Growing Obsession

Julie Milligan is still unsure how it all happened. One day she’s a Los Angeles family law attorney, the next she’s created an award-winning landscape on a Santa Monica rooftop. Even stranger still, months later she finds herself waist-deep in Hawaiian earth, digging trenches for a 14-acre garden in Kauai.

“Every day I ask myself, how did I go from a successful divorce lawyer to knowing 80 varieties of palm trees?” said the blond, slightly built Milligan as she sat in her garden recently. “If you had told me four years ago that I would be quitting a 12-year career as a lawyer to install and design gardens, I would have laughed.”

It all started with a few herbs and some citrus trees. Five years ago she jumped at the opportunity to buy the condo next door. Her old place had just a 100-square-foot deck; the new apartment offered 1,600 square feet of outdoor space. The deck, which wraps around her spacious two-bedroom condo, sits atop the roof of the unit below.

Roof gardens, common in dense urban areas such as New York City and San Francisco, are unusual in the suburban sprawl of Southern California. But with real estate prices in the region rising, many buyers are finding it more affordable to forgo the land and cultivate plants on roofs, decks and balconies.

“It’s unique to find such a large deck in Santa Monica or even Southern California,” said Milligan. “Suddenly having room outdoors for plants inspired me. I started growing things I wanted to eat, such as citrus, herbs and various vegetables.”

Before long, Milligan, now 40, had created an oasis overlooking the ocean and the heart of Santa Monica that earned the respected Golden Trowel Award in 1999 from Garden Design Magazine. Soon after, she left law to pursue garden design full time, trading in her suit and briefcase for overalls and a shovel. “I had never intended to quit practicing law,” said Milligan, the daughter of a lawyer and a sculptor. “My transformation actually began when my partner and I relocated to Aspen on a part-time basis and I started setting up a law practice there.” What occupied Milligan’s attention in Aspen was not the availability of office space or law clients, but rather the effect of high altitude on plants. “I couldn’t get anything to grow at 10,000 feet,” she said. “It all got smaller, and I became very frustrated. The climate was too severe for gardening, and I just couldn’t live there. So we started looking for a compromise place to live.” Milligan and her partner finally agreed on Kauai. They bought a treeless, weedy cow pasture, and Milligan dug in, creating a tropical paradise for their second home. Since taking up landscaping full time, she has also designed several gardens in Southern California and intends to do more once she finishes her Hawaiian project. “I have no intention of going back to law,” said Milligan. “Working with plants woke up the creative side of me. In many ways, gardening is the opposite of being a divorce lawyer. Instead of dismantling something that was once beautiful, I’m taking nothing and making something beautiful.” In her Santa Monica garden, Milligan has corralled a wide variety of plants into a pleasing horticultural work of art that offers privacy and refuge. She skillfully combines sometimes unlikely partners such as ornamental grasses, bamboo, palms, citrus, fig trees, succulents, birds of paradise, olive trees, ficus, perennial morning glory and various herbs and vegetables–all thriving in containers. A potted creeping fig vine even covers a stucco wall. The area is especially enticing because of her masterful creation of garden rooms. “Julie has brought the inside and outside of her condo together very well,” said Los Angeles-based French interior designer Valerie Pasquiou. “The garden and the interior are very organic, natural and spontaneous, and they blend well together.” The interior, which Milligan designed with her partner, Jackie Yellin, a real estate investment specialist, has a lofty, open feel. The condo’s maple and seagrass floors and mix of modern and Japanese-style furnishings flow to the outdoors, where Milligan has created six distinct seating and activity centers, including a dining area outside of the kitchen and a place to enjoy good conversation and a glass of wine, sitting on floor pillows outside the bedroom. A variety of art, including various sculptures (some done by her mother), wall hangings and mirrors create even more of an illusion of rooms.

Fountains provide the soothing sound of water, and chimeneas and outdoor heaters make forays into chilly nights comfortable. Lighting from carefully placed candles and torches is simple and subdued, giving a hushed, relaxed tone.

While all of the special touches complete the garden, her use of bamboo, ornamental grasses and grasslike plants pulls it all together and makes the garden an ideal retreat.

“Bamboo is the perfect urban plant,” said Milligan, who uses it liberally to screen out neighbors and other buildings. “It’s beautiful and gives you great vertical screening. Ornamental grasses are also terrific. They’re attractive, low-maintenance and stay green year-round.” Milligan became inspired to use ornamental grasses when she saw landscaping created by ornamental grass expert John Greenlee, who has designed meadows all over the world. “It’s been very exciting to work with Julie incorporating ornamental grasses” in both her homes, said Greenlee, author of Encyclopedia of Ornamental Grasses (Rodale, 1992). “Julie has a good eye and a sense of experimentation. The grasses in her garden make you feel more connected to the earth. She essentially has a meadow on her roof that isn’t about fussy flowers or a lot of color. Color is used judiciously. Her garden is much more about texture.” Grasses such as blue fescue, yellow foxtail, red fountain and zebra are found everywhere, swaying in the wind and creating a hypnotic rustling sound. She also has a number of sedges like Cyperus papyrus and horsetail ( Equisetum hyemale ), a rushlike plant that does well in water gardens.

Having a low-maintenance rooftop garden is a plus for Milligan, who now splits her time between Santa Monica and Kauai. In addition to her Hawaiian garden, she is also working with Greenlee, who has a nursery in Pomona and growing grounds in Malibu, to increase the plant palette on the island, starting with her acreage.

She encourages those even with the smallest spaces to create an outdoor retreat. “Having a garden refuge improves quality of life considerably for those who live in apartments and condos. People may not always realize it, but they crave outdoor space,” she said. “If you can create an environment you can actually go out and live in, you’d be amazed at how it positively affects your entire life.”

Jane Tani agrees. Milligan landscaped her Los Angeles home two years ago. “Within a week, Julie converted the yard into a little paradise,” said Tani, who is a business manager. “She created a beautiful private patio in my front yard where I go just about every morning to drink my coffee and read the paper.”

Milligan’s advice for any garden, large or small: “Get creative and you can fit plants in just about anywhere,” she said, reaching down to take a sprig from mint growing at the base of a potted ficus tree.

“Experimentation is what leads to great gardens,” she said. “Every time I allow myself to think outside of the box, the garden gets better.”

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Date: OCTOBER 25,2001