It’s not Lotusland. It’s Ganna Walska’s Lotusland.

Alison Clare Steingold

Published in

YES PLZ

8 min readJun 16, 2019

Written by Amy Marie Slocum | As appeared in Yes Plz Weekly Issue 030, June 17, 2019

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Failed opera star Ganna Walska never showed any passion for plants or nature before she bought Lotusland and divorced her sixth husband. But Madame Walska was a collector. A collector’s collector. Decades later, this mythic garden features 37 acres painstakingly crafted with some of the world’s rarest, largest, and quirkiest botanicals. Amy Marie Slocum touches base with longtime Director of Marketing and Communications Bob Craig, to explore Montecito’s edenic wonder.

In reading about Ganna Walska’s life, it doesn’t seem like she showed much interest in nature before Lotusland. Why do you think she became so interested in the garden?

Well, one of the purposes in purchasing Lotusland was that in many ways, she was looking for a sustainable farm. When she left Europe, she thought Hitler was going to overrun the world, and she would need a fall a small farm to sustain herself. So the man who would become her sixth husband — Theos Bernard — convinced her to buy Lotusland for many reasons. One, they were going to create a refuge for Tibetan monks, but they were also going to be able to grow their own food and subside off the land. So I think that the gardens existed inspired her to such a degree that she wanted to keep going, and doing everything grander, which, within the framework of her own psyche, was all about collecting and building the best of things and seeking a spiritual path via nature and plants — as opposed to yoga and other avenues that she had pursued earlier in her life. It really seems like it was a lifelong project that brought her deep satisfaction. It became her passion for many years, ever since she moved here in 1941, until the day she died in 1984.

The history of Lotusland is super fascinating, and, of course, how it’s maintained.

We use no pesticides or chemical fertilizers. Everything is 100% organic, as it’s been for over 20 years. The guys who worked in the garden as young men, when the garden first transitioned into a public garden, found that they were maintaining a garden like everybody did back then, and then they would go home and garden organically at home where they were growing vegetables or taking care of their plants. So they thought, Well, geez, this is a big disconnect. We should we should be gardening organically at work, too. So they developed a whole method for taking care of the plants without using chemicals.

“She liked things en masse — whether it was jewelry, or theatrical productions, or anything in her life”

I’ve read that Madame Walska came up with the idea of “mass plantings.” Can you tell me a little bit about what that is?

She was an opera singer — that was her big passion, among other things — but she was not necessarily a horticulturist, or a landscape architect. But she liked things en masse — whether it was jewelry, or theatrical productions, or anything in her life. So she would hire landscape architects who were top notch in their field. For instance, in the front of her house, she’d say, “OK, I want 250 barrel cactus here.” And they would say, “Oh, Madame, that sounds wonderful, but that’s really not the way we do it.” And she’d say, “Well, that’s the way I want it done.” So in creating these mass plantings, she helped define a new style of landscape design, which is accepted and repeated often today.

And the quirks of the garden: the blue garden, the cactus garden, and the cycad garden, which was also extremely unorthodox at the time.

When Ganna Walska was building her garden here, it was a private “stroll garden.” It wasn’t a public garden. So she pretty much just did what she wanted. Early in the 1960s, her passion was to build the Japanese garden. She had a Japanese gardener who became her partner in designing it, along with her stonemason. She had a passion all through her life for collecting, so she collected specimen plants. When she got a little older, she figured this would be her last big project, and she decided she wanted to build a cycad garden. Cycads are very valuable and are collectible, so she auctioned off a significant amount of her jewelry collection in order to get the funds necessary to build that garden. Today, that garden contains three rare cycads called Encephalartos woodii. These three woodii are extinct in the wild; they are only known to exist in Botanic Gardens. And there are no known females anywhere in the world, there are only males. So, her quirkiness and eccentricities created this spectacular botanical garden that has wonderful scientific significance in today’s world of horticulture, because we have all these rare plants that otherwise may not have been protected.

A few years after that, I read that a law made it illegal to transport them across national borders.

Right. They’re protected by the same sort of treaties that keep people from importing elephant tusks and such, so it would be very hard to come across these specimens today. People don’t want them leaving their countries. But what’s interesting is that these cycads probably came from plants in South Africa. Our curator right now is in the process of repatriating rare cycads that have disappeared from their native environments. So we grow these little seedlings from our garden, and take the plants back to Africa and plant them where they’ve been hunted to extinction.

For most of her life, if not for her entire life, it was a private residence. Now, it’s open to the public. Did she invite people from the community to come and enjoy the garden?

Yes, she did. She would open the garden up to the Garden Club, the Cactus and Succulents Society, and various other organizations that were very plant-centric. She was a giver to the community for sure. And for all practical purposes, when she passed away, she had a foundation set up to pass it on to the community… We bring in every fourth grader from Santa Barbara County, and all the colleges and universities in the area bring their horticulture students here. We’re really a remarkable community asset, which is really one of the most fun things about working here.

“She auctioned off a significant amount of her jewelry collection in order to get the funds necessary to build [The Cycad] garden. Today, that garden contains three rare cycads…extinct in the wild… So, her quirkiness and eccentricities created this spectacular botanical garden that has wonderful scientific significance in today’s world of horticulture”

There’s something complicated about hosting the public here?

So when Ganna Walska passed away in 1984, we had to have a Conditional Use Permit from the county of Santa Barbara. It took nine years and 63 public hearings before we got the permits to allow people in, and that’s because there was a very small handful of local neighbors in Montecito who didn’t think that they wanted a public Botanic Garden in the area. And so we have all these rules we have to follow, one of which is that we can have no more than 15,000 visitors a year, and no more than 25 cars during a school day. And it has created this urban myth that we don’t want visitors because we’re so well off, but it’s actually just the opposite; we are not well off because the county doesn’t let us have enough visitors. So we’re always fundraising, and we’re always trying to do things that help bring in more revenue. The local zoo here in Santa Barbara brings in 15,000 visitors in a busy summer weekend.

What do you hope that Lotusland looks like five years from now?

Well, I hope that we’re able to keep it open to the public and that the plants survive the ups and downs of drought-prone California, and I hope that we are able to maintain some sense of financial stability. Our budget now is about $3.5 million dollars annually, and we have to raise about $2.5 million of that. So if we were able to get more recognition or donations, we wouldn’t spend so much time having to fundraise, which I think would be a nice thing for all of us here. Because it’s a tremendous amount of work and I’m sure that people would like to hear from us, other than asking them for money. ⬣

“Doing everything grander, which, within the framework of her own psyche, was all about collecting and building the best of things and seeking a spiritual path via nature and plants”

Read more in the Yes Plz Weekly, Issue 030.
Available until 9pm PST on June 16, 2019 at yesplz.coffee.

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