Las Urbanistas

The decision to close the site, which became a flash point in the national debate over immigration, was reached late Tuesday by Mayor Stephen J. DeBenedittis and the six-member Town Council after a 2 1/2 -hour closed-door session. It brings the western Fairfax community virtually full circle in its attempts to regulate — critics say drive out — its large population of Latino day laborers. The center was established in late 2005 as an alternative to the streets for laborers and prospective employers to come to terms.

Herndon’s experience with the day-laborer center was a bellwether for towns across the country wrestling with national immigration issues. As other jurisdictions try to pass measures targeting illegal immigrants, yesterday’s actions in Herndon indicate that courts, and not legislators, might have the ultimate say.

DeBenedittis said that the town has other means at its disposal, such as zoning and traffic ordinances, to accomplish its goals.

“There is no longer a need for the town to support a regulated day-labor site,” he said.

Immigrant advocates said yesterday that after the center closes Sept. 14, they expect a return to the chaotic morning scenes in locations such as the 7-Eleven on Herndon’s main street, where scores of laborers gathered to try to find work, many seeking construction jobs along the busy Dulles International Airport corridor.

“It was a system that worked really well,” said Bill Threlkeld, director of Project Hope and Harmony, an affiliate of the nonprofit group Reston Interfaith, which operated the center for the town. “Now it’s all crumbled, and we’re back to where we were.”

At issue was an ordinance the council approved in 2005 as a legal companion to the day-laborer center, barring workers and motorists from striking deals for employment on the streets. The courts have generally required that communities barring public solicitation for work — a form of speech — must provide an alternative venue for that speech, such as a hiring site.

As the town enforced the anti-solicitation ordinance, many residents grew resentful of the center. Reston Interfaith, a group of religious institutions operating under a grant from Fairfax County, did not require workers to document their immigration status. Opponents of the center said the town was essentially abetting illegal immigration.

In 2006, voters unseated Mayor Michael L. O’Reilly and two council members who pushed for the center as an alternative to the informal job centers such as the 7-Eleven on Elden Street. DeBenedittis and the new council began searching for a site operator who would check workers’ immigration status but could not find anyone.

The town’s plan began to collapse last year when a Reston man, Stephen A. Thomas, ticketed for hiring a laborer in the parking lot of the Elden Street 7-Eleven, challenged the law on First Amendment grounds.

A district court found in favor of the town, but Fairfax Circuit Court Judge Leslie Alden ruled for Thomas on Aug. 29. Alden said the anti-solicitation ordinance fell short not only on First Amendment grounds but also under the equal protection requirements of the 14th Amendment. She said the Herndon center was not sufficient to make up for the ban on job solicitation because the town intended to bar illegal immigrants from the site. Alden said the Supreme Court has ruled that the equal protection provision applies to noncitizens as well.

Alden’s ruling left DeBenedittis and the Town Council in a dilemma. An appeal could take months, even years. With no one available to operate the center according to its wishes, the town would have to take over the facility. But to preserve the anti-solicitation ordinance, the town would have to open the center to those who might be in the country illegally — violating a core campaign promise.

On Tuesday night, DeBenedittis and the council decided to pull the plug on the center. DeBenedittis said the town would try to keep informal job sites from popping up by relying on zoning and traffic ordinances.

The council’s decision is unlikely to quell debate over the site, which has roiled local politics since it was proposed in 2005.

No one knows how many of the people who use the center — an average of 120 a day — are in the country illegally. Some predict friction among police, immigrants and their advocates.

“I think it was a mistake,” said former council member Richard Downer. “They’re going to force the police department to do things that could create new legal issues. There’s a fine line between harassment and enforcement.”

Ann Null, a council member who opposed opening the center before she retired in 2005, said she hoped its closing would induce illegal residents in the town to leave the country.

“There’s a construction boom in Panama,” she said. “They can find jobs in a country where they don’t have to learn the language.”

Glenn Koenig / Los Angeles Times

Disneyland’s themed landscapes offer ideas for most any garden, whether it’s tropical, edible or even gothic.

By Tony Kienitz, Special to The Times September 6, 2007

HERE’S an interesting fact: Only 100 feet divides Adventureland from Frontierland. While one land drips with banyans and bromeliads, the other sizzles with cactus and sage.

It’s within this great divide that perceptive visitors can find their own garden inspiration — one of many masterfully conceived mini-landscapes at Disneyland whose design just might work at home.

That’s right. Now that the summertime crowds are starting to ebb, put on the mouse ears and head to Anaheim.

Aptly named horticulturist Karen Hedges, who oversees the day-to-day upkeep and artistry of the park’s gardens, provided a behind-the-scenes tour one recent morning, before the gates opened to the public. What she and her gang of nearly 150 gardeners pull off every day is nothing short of Herculean.

“It’s 6 a.m., and we just got through laying 10,000 square feet of new sod,” she notes cheerfully, adding that her crew deadheads the gardens of Disneyland, California Adventure, Downtown Disney and three Disney hotels every day.

Sure, most visitors don’t come for the landscape design, but take a look at that garden separating the entrances to Adventureland and Frontierland, and you’ll see a fantastic example of color usage, plant juxtapositions and water-wise design.

There beside a duck pond grows a deep spray of ruddy yellow rudbeckias, tawny yarrows, gaillardias, salvias, sunflowers and swaying golden fountain grasses. The sunset hues set a romantic tone, a Wild West where men crack bullwhips and madams snap garters. Some of these flowers are hot-weather annuals, whereas the grasses and sages will hold up for years to come.

