‘If You Revere Nature, Why Not Live With It?’ : Homes: Naturalist Arnold Newman resides in a one-acre rain forest he made, plant by plant, on a hillside overlooking Sherman Oaks.

Arnold Newman wakes up every morning as if in the middle of a rain forest, under the greenish half-light of palm trees and bamboo, and listening to croaking frogs and the mumbling of a tropical creek.

But the writer and naturalist’s home is closer to Ventura Boulevard than it is to the Equator. His private one-acre rain forest is planted on an arid hillside in the Santa Monica Mountains overlooking Sherman Oaks.

The unusual landscaping, planted over 25 years, includes nearly 1,000 species of trees and shrubs collected from more than 30 rain forests around the world. And to Newman, it is more than simply ornamental.

He considers the rain forest a living photo album that rekindles memories of three decades of traipsing through dense tropical forests as a naturalist and writer. Each tree, each bush evokes memories of a particular trip.

“If you revere nature, why not live with it?” asked Newman, 51. “If you can’t be in the rain forest every waking moment, why not bring it here?”

So that is what he has done. In bits and pieces, tree by tree, Newman has cobbled together a rain forest where plants from Sumatra and Brazil grow side by side on the banks of a turtle-filled artificial creek. A clump of Central American palm trees, whose spines are used to make poison darts, are the only examples of their species in the United States, Newman said.

Newman continues to scout for additions to his garden. He may buy seeds or persuade someone to climb a tree to fetch some. He first plants his seeds in his greenhouse, then nurtures them until they are hearty enough plants to move outside.

But a rain forest needs rain--lots of rain. Rainfall in a rain forest averages about 80 inches annually, but Los Angeles only gets about 14 inches in a typical year.

Newman makes up the difference with a complex drip irrigation system that saturates the ground and a set of atomizers that shroud his property in a fine, white mist.

“It’s not a drought-tolerant landscape,” Newman conceded. But he said he uses less water than he would if his property had a lawn and a swimming pool.

Newman’s passion for the rain forest began when he was a child and would spend hours at summer camp counting the turtles in a nearby swamp. He attended Miami University so that he could be close to the Everglades and began collecting seeds for his private forest in 1965.

That was when he went to the mountains of Colombia to conduct a wildlife inventory. A snafu left him and his wife in the forest without supplies, and he had to choose whether to return home without his research or to stay and forage.

He chose to stay and joined a band of natives who showed him how to live off the land, collecting roots and fruit and hunting the monkeys and snakes he was sent to count.

“I was immersed in the forest primeval,” he said. “Even as a naturalist, you have no idea what it’s like there. I came out with a hell of an insight on the miracle of creation. . . . I’ve rather dedicated myself to re-creating that memory here.”