The California Landscape Redefined
California’s garden history is nearly as packed with lively characters as its political past. Back when the land was open and wild, sea captains sailed up around Cape Horn with loads of plants and seeds; Spanish padres hacked fruit orchards and vegetable plots from the dry scrub around missions; and botanical hunters wandered the world in search of palm trees, eucalyptus, figs, oranges and acacias to sell to newcomers hungry for exotica. But what started as a passion for plants blossomed in the early 1900s into a quest for design styles to show off California’s native landscape and the palatial homes of rich arrivals from the East. Dazzled by mountains, ocean and nonstop sunshine, these people, who settled in Santa Barbara, Pasadena and points north, weren’t interested in reproducing what they’d grown in Chicago or New York. Seasoned continental travelers, they saw shades of the Mediterranean in California--in the climate, the light and the broad array of thriving greenery. And over time, their concept of gardens changed further--from something viewable from a window to a progression of open-air rooms as lavish and livable as any on the Cote d’Azur.
The quiet opulence of California’s landscape golden age--which spanned a mere 30 years at the start of the century--was brilliantly captured by a book that appeared during the Depression: Winifred Starr Dobyns’ “California Gardens.” Full of black-and-white images, it offered an almost textless tour behind the high hedges and iron gates of our earliest great estates. Enjoy the vista, it implied. Lounge on the terrace. Smell the roses. Imagine. Here was what money, taste, education and travel could buy: allees of palm and cypress framing mountain views, water stairs, reflecting pools, vast lawns accented with imported urns. The layouts were reminiscent of Italian villa gardens, Persian pleasure courts and the walled retreats of Andalusia. Owners, such as the gifted Helen Thorne of Montecito, sometimes created these marvels themselves, but more often, they hired landscape architects, a breed of designer long familiar abroad but just then appearing in the United States. California’s first garden masters--Florence Yoch and Lucile Council, A.E. Hanson, Lockwood de Forest, Edward Huntsman-Trout and Paul Thiene among them--were as cultivated and well-bred as their employers. Several owner-designer teams--such as J. Waldron Gillespie and his architect, Bertram Goodhue--actually set off for Europe together on idea-gathering jaunts.
The results appear in Dobyns’ book, which has been out of print for years (though rarely absent from the libraries of landscape architects). Happily for everyone--garden amateurs and pros alike--the work has recently been reissued by Santa Barbara’s Allen A. Knoll, Publishers. It’s a walk through an era that’s gone forever, even if some of the landscapes pictured still exist. Many are private; some have changed radically, as gardens do, over time. Nevertheless, in their overall designs as well as their details, they’re just as inspiring now as they ever were. They show how classical forms helped direct and shape the drama of our Western paradise. Their graceful courtyards, fountains and groves are timeless, and so are their drought-tolerant, Mediterranean plants in a region where water is perpetually scarce. Appropriately for a place as ever-changing as Southern California, Dobyns, herself a landscape architect, reminds us to cherish our traditions and to keep learning from the visionaries of the past.