In fact, using visually dynamic perennials as the bones of a garden is a classic design technique. Annual flowers can be shucked in and out as the seasons change (and they do change here, occasionally). Designing a garden with perennials first, annuals second, results in a landscape that’s almost always beautiful, easier to maintain and, because you’ll buy fewer plants as time goes by, kinder to your wallet.

The plants in this part of Disneyland are all distinctively shaped. Each one has a slightly different leaf and sends its own message to the eye. If you live in a Spanish-style bungalow or a California Craftsman, take a close look, me ‘earties, because the vibrant and expertly blended colors here are perfect for pirating.

NATURALLY, there’s more. This is Disneyland. Virtually every ride in the park comes with its own landscape look, a design that creatively overcomes the challenges of its space.

Perhaps you live in an apartment or condo, your only garden the hodgepodge selection of pots on a balcony or patio. A jaunt over to New Orleans Square provides some fine examples.

Throughout the narrow alleyways of the square are dozens upon dozens of beautifully rendered pots. Spilling and coiling from these urns are densely packed collections of begonias, variegated plectranthus, English ivies, coleus of all colors, azaleas, fuchsias and caladiums.

Each pot is a garden in its own right, abiding by a basic rule of landscape design: something spiky, something round, something dazzling, something subtle. Taken as a whole, no single pot is more dominant than another. Together, they speckle the dour, aged colors of New Orleans Square with bright, jazzy hues.

The trick to these pots is threefold: They’ve been stuffed full with fairly mature plants, they rely on the contours and colors of foliage rather than flowers to make their statement, and they grow simultaneously upward and downward, away from the confines of the pot.

There are more ideas to borrow over in Tomorrowland. As in all parts of the park, here Hedges’ crews perform the daily magic of “color call-outs,” deciding which annual flowers need to be replaced and what “instant landscaping” might be required. But it’s the people with Disney’s Imagineering unit who come up with the grand, big-picture ideas.

Imagineer Tony Baxter is credited with dreaming up Tomorrowland’s edible landscape, and if you’ve ever wondered how a hedgerow of clipped kumquats might look in your yard, this is where you’d find out. Stroll past Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters and you’ll see espaliered apples, cute rows of peppers, sheared rosemary, lavender and santolina.

Another twist and turn in the path reveals strawberries, artichokes, dwarf pomegranates and a perfectly sculpted persimmon tree.

“It took some time to figure out the best combinations in the edible gardens,” Hedges says. “Tomato plants, as any gardener knows, are not usually very ornamental. So we’ve substituted red peppers into Tony’s designs.”

Again, long-lived plants establish the structure of the garden, and annuals provide outbursts of colors and variations in plant dimensions.

It’s immensely useful to see an edible landscape in a finished form. Too often these gardens are photographed in bite-size pieces. In Tomorrowland, gardeners can appreciate the idea as a whole and more readily see how easily these plants can be incorporated at home.

The clean, French lines of the edible landscapes are also worth noting — something one doesn’t often see in Southern California vegetable gardens.

EVEN Disneyland gardens that are a bit themey and theatrical have ideas worth borrowing. The gothic garden of the Haunted Mansion takes advantage of new hybrid colors available for familiar plants. Here, just inside the moss-green wrought-iron fencing, low-growing heucheras sport leaves in unusual shades that could be best described as dried Grey Poupon mustard and day-old lox. They bob above dark tufts of black mondo grass.

Ground covers of black ajuga and vermilion ipomoea trail around headstones. Small weeping mulberries, contorted willows and shimmering coprosma serve as the garden’s midsize plants, while dappled sunlight falls through classic Southern magnolia trees arched overhead.

The Haunted Mansion’s garden may be one of the most cleverly planted arrangements you will see. If you were to swap the colors of the plants — say, trade the washed-out heucheras for ones in vibrant Cabernet colors, switch the ajugas to variegated pinks and greens, and change the ipomeas to purple and pinks — you would have created a garden that was traditionally beautiful. The color palette that visitors see here does create a forlorn sense of decay, but the shapes and combinations of leaf and branch are what make this garden worth studying.

The list of such lessons here is long. There are the tropical gardens in Adventureland, perfect for a poolside landscape.

Around the darker rides in Fantasyland, you’ll find wonderfully coifed boxwood hedges and thick plantings of traditional European annual flowers. Expansive succulent gardens emulate underwater seascapes near Ariel’s Grotto and the new Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage. Nicely crafted gardens featuring California native plants await in Downtown Disney.

As Hedges’ morning tour stops at the animal topiaries crafted along the banks of It’s a Small World, one of the lead landscape gardeners, Mike Buhrmester, pauses to report that the blue lobelia he had been planting is rife with hookworm.

Hedges immediately asks which grower supplied the plants, and she and Buhrmester quickly figure out how to stretch their resources and still make the garden Disney-worthy. It takes all of a minute for them to devise a solution.

That, she says, is her wisest secret for creating a wonderful landscape. “We just try our best,” she says, leading the way to the next garden on the map. “It always seems to work out.”

In other words, relax. Don’t fuss. Have fun. That is the golden garden rule.

Tony Kienitz is author of “The Year I Ate My Yard.” Send comments to home@latimes.com