Beverly Hills, Calif. ? Eleanore Berman knows her garden so well she can paint it in the dark. She has sketched its columns of bronzy bamboo, brick walls awash in red Virginia creeper and jade-colored hedges at night in her studio and even on cross-country trips.

Berman’s back yard, which she has tended for more than four decades, has traveled the world, which has inspired at least 200 pieces.

At an exhibit in Amsterdam, the U.S. cultural attache announced to the opening-night crowd: “Welcome to Eleanore’s garden.” Her artwork is on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and UCLA Hammer Museum, galleries in London, Berlin and Amstelveen, Holland, and homes here and abroad.

In her Impressionist work, a black element in the background may look enigmatic, but it’s really her garden gate. Dissolved mounds of soft sage are the way she sees shrubs.

One painting of egg-shaped stones from her path was reproduced on the cover of a psychology book because the publisher thought it represented the beginning of life.

“People ask me how I come up with ideas, and I tell them it’s a mystery,” says Berman, 70. “But I spend a lot of time in this garden that I love. I’m engaged in it, fascinated by it, stimulated by the light or dark, and I want to see it in a painting. Can you think of any greater gift nature has given us?”

Since 1967, she has lived in a Colonial Georgian in Beverly Hills, once owned by “Mrs. Miniver” producer Sidney Franklin.

“I fell in love with the house because it already had a studio and the bones of a great garden,” Berman says. “I dig my hands into the ground, replace plants, prune roses. I even keep a compost heap in back, which is rare for a Beverly Hills lady.”

Her back yard is a long rectangle, divided into sections. A jumble of pink daisies, bearded iris, sweet alyssum and lavender sways along the center flagstone path like crowds at a sing-along. Standing guard are flowering cherry trees and clipped myrtle hedges. A thick mat of grass is on one side of the path, a pool area with a white marble sculpture from Italy on the other. Pink geraniums and red begonias bloom in terra-cotta pots.

Beyond the back gate is a formal garden, one with patterned brick walkways leading to manicured boxwoods and roses the size of pint-size paint cans. Her upstairs studio and gallery, separate from the house, benefits from this view.

For inspiration, she walks the slate paths, pinches off sprigs of lavender, inhales the scent and breathes it in. She observes spikes of new shoots, curves of clouds, blocks of moody shadows. Then she retreats to her studio and transfers the impressions nature has left with her onto canvas.

When Berman was growing up in New York City, she kept an easel in her bedroom and sketched lively expressions of Central Park — a flower, bridge or pond.

Later, she studied with modernist painter Josef Albers and sculptor Ossip Zadkine at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

“We were fascinated by the European faculty, many from the Bauhaus (design school in Germany),” she says.

She practiced her art in the Paris atelier of French Cubist painter Fernand Leger and in New York with painter Manfred Schwartz and printmaker Robert Blackburn before marrying and moving to the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles. .

Raising her four children became her priority, but Berman found a spare bedroom and time to paint, and she began to exhibit her work in Los Angeles.

Her realistic paintings were often of the sea, rock formations and people. When she moved to this home, however, she, like a garden, was renewed.

“I used to do defined forms, but here I started looking at the body and not the outline,” she says. “It’s as if I took a camera and enlarged a detail.”

Her most recent series of large paintings of hedges and garden paths is done in energetic, loose brushstrokes daubed with salubrious colors. She swirls brushes through puddles of yellow, pink and pumpkin to make succulent round petals. Thin slashes of gray, plum and cream imitate rain falling on stone.

“Perhaps I paint these paths as symbols of the journey we are all on,” she says.

“And I, as the keeper of this garden, know this path well.”