Home-Grown Paradise : This Sun Valley estate is filled with hundreds of flowers, palms, pools, trees, canaries and uncounted fish.

Joe Stromei loves his garden: “It’s so hard for me to go to work in the mornings, especially in the spring, when it’s all starting to bloom. Look at this, how can I leave it?”

Stromei sweeps his arms wide, embracing hundreds of roses, irises, succulents, anemones, pansies, abutilon, palms, pools, trees and stone walls. Not to mention his four dogs, 500 chickens, 200 canaries and uncounted fish. All of it, except for a few of the larger trees, are grown by Stromei since he bought this Sun Valley estate 15 years ago.

Fortunately, Stromei, who owns Aaardvark’s Odd Ark vintage clothing stores, doesn’t need to punch a time clock. Most mornings, he can spend a few extra minutes pruning, feeding and futzing. “Gardening work never ends, let me tell you,” he said.

The house is at the bottom of a little hollow, not unlike the stage in an amphitheater, and it is surrounded by tiers of stones embedded in concrete--the same material as the curved walls that separate the garden from the busy road--forming irregular planting beds, all designed by Stromei.

A long building in back of the house is home to the canaries, which Stromei breeds for pet stores. Behind the greenhouse full of rampant jungle plants is the chicken shed, where Stromei breeds Araucanas (Chilean chickens) and Polish top-knotted chickens. An old barn holds baby chicks and incubators.

Beyond the one-acre hollow, the rest of Stromei’s 10.85 acres are sloping hills bright with spring wildflowers, many planted by Stromei. Roses dominate the garden, but it is in no sense a traditional rose garden.

Stromei mixes plants, colors and types with seeming abandon, in groupings that often work surprisingly well: Gerbera daisies paired with a variety of succulent echeveria rosettes, for instance. He can’t resist variegated plants, either: bicolored opuntia and Cordyline terminalis dot the landscape. Growing in clumps in several locations, a lovely dusty blue palm, Brahea armata , softens the sun’s intensity.

Stromei (an Americanization of his ancestral Italian name, San Romeo), like most passionate gardeners, is generous with plants. Every year, he propagates roses, which he gives to the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens for its annual plant sale.

“I’ll tell you the secret of starting roses,” he says, holding up an old cat-litter tray crammed with newly leafing, four-inch roses. “Use a cutting no more than four inches long; take the cutting between Dec. 15 and Jan. 15, and plant it deep, in a mix of peat moss and sponge rock. An old Indian woman taught me that, and it always works.”

So, apparently, does everything else he tries.