Ogrody Pani Walskiej

[ertes]

www.latimes.com/features/home/la-hm-lotusland10mar10,0,1674240.story?coll=la-home-home
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A diva who loved high drama
# Polish opera singer Ganna Walska painted with plants at her Montecito
estate. More than a half-century after she began, it's easy to see that she
didn't really retire from the stage

[ertes]

You have only to walk among her aloes to understand. Densely packed on a series
of knolls, the 100 or more varieties form galaxies of fleshy stars. The knolls
allow good drainage, always important to a succulent, but the effect is
something more. We are no longer an audience but a part of this crowd scene: The
2- and 3-foot-high flower spikes are flame-colored spears or an army of torches,
and we're onstage with them.

In gardens, it seems, Walska found a trick that divas can only imagine: Her
grandest performances are perpetually repeated. The aloe act culminates at a
rise where a pair of larger and more gnarled specimens are standing. These, we
soon realize, are fountains, not plants.

Made from the wavy shells of giant clams, they stand in a pool that's a Pacific
fantasy, edged in abalone shells that reflect its pearly blue. The interplay of
colors and the faintly grotesque beauty aren't all that takes our breath away.
Anticipation does too. At any moment Venus should emerge, though what she'll
look like in this strange new world is anybody's guess.

No doubt Walska had a fellow feeling for the love goddess. At 30, she had the
dewy skin and liquid dark eyes of a teenager. Her romantic career began in St.
Petersburg with an adolescent marriage to a Russian count and admiring notice
from the czar.

Well into her 50s, she was accustomed to seeing men fall helplessly in love
after spending only days — or hours — in her company. And many of them were
extremely wealthy: Her third husband, Alexander Cochran, was known in 1920 as
"the richest bachelor in the world."

When marriage paled, Walska came to Southern California looking for a simpler
life. She wanted, she wrote later, "a garden tiny … enough to count on only
Nature's help for growing." But "tiny" was a relative term for a woman whose
other properties included a New York town house and a French château.

And what would "simple" mean to a hostess who wrote knowledgeably of the
protocol involved in seating two related grand dukes, a patroness of the arts
whose summer parties had featured "a different orchestra in each corner of the
park"?

That Walska was in the U.S. was not entirely a matter of choice. Although she
often married Americans (her favorite seems to have been Harold McCormick of the
International Harvester fortune), she preferred to live in France. When, in
1940, the impending Nazi invasion made life there untenable, she fled to Manhattan.

It was not a happy transition. Walska was 53, emotionally unattached, and the
vocal teachers who had nurtured her in the face of stage fright and bad reviews
were either dead or a continent away.

Mysticism in many guises — from yoga to Christian Science to Ouija boards — had
preoccupied Walska for years. On her first visit to California, in the late
1930s, she caught a whiff of the nirvana her gurus were always promising:
"Nature herself coquettishly conspires in pressing you to her bosom," she gushed
in her memoir, "Always Room at the Top." "The air is magnetized … the
consciousness awakens."

A second visit, in 1941, found her shopping at the behest of a suitor, Theos
Bernard, a 32-year-old with a soulful simper who had grander dreams in mind.
Bernard, who had studied yoga in the East and could twist himself into knots,
had seen the Montecito property and thought it would be perfect for the Tibetan
monastery he hoped, with Walska's money, to found. The pair married, and
although they christened the estate Tibetland, the lamas didn't come. (A wartime
State Department denied their visas.)



Fortunately, Walska's previous marriages had educated her in the use of the
prenuptial agreement. When she and Bernard divorced in 1946, she returned with
revived enthusiasm to her temporal nirvana and gave it a name, Lotusland, that
more accurately reflected her own ambitions: spiritual growth and flowers.

For all the gauzy platitudes in her memoirs, Walska had a temperament more in
common with the hardheaded industrialists who transformed California at the end
of the 19th century. She liked to make a splash and had no patience with
half-measures.

In "Lotusland: A Photographic Odyssey," Theodore Roosevelt Gardner II tells the
story of a meeting of the Palm Society that Walska hosted. Although her own palm
collection featured rarities that had been growing on the property since it was
a nursery in the 1890s, she ordered truckloads of prize specimens to be planted
before the palm lovers arrived.

Like the singer herself, the existing gardens at Lotusland had good bones. The
previous owners had installed inviting terraces and planted a long, dreamy allée
of gray-barked olive trees.

With the help of consultants including Ralph Stevens, Kinton's son, who had
grown up on the property before becoming Santa Barbara's superintendent of
parks, Walska set out to preserve and enhance these features even as she was
replacing Italian cypresses with American cactuses and exchanging the garden's
look of upper-class horticultural propriety for something decidedly more radical.

The change didn't happen overnight. Records indicate that her first "blue
garden" was a blue-flower collection full of such traditional Southern
California choices as delphinium and Cape plumbago.

As Walska transferred her energies from husbands to gardens, she never lost her
penchant for opulent femininity. Consider the profusion of ornaments among her
plantings: not only the diminutive cupids crouching among the succulents, or the
weathered rocks as personable as statues, but the amethyst-lined geodes
scattered among the crown-of-thorns, the pink quartz accents in the cactus
patch, the several paths edged with chunks of turquoise glass, slag from a local
bottling plant.

It's as if she feared the garden, like any self-respecting beauty, would feel
naked without its jewels.

Her own rocks were legendary — including a 95-carat yellow briolette diamond
named in her honor. When her jewelry was auctioned in 1971, it brought close to
$1 million. She was at work on her last great project at the time, the cycad
garden. Although their smooth trunks and feathery leaves make them look like
dwarf palms — or giant feather dusters — cycads are ancient, cone-bearing
relatives of pine and spruce.

Their extremely slow rate of growth and the hard-to-recognize differences among
some species make buying mature specimens a costly proposition. Walska amassed
500 plants.

Ironically, the cycad garden is Lotusland's least flashy. The dell it occupies
is a serene green bowl cupping the sun. Spaced about the undulating terrain —
which is almost unornamented except for a pond and a scattering of boulders —
the clumps of gently waving fronds with their startling eruptions of footlong
cones suggest a world that has never known a human.

It cost her 40 years and a considerable fortune, but Walska finally found her
simple life.

Recently the Lotusland Foundation commissioned a new garden — the most ambitious
addition since Walska's death. It was inspired by the donation of a major cactus
collection that Fallbrook resident Merritt Dunlap, a longtime friend of
Walska's, had promised her in 1966.

The site of this desert garden, installed a year ago at the end of the old olive
allée, is appropriately dramatic. Vaguely prow-shaped, it seems to be heading
straight for the mountains. Within its sunny confines, hills with an appropriate
desert paving of black stone bring cactuses to different levels for better viewing.

Here and there, rough basalt columns among the bulbous pillars of echinopsis
give the sense of an archeological site; so does the central terrace, shaped
like a lopped-off pyramid. But walking up its steps I am oddly disappointed.
This Aztec setting is perfect for cactus, but it doesn't make me want to linger.