The Gardens Behind the Hedges

Beverly Hills maintains its hedges like arguments, per its founding piece in these pages, and behind two sets of them the public is, quietly, invited. The great stone mansion in the hills above town, a doomed oil heir's monument now owned by the city, opens its terraced grounds daily as a park, and the flower-mad estate of the town's first grande dame runs docent tours through gardens that descend a hillside in Mediterranean tiers, and both, in the spring weeks when Southern California blooms all at once, constitute the town's most surprising free-and-nearly-free attraction.

The stone mansion's grounds are the accessible marvel, formal terraces, cypress allees, koi courts, and balustraded overlooks with the whole basin spread below, maintained to a standard that explains the location fees, since the film industry shoots here constantly, and the visitor wanders it all without ticket or reservation, which residents of the surrounding blocks consider the town's best-kept open secret. The mansion itself opens rarely, its noir history, a death the city never fully explained, adding the requisite shadow to the topiary.

The grande dame's estate runs the intimate version, tours booked ahead through the gardens she built across a hillside, rose terraces, a renowned palm grove gone gloriously jungly, and the house kept as she left it, which together preserve the town's founding era, pre-industry, horticultural, and ambitious, better than any archive. Spring, February through May here, brings both properties to peak, wisteria, roses, and the town's street trees performing in succession.

Take the stone terraces on any visit as the free counterweight to the boulevards, book the estate tour for the spring weeks, and walk the flats' famous canopy streets between them, jacarandas in their April purple. The town performs wealth in public, per its other pieces, and gardens in private, and the two exceptions behind the hedges are where the second, better performance has been running all along.