By Cathy H. Burroughs, travel and adventure blogger, journeyPod.com
The posh, verdant resort town of Santa Barbara, California, (once the country’s first movie-making hub, predating Hollywood) and its even posher celebrity-inhabited (Oprah, Ellen, Harry and Meghan and many more!) kissing cousin Montecito are two exquisite places to both reside and get away. Both, framed by ocean and primordial mountain ranges, are landscaped with a ubiquitous array of every imaginable exotic plant, flower and tree. Evoking a magical blend of the Garden of Eden, Avalon, Gloccamora, dramatic Mediterranean-like, mountainous stairstep hillsides with a dash of rain forest and 100s of spikey desert cacti and succulents, it is hard to imagine any garden which could top these two lavishly planted green cities
So it came as an extraordinary surprise to stumble upon a somewhat obscure, nearly secret garden, just blocks from where we were staying, which you could say is the penultimate. You could even say it outdoes even its two home cities’ bucolic wonders. It is Ganna Walska Lotusland.
We were privileged to be introduced to this nearly 40-acre luxuriant spread in an intimate private tour atop a golf cart navigated expertly by the tattooed and elegant garden’s marketing maven Nathan Williamson. “Part Willy Wonka and Dr. Seuss” was how he beguilingly described some of the gardens’ more otherworldly and exotic specimens, faring from all corners of the world. For it was the gardens’ visionary guiding light, the wildly multi-talented performer, designer and metaphysician Ganna Walska, who aptly dubbed herself, “the enemy of the average,” and went and is still referred to after her death as Madame who conceived and created Lotusland. It was she who gathered some of the garden’s most exotic originating plantings from her haggling with the city’s many ship captains. With several decades of devoted labor and dedication in the extreme, she established her wonder of this world and her lasting legacy: Lotusland.
Within the garden’s labyrinth, you’ll find 35,000 different specimens, and 3,400 different varieties, including hard-to-find anywhere euphorbias, cycads and cacti. In more than 22 sub gardens one finds themes of Aloe, Japanese, Blue Garden, Australian, Bromeliads, Cactus, Cycad, Fern, Olive Allee, Palmetum, Parterre, Succulents, Topiary with 26 topiaries, including a camel, a giraffe, a gorilla, chess pieces, and a working clock centerpiece with copper zodiac signs.
A stand of epic Dragon Trees, whose bloody sap once served as the rarified blend staining Steinway pianos, encircles Madame’s simple Spanish-styled villa, echoing the architecture and lily pond gardens of the famed French impressionist Claude Monet’s Giverny home.
The garden’s eccentric maestra and horticulturist, once a frustrated Polish opera singer with an international reputation and alluring jewelry, cosmetics and perfume designs, Ganna Waleska (1887-1984) equaled actress Elizabeth Taylor on her intricate relationship and marriage front. It is Madame who has bequeathed this region her enchanting masterpiece.
Imaginative, fantasy-like and ebullient, with its fountains, pools, outdoor theater and maze of singular gardens, orchards, topiaries and lily ponds, this infrequently photographed, little-known private sanctuary, painstakingly planted and nurtured over eight decades up to the present, it continues to thrive as a truly world-class botanical find. It unquestionably seals Madame Walska’s place and fate in the worldwide garden hall of fame.
With its elusive docent-guided and freewheeling self-guided tours, one is urged to book the much sought-after access to Lotusland’s mysterious inner sanctums online well in advance.
This was Cathy H. Burroughs travel writer’s first visit to these miraculous gardens. Its path-finding, groundbreaking founder and creator Madame Ganna Walska, thwarted in both her Paris-based opera career and later in her attempt to create a retreat for Tibetan Monks in Montecito, California, converted her nearly 40-acre estate into one of the 10 best gardens in the world. The result reveals her exuberant horticultural zeal, originality, international resourcefulness and acumen approaching genius – a truly splendid and still relatively secret garden.
Ganna Walska Lotusland
Botannical Garden
Cold Spring Road
Montecito, CA 93108.
Tel: 805=969-9990
