A fascinating topic, especially since there is such great diversity between north and south, coast and mountains, Central Valley and desert (and, as we all know, the mission gardens, as we know them today, were not really planted until the early 1920s).

I wonder if we should also consider pioneer gardens literally cut from the wilderness, and crowded by the huge stumps that remained after the giant trees were cut down. (Even now, in north coast valleys, you can still find the occasional garden overtowered by a hundred+ year old redwood stump.)

My post about CA garden history is on the thread, "Historic Garden Week in Virginia". Sorry I can't get it over here. Will repeat when I have a moment.

Ginny wrote on the "Historic Garden Week in Virginia" thread:

"Kate, Tessa and others! Mais non! You must check out the California Garden and Landscape History Society at their website which is cglhs.org. They have an interesting newsletter and a fabulous annual meeting with tours of historic gardens, some public, some private that most of us would never get in otherwise. Join! I live on the opposite coast but am a member, just for the publications. No doubt I'll get out there for some of those meetings, as I have been attending the wonderful meetings of the Southern Garden History Society each year. Last year Atlanta, this year New Orleans.
"Back to California. I hope you get Pacific Horticulture magazine which often has articles about California garden history, and blurbs about garden tours. And check out THE book about California garden history, which does indeed go back centuries, "California Gardens: Creating a New Eden", by David Streatfield. He is the most important scholar in this area and the book is beautiful, as well as informative and RELIABLE. Sorry for the emphasis. A sore spot with me.

"Another excellent book, heavy on fabulous photos, light on text, is "The Gardens of California, Four Centuries of Design from Mission to Modern", by Nancy Goslee Power.

"California is oozing with garden history. You just have to plug yourself into the network to hear about local tours. As an afterthought, who is going to see this info on a Virginia thread?? "

(All you do is left click over what you want coppied, go to "edit" and left click on "Copy." Then go to the thread you want, scroll down to message area, right click to set your cursor in the message box, go to "edit"again and hit "paste")

Ginger

Three cheers for Ginny and Ginger! Must have something to do with that first initial...

melanie

Thanks for the tech support, Ginger. Have printed it out so I don't reveal my dumbth in public again!

Where is sprectre, who often lamented that he had little to talk about re garden history in CA--that the Easterners had it all!!??
G.

I am suitably chagrined.
We _do_ have garden history in CA.
I am even a member of the SD Historical Society that is in the process of restoring a garden in the OldTown section of SD right now. There are the missions, there are three old adobes (Rancho Buena Vista, Rancho Guajome, Rancho Santan Maria de los Penasquitos)in the county that are in various degrees of completion of restoration. I do not mean to deny the historic nature of these properties.

I must admit to a personal preference for the old VA variety, I guess. These So. CA properties go back to, at best, the mid-1800's and a parched, dusty rancho with the occasional citrus success or dry farming of beans. Even Fioli, often trumpeted as a 'landmark' CA garden is not even a century old. It is awesome and beautiful, but its high water use design makes it seem as foreign to me as any VA garden. I suppose the Huntington gives me the best of both worlds, but that is specifically a botanic garden, not a historic or restored private garden (though it IS older than Fioli, for example).
Ahhh, phooey.
I like old gardens.
I am partial to the older, more formal, greener, European-influenced gardens of the VA Garden Week, but wouldn't give up my Zone 10 for the world. How's that for conflicted? :)
Tessa

It certainly does not look like earlier CA gardens amounted to much, especially as far as their design qualities are concerned.

It seems that the gardens Henry Richard Dana found when he visited CA in 1835/36 (Two Years Before The Mast), were mainly of the truck/production variety:

"There are in this place, and in every other town which I saw in California, no streets, or fences, (except here and there a small patch was fenced in for a garden,) so that the houses are placed at random upon the green, which, as they are of one story and of the cottage form, gives them a pretty effect when seen from a little distance."

[19th century paintings and engravings show the fenced-in mission gardens away from the buildings.]
. . . .
"The men are employed, most of the time, in tending the
cattle of the mission, and in working in the garden, which is a very large one, including several acres, and filled, it is said, with the best fruits of the climate.
. . . .
Finding wheat-coffee and dry bread rather poor living, we dubbed together, and I went up to the town on horseback with a great salt-bag behind the saddle, and a few reals in my pocket, and brought back the bag full of onions, pears, beans, water-melons, and other fruits; for the young woman who tended the garden, finding that I belonged to the American ship, and that we were short of provisions, put in a double portion."

But on his 1869 return visit to the San Diego mission he noted that,

"All has gone to decay. The buildings are unused and ruinous, and the large gardens show now only wild cactuses, willows, and a few olive-trees."

The gardens at Filoli were planned during a time when water conservation was not an issue back in the late teens to early 1920's. It also didn't hurt that the man who owned Filoli, Willian B. Bourn also owned the Spring Mountain Water Company ( San Francisco Water Co ) .
Mr. and Mrs. Bourn hired Bruce Porter to design the gardens and Willis Polk to design the mansion.
It was an interesting collaboration to say the least on all fronts.. Polk favored formal classical lines and designed a mansion which is a cross between staunch Georgian styling and Spanish architecture, .... picture a formal red brick 2 story facade with a towering entry portico made of white doric columns and a Spanish red terracotta tiled roof.
Mr. Porter favored California natives and had a decidedly mediterranean style.
This was to be the Bourn's 'city house', a place to come to entertain the affluent of San Francisco so they wanted something much more formal in layout than their digs up in the foothills of the gold country where he operated his gold mines.

The garden's hardscaping was mostly all laid out by the time the Bourns passed on and the property was purchase by Lurline Roth.
Mrs. Roth was a passionate gardener and under her direction some of the most interesting specimens were planted at Filoli.

As a horticultural internist at Filoli in the 1980's I was fortunate to tend many of the plants that she personally planted such as the rose garden that is planted out to mimick the stain glass window design at the Chartres Cathedral , shear miles of boxwood, hundreds of lineal feet of Taxus baccata, plant thousands of spring bulbs in her parterre gardens, prune the magnolias that step up to Italianate 'High Place ' as well as maintain the lesser known and off limits to the public woodland gardens, greenhouses and cutting gardens.

Filoli may require a lot of water, but it is changing a bit with the times under the leadership of Lucy Tolmach ( she has a new last name that escapes me at the moment ) and many of the changing horticultural exhibits are now water conscience.

It's a spectacular garden to visit !

Ginny, thanks for answering my query on the Virginia thread --it was a great idea to start a separate thread and get the ball rolling. I look forward to checking out some of the resources you cited.

As someone who grew up in the middle of the U.S. and has spent a fair amount of time living on the right coast, I've recently become aware of how little I know about the history of the left coast. I think garden and landscape history would be a fun way to get into the topic. Naturally, it will require multiple field trips . . . .

(Tessa, I do agree that there is something special about the historic/historically recreated gardens of Virginia.
Despite--or perhaps because of--having once lived in Williamsburg, the sight and smell of a boxwood hedge still brings a smile to my face.)

While I did know that Fioli was established by Mr. We-Gots-Water, I did not know you interned there, mich. You seem to have sharpened your shears at the finest gardens on both coasts. My (distant) connection is that as a child I sailed back from living in Hawaii on the Matson liner SS Lurline (well, the 2nd Lurline, after the 1st was sold off in 1963) named after the same Mrs. Roth. :)
I would like to visit the garden again. I have never seen it 'in season'.

I agree that the whole garden history pursuit most certainly requires road trips. I see San Francisco and VA both on my horizon. Conveniently, I have a sister living in the former and a brother in the latter. Don't I plan well?

(urbangardener - I don't know why the old Eastern gardens are special to me. I've lived in every corner of this country - from Seattle to New Orleans to Boston to yes, VA and Hawaii. Maybe it is my British heritage that gives me that boxwood yearning!)
Tessa

Tessa,
There are so many 'in season' times at Filoli but in my opinion the most stunning month of all is April.
This is when the facade of the mansion is veiled in Wisteria chin. + jap. and if the air is still cool the yellow lady Banksia rose is still blooming and comingling with the wisteria over the front entry portico.

The parterre beds are brimming with late season tulips + dutch iris and the various cover crops ( forget me knots, nemesia, alyssum , primrose amongst others ) are also in bloom.

The woodland garden that often is not opened to the public is usually opened this month only for viewing the extensive rhododendrons, camellias, kalmia, enkianthus, thousands and thousands of wood land bulbs and orchids ect.....

The orchid house / conservatory is overflowing with too numerous to list orchids and the rose garden is budded up and just starting to push bloom.
The knot garden is usually sheared hard in March so it is tight to its layout form but is not blooming.
Across from the knot garden the perennial display garden is still being tweeked with incoming new plants that were grown in the greenhouses.

Sometimes the cutting garden is open and if it is that means the vegetable garden will be open too. One should try to take advantage of this viewing time. The cutting garden won't be lush but what you will see are various methods used in staking , which I find very interesting and had no idea so much went into a cutting garden in order to ensure tall straight stems for the outrageous floral arrangements that go in the mansion .

The horticultural internship program at Filoli was extremely different from the one at the Arnold Arboretum, which I took concurrently back to back.
One would think that a west coast institution might be a little bit more laid back than an old established east coast establishment but the opposite was true. Filoli was like being in the Marine Corps for horticulturalists while Harