Lotusland
Interesting facts
- In 1971 Ganna Walska auctioned 146 pieces of her jewellery and spent the proceeds on the rare cycads of what became her last garden.
- Walska married six times, and the lavish promotion of her opera career by her fourth husband, Harold McCormick, inspired elements of Citizen Kane.
- She first called the estate Tibetland because she hoped to host Tibetan monks there, but wartime visa restrictions kept them from coming.
- The cycad collection represents nine of the eleven living genera and more than half of all known cycad species.
- The Topiary Garden holds a floral clock about 8 metres across and a zoo of 26 topiary animals, including a camel, a gorilla and a giraffe.
- The blue-green glass lining the paths was slag brought from the Arrowhead Water Company's bottling works by Walska's stonemason, Oswald da Ros.
- The Aloe Garden gathers about 160 species of aloe and 85 species of euphorbia, some brought from South Africa, Madagascar and Yemen.
- The Cactus Garden grew from a collection begun in 1929 by Merritt Dunlap, who promised it to Walska in 1966; it arrived in 2001 and includes every species of Weberbauerocereus.
- The Blue Garden alone holds about 130 Chilean wine palms, a rare species.
- The deciduous orchard still holds olive trees planted in the 1880s, in the estate's nursery era.
Why it is worth it
Lotusland is a garden made by a performer's imagination. Ganna Walska, a Polish-born opera singer and socialite, bought this Montecito estate in 1941 and spent more than forty years turning it into a sequence of theatrical outdoor rooms: lawns crowded with hundreds of golden barrel cacti, paths edged with chunks of blue-green slag glass, a pond of sacred lotus, a topiary zoo and a horticultural clock. The 37-acre garden now holds some 3,500 kinds of plants.
The ground had been gardened long before her. In 1882 the nurseryman Ralph Kinton Stevens bought the land, called it Tanglewood and grew palms, lemons and other subtropical plants; in 1893 he published what is described as the first California nursery catalogue devoted entirely to tropical and subtropical plants. Later owners, the Gavit family, added a Mediterranean Revival house by Reginald Johnson in 1919 and, in the 1920s, Spanish Colonial Revival additions by George Washington Smith, including the pink walls that still enclose the estate. Walska and her husband Theos Bernard first named it Tibetland; after their divorce in 1946 she renamed it Lotusland and worked with designers including Lockwood de Forest Jr. and Ralph Stevens, son of the first owner, and the stonemason Oswald da Ros.
The result is a series of distinct gardens, each built around a single idea. The Blue Garden gathers silvery and blue-grey foliage, from blue Atlas cedars to Chilean wine palms. The Aloe Garden surrounds a kidney-shaped pool trimmed with abalone shells and a fountain of giant clam shells. The Water Garden, converted from an old swimming pool in the 1950s, holds lotus and water lilies, while the Japanese Garden frames a small Shinto shrine with clipped pines and maples. Most celebrated is the Cycad Garden, begun in 1979 and now holding more than 900 specimens with most of the world's genera, including three plants of Encephalartos woodii, a cycad extinct in the wild. Walska died in 1984 and the garden opened to the public in 1993 as a non-profit botanic garden.
Getting there
Lotusland is in Montecito, about 4.5 km east of central Santa Barbara, California, close to US Route 101. Santa Barbara Municipal Airport (SBA) is about 17 km away.
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From the encyclopaedia
Ganna Walska Lotusland, also known as Lotusland, is a non-profit botanical garden located in Montecito, California, United States. The garden is the historic estate of Madame Ganna Walska. Lotusland is home to 3,500 different plants. The County of Santa Barbara restricts visitation via a conditional use permit: Lotusland botanic garden is open to the public by reservation only.
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