What people call Los Angeles is really a collection of 88 cities spread out over all four thousand square miles of Los Angeles County. High population attests to the best weather anywhere, making outdoor living a year around activity. When it's balmy outside, who wants to stay indoors when you can enjoy a landscape for relaxing, dining and swimming? With all the latest accoutrements that make a grill into an outdoor kitchen and a pool into the gem of a water feature, Angelenos are sure to enjoy these investments almost every day of the year.

Yet within this county are vastly different conditions which relate to lot size and proximity to the coast. High end homes in Santa Monica where the marine influence is strong need the warmth of outdoor fireplaces or a fire pit to make evenings outdoors more comfortable. Further south Long Beach with its port lends a more international flare to small yards of older neighborhoods that back up to pricier coastal communities. Throughout these areas are the coveted Spanish bungalows of the 1920s that are so small that a well built landscape proves the essential extension of interior spaces.

At the opposite side of the Los Angeles basin where the older communities back up to the mountains, living in the landscape is driven by much higher summer temperatures. Though Pasadena is no longer the haunt of "little old ladies", it has become home to established professionals who revitalize the old estates and bring the Craftsman bungalows back to their original beauty. Here you'll find elegance in spades, a strong aesthetic, and these larger homes feature some of the finest landscaping in the west.

Head north through the dense San Fernando Valley to tree studded hills of Thousand Oaks, developed much later than the rest of the county. Here newer McMansions feature all the bells and whistles your landscape money can buy. With interior heat reaching its highest level in this area, swimming pools, spas and extensive dining on the patio is an everyday thing.

Nowhere is the landscape more important than in Los Angeles where celebrities vie with designers and wealthy old money to create the most innovative and exciting landscapes. Some of the best feature exotic succulent gardens and compositions of drought resistant natives. Los Angeles is the well spring from which these trends are born long before they arrive further east.