AARP Travels to Madame Walska’s Santa Barbara Garden, Lotusland

Palisades AARP members and friends will take a bus trip on Wednesday, April 21 to Lotusland, the 37-acre Montecito estate considered by many the most singular and beautiful garden in Southern California. Lotusland was designed by Ganna Walska, a woman who was passionate: for fashion’her gorgeous opera gowns are on display through April 4 in the Ert’ exhibition at LACMA; for plants’ she spent 40 years developing her garden in between singing in operas here and abroad; and for men’she married and divorced six husbands. Walska owned the property, which she originally named Tibetland, from 1941 until her death in 1984. Married at the time to her sixth and last husband, Theos Bernard, she purchased the estate intending first to use it as a retreat for Tibetan monks. The Tibetan monks never appeared and sometime later, after divorcing Bernard, she changed the name of her estate to ‘Lotusland’ in honor of the sacred Indian lotus growing in one of the ponds on the property. She thus began what would be a gradual transformation from well-known socialite to garden designer. Most of her energy and resources were poured into creating a botanical garden of rare plants using her natural artistic talents to create a fantasy world of exquisite beauty. To accomplish this, she worked with a number of landscape architects and designers, including Lockwood de Forest, Jr., Ralph T. Stevens, William Paylen, Oswald da Ros and Charles Glass. Walska herself was a designer and loved to mass single species of plants together. She wanted the best, the biggest and the most unusual plants available and was often willing to pay any price to get them. So determined was she to finish the work she had begun that in the 1970s, she auctioned off some of her jewelry in order to finance her final creation’the cycad garden. Hear more about this extraordinary woman during a 90-minute docent-led tour of her garden, a featured component of the tour. To register for the trip, mail a check for $40, made payable to Pacific Palisades AARP, and send to Mary Cole, 639 Radcliffe, Pacific Palisades 90272. Lunch at the Big Yellow House is included.