Actress Julie Newmar's Gorgeous Garden Boasts More Than 80 Rose Varieties

"First of all, or maybe last of all because I’m 89 now, I can say in capital letters that I live in Paradise,” says Julie Newmar from her garden in Los Angeles. She has always lived by superlatives. At 5 feet, 11 inches tall, the actress/dancer/model has exemplified a very specific kind of midcentury bombshell since she burst on the scene as Stupefyin’ Jones in the Broadway musical Li’l Abner. (You can watch clips of the subsequent movie on YouTube, where she emerges from a rocket with the ability to paralyze a man with a bump of her hips.) But it’s her role as the original Catwoman, seductively purring alongside Adam West in the campy 1960s television show Batman, that has endeared her to a generation of adoring fans—including me. These days, Newmar spends her time “pinching pansies” surrounded by her own private paradise.

As a kid, I had an after-school ritual of watching old Batman reruns at my neighbor’s house accompanied by nacho cheese Doritos and Dr Pepper. We’d dance to the theme song and then watch rapt as Catwoman took what was already an over-the-top show and amped it up with a dose of glamour. She never seemed to be able to decide if she wanted to fall in love with Batman—or murder him. I found her utterly fascinating. So when my friend photographer Robert Trachtenberg texted me that he was renting a house just down the street from where Newmar lives and that she had a beautiful front yard packed with roses, I was intrigued. There, behind said wall of roses and a wry “No Dogs Please” sign, Newmar has made a fantastical garden of flower-filled rooms, primeval tree ferns, and fountains. “Some people love dogs. I love plantsss,” she says, drawing out the s. “I think I fell in love with gardens because that’s where I felt safest as a kid—out in our yard with my father.”

Even as the native Los Angeleno’s career took off—which demanded near-constant travel for Broadway shows, movies, and television appearances—she found time to nurture her green thumb. “When I was touring, I remember putting plants on the edge of the windowsill in the kitchen wherever I was staying,” she says. “Seeing something growing gives me the sense that everything is all right and in its place.”

After finally settling down at her current Brentwood home, Newmar hired a series of landscape designers to help transform a blank slate with a dog run and front yard full of English ivy into a horticultural utopia fueled by her imagination and appetite for knowledge (she is a big reader).

“Wisdom says if you love gardening, get advice from someone smarter than yourself,” she says. “ ’Cause you need the layout first of all.” Landscape designer Jay Griffith took her ideas and made curving pathways that weave among the various garden rooms punctuated by fantastical elements like a Balinese waterfall and an Alice in Wonderland gate, mirrored so it looks like there is another vista behind it.

In Newmar's world, gardens are transporting, even transcendental. “Every day I go outside, I see something new that’s blooming, and it transfixes me,” she says. “I just stand there and pick up one flower and look closer and closer into it. The sepals and all those fancy Latin words that tell you what’s what. I fall down into it with a spiritual glee.” 

The space is designed with four secret gardens, making the property seem even larger than its 8,600 square feet. “I believe in small house, big garden,” she says. “Who wants to take care of all that indoor stuff?” The landscape is arranged so Newmar and her adult son, John, who has Down syndrome and lives with her, can easily tour the gardens in a motorized scooter. “After all that dancing, I don’t walk very well anymore, and he doesn’t walk very well,” she explains. “But the two of us just zip around, and everything is designed to be flat so we can go here, there, and everywhere.” Newmar created a prehistoric-looking area for John’s amusement, nestling fake snakes and lizards among Japanese maples, hanging begonias, orchids, and a bromeliad collection. 

For all her attention to the fantastical, Newmar also takes a practical approach to gardening. Aided by her current designer, Bradley Bontems, she keeps meticulous track of the plantings, recording flowers as they come and go and uploading videos to YouTube to share her slice of nature. Pansies and other annuals go wild for many months in Southern California’s mild climate, followed by cottage garden flowers like foxgloves, delphiniums, and poppies. Newmar is always honing the plantings. “Let me share a secret with you,” she says. “Let’s say something is missing or wrong in your garden. Half-close your eyes. That will eliminate the distracting details and you will see the whole picture. P.S. To dress properly in the morning, do the same thing.”

Color is of the utmost importance, particularly with Newmar's collection of 80 different roses. “Oh, my gosh,” she says. “There’s no drug on Earth like the depth of a rose. That ‘Gertrude Jekyll’. And ‘Yves Piaget’ as big as your face. ‘Janice Kellogg’. ‘Fragrant Cloud’. ‘Pat Austin’. I have so many.” Landscape designer Sandy Kennedy organized the roses into a Hot Garden of reds, yellows, and oranges and a Cool Garden of lavenders and pinks.

Roses and foxgloves rotate over the course of the summer with pansies and delphiniums in a cottage-style planting. ‘Pandora’, a rich burgundy corn poppy, is easily grown from seed. Of the ‘Eden’ rose that climbs an arbor, Newmar advises, “You’ve got to put it up high because it wants to look down at you.”

Roses create a riot of color in much of the garden, but quieter spaces also exist, like along this brick path amid begonias, tree ferns, and bromeliads. “The best thing about a garden is that you’re going to experience it over time,” Newmar says. “The flowering part might change every year, but the deep roots are permanent.”

Famous in West Coast garden circles, Newmar's yard is a hot ticket when she allows visitors during the Open Days program of The Garden Conservancy. And more than one flower has been named in her honor—a daylily (peach with a burgundy throat) and a rose (gold with blush-pink edges). But it is her fame as Catwoman that has stuck with her most over her six-decade career, so much so that her catsuit hangs in the Smithsonian. “Thank god for Catwoman,” she says. “It’s like the opera Carmen. They’ll always be writing different versions of Catwoman. She will live on forever. I’m only too grateful. It’s as if it were designed around me, for me.”

As she nears her 90th birthday, Julie Newmar knows how lucky she is— even if life has thrown her a few unexpected turns along the way. “At the end of the day, you understand that the real garden you’re working on is yourself. No two days in my garden are ever the same. You can bury a lot of troubles while you’re digging in the dirt.” Sounds like the definition of paradise to me.

Styled by Elizabeth Stewart