Lotus land

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Lotus flowers in lotus land

Lotusland , and Ganna Walska Lotusland- called, is a 15 hectare large botanical garden in Montecito in the south of the US - the State of California .

history

The bathhouse from the 1920s

Ralph Kinton Stevens and his wife, Caroline Lucy, bought the land in 1882 and named the property Tanglewood . The couple, who were one of the first plantation owners in Santa Barbara County, established a breeding facility for lemons and palm trees , and later other tropical plants.

In 1916 the property was sold to the Albany Gavit family and renamed Cuesta Linda . Your architect , Reginald Davis Johnson , designed landscape elements and garden structures in the Mediterranean Revival style around 1919. In the years between 1921 and 1927, the architect George Washington Smith distinguished himself for the designs of other buildings as well as the striking walls of the property in the Spanish Colonial Revival style.

In 1941, Theos Casimir Bernard (1908–1947) and his wife Ganna Walska (1887–1984), a Polish- US-American society lady, singer and gardening enthusiast, bought the site and renamed it in 1946 as Lotusland . After the death of her husband, Ganna Walska devoted more than four decades to designing her garden. She had neither a training as a gardener nor a botanical knowledge, but rather created the garden in collaboration with experts such as Peter Riedel , Lockwood DeForest , Ralph Stevens and Joseph Knowles , not without lending a hand. In order to be able to buy plants for her garden, she sold valuable jewelry. A total of 3,200 different plant species can be seen in Lotusland , with a focus on non-flowering plants. Reese: "In Lotusland she transferred aspects of what makes opera - staging, drama, beauty - into garden art."

The gardens (selection)

In Lotusland, Ganna Walska laid out gardens of different characteristics, of extraordinary design and artistic creativity with botanical and horticultural depth. For example, there is now a large collection of rare cycads with some species that are no longer in their natural habitat.

Blue garden

The Blue Garden shows plants with silvery to blue-gray foliage, including real sheep fescue , honey palm , camphor tree , Lebanon cedar , New Guinea araucarias , Queensland araucaria , Queensland kauri spruce as well as Brahea armata and Senecio mandraliscae .

Bromeliad garden

In the bromeliad garden , date palms , elephant feet as well as Quercus agrifolia and Trithrinax brasiliensis are planted in addition to the bromeliads that give them their name .

Fern garden

In the fern garden , in addition to antler and Australian tree ferns, there are also shade-loving plants such as angel's trumpets , pritchardia and zantedeschias .

Japanese garden

The small Shinto shrine in the Japanese Garden is surrounded by azaleas , wisteria , Japanese maple , camellia , coastal sequoia , sickle fir and several species of pine trimmed in the Niwaki style .

Cactus garden

The collection of columnar cacti, begun in 1929 by Merritt Dunlap, now includes over 500 plants from around 300 different species of cactus such as Armatocereus from Peru , Fouquieria columnaris , opuntia from the Galapagos Islands and weaver's ocereus .

Cycad Garden

In the cycad garden there are more than 900 specimens of cycads from nine of the eleven living genera and more than half of the known species.
These include three specimens of the species Encephalartos woodii, which is extinct in the KwaZulu-Natal wilderness .

Butterfly garden

The butterfly garden is home to flowering plants that serve butterflies and other insects either as fodder plants for the caterpillars or as a nutrient plant for the adult imago .

Succulent garden

In succulents Front Garden next to grow Madagascar palm trees and species from the genera Aeonium , snake plant , Echeveria , Fouquieria , Haworthia , Kalanchoe and yuccas .

Water garden

In the water garden you can admire real papyrus , Indian lotus flowers , water lilies , taro and sugar cane .

Collections

  • Around one hundred fruit trees , for example apple, pear, persimmon, peach, plum and olives from the 1880s
  • Citrus plants : grapefruit, guava, kumquats, limes, oranges, lemons

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Lotusland  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Pioneer Profiles and Biographies. "Ralph Stevens (1882-1958)" The Cultural Landscape Foundation, Washington, DC USA
  2. ↑ Kirsten Reese: Ganna Walska - "Lotusland" - "Lotussound": an (ex) singer, a garden, a sound installation. In: Music Stories - Forms of Mediation. Böhlau, 2010, ISBN 978-3-412-20625-3 , p. 286 f.
  3. ↑ Kirsten Reese: Ganna Walska. 2010, p. 288.
  4. ↑ Virginia Hayes, Steven Timbrook: Lotusland Collections and Horticulture . Companion Press, 2007, p. 11.
  5. ↑ Rafaël Govaerts (Ed.): Encephalartos - data sheet at World Checklist of Selected Plant Families of the Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Last accessed on April 8, 2015.

Coordinates: 34 ° 26 ′ 34.8 "  N , 119 ° 39 ′ 25.2"  W.