Museum-Quality Plant Care

Where’s Claude Monet when we need him? It’s a shame the Impressionist master isn’t around to immortalize the garden at the Norton Simon Museum. No, not the waterlilies--been there, done that--but the guy afloat on the boat. You could call it “Man in a Plastic Dinghy.” When the museum is closed each Tuesday, Mariposa Horticultural Enterprises of Irwindale dispatches a crew to keep the 2 1/2-year-old pond shipshape. In a scene never observed by the public (until now), a member of the maintenance team boards the museum’s inflatable raft and paddles off to work. “The guys use the boat to fertilize the waterlilies by dropping little pellets into the underwater planters,” says John Sudolcan, the museum’s director of operations. “It also helps when they rake the bottom to thin the natural growth of the oxygenating grass.”

The pond, laid out by Santa Monica landscape designer Nancy Goslee Power and inspired by Monet’s water garden in Giverny, France, is shallow enough at its edges for workers to don waders for most chores, including the removal of voracious apple snails and stray goldfish. But for cleaning the biofilter at the pond’s 6-foot-deep center, access is by rowboat only.

The placid waters in Pasadena may pale in comparison to Monet’s wind-tossed Honfleur seascapes, but the museum is already on its second raft. The first, a four-man model from Sport Chalet, had to be decommissioned after two years. “We used to keep it inflated in the outdoor pump room,” Sudolcan says. “But with all the sharp objects out there, it kept getting punctured and we just couldn’t patch it anymore.” The replacement, a smaller gray-vinyl number from Big 5 Sporting Goods, should remain seaworthy a long time. Says Brian Regan, Sudolcan’s assistant: “We deflate it after every use, fold it up, pack it in its box and store it inside in the art shop. We treat that one like it’s gold.”