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"View Slideshow\n\nMy name is Siri Hari, which means great creativity of God.' \" Thus spake Siri Hari Kaur Angleton-Khalsa, n\u00E9e Lucy d'Autremont Angleton. And if her Sikhist appellation sounds a tiny bit exalted, one need only consider the earthly paradise Angleton-Khalsa has fashioned out of two weed-choked acres in northern New Mexico.\n\nBorn in Washington, D.C., where her father, James Angleton, served for over two decades as the head of the CIA's counterintelligence office, Angleton-Khalsa led, to all appearances, a charmed early life. There were summers at her family's riverfront retreat in Brule, Wisconsin; visits to Glensheen, the 22-acre estate on Lake Superior built by her great-grandfather, lumber baron Chester Adgate Congdon; sojourns at her grandparents' villa in Rome. In 1970 Angleton-Khalsa's mother and sister became disciples of Siri Singh Sahib Bhai Sahib Harbhajan Singh Khalsa Yogiji, the Indian spiritual leader who introduced kundalini yoga and Sikhism to America, and Angleton-Khalsa quickly fell under his spell as well. \"I was 11 when I saw Yogi Bhajan give a lecture in Tucson,\" she recalls. \"I had no attention span, but for the first time in my life I paid attention.\"\n\nIn the early 1980s Yogi Bhajan invited Angleton-Khalsa to study and work at his ranch in the Jemez mountains northwest of Santa Fe, and she eventually purchased a small piece of land adjacent to the ranch. \"There was a two-story house\u2014typical masculine New Mexico architecture\u2014and a yard full of weeds,\" she relates. It was the yogi who encouraged Angleton-Khalsa to hone her gardening skills there. With the help of a Sikh friend and a garden designer named Kathy Ruch, she cleared out the clay-heavy upslope behind her house and set to work terracing and cultivating it. \"We put in a small patio lawn. Then we added a second level. Then we had masons come in and do a long, three-foot-high stone wall and put in the upper garden.\"\n\nThe upper garden, also known as the wild garden, runs the width of the property and vividly combines grasses and New Mexico natives with perennials like roses, irises, alliums, salvias and delphiniums. To the north of these terraces, she later added a croquet lawn and a Buddha garden. Sikhs follow the teachings of the 10 Sikh gurus, but that didn't prevent this Sikh from installing a flea market-bought Buddha under a wrought iron dome and flanking it with archways dripping with roses, wisteria, grapes and clematis. On a small hill above the Buddha garden, she was inspired by trips to Carcassonne with her mother, a medieval history scholar, to re-create a Gothic ruin: A half-crumbled temple with Gothic arches and a mosaic interior was ordered from an English firm and customized with marble floors and a fountain.\n\nIn 2002 Yogi Bhajan suggested that Angleton-Khalsa expand her horticultural vistas by acquiring the property next door to hers. After purchasing the acre-plus lot and removing its house and outbuildings, she worked with landscape architect Edith Katz to design a long, flat pool that was big enough for swimming laps but graceful enough to suggest a reflecting pool. They played up the pool's formality by anchoring it at one end with a classical Greek pavilion and at the other with a large cherub fountain and two square flower beds. Fond of Roman-style bathing pools\u2014\"Cold water increases fortitude,\" notes Angleton-Khalsa, whose other regimens include three half-hour meditations a day\u2014she asked Katz to design a series of hydrotherapy baths, laid out in a Roman-key pattern, adjacent to the swimming pool. (The baths were executed in granite, which reminds Angleton-Khalsa of her summers in Brule.) A jewel-like bathhouse serves all three pools. Finally, they built a pergola along the length of the swimming pool, providing a shady spot to relax and contemplate, on the other side of the pool, a knot garden and two beds of billowing roses, daylilies, geraniums and lavender.\n\nThe lush grounds also offer all\u00E9es of pear and crab apple trees, small trickling fountains and even strolling peacocks, visitors from Yogi Bhajan's ranch. With its personal references and mandarin flavor, the garden is not the first thing you'd expect in the land of vigas and hanging chili peppers\u2014and that's the essence of its appeal. \"My mother always says it's so glamorous and unexpected in the middle of the desert,\" says Angleton-Khalsa. \"And I have to say there are certain days this place totally sparkles.\" In the summer, when everything's especially sparkly, she hosts frequent informal parties for relatives, neighbors and members of the Sikh community. \"It's the place to be. We have yummy food on the barbecue. We're all vegetarians, but we make great stuff.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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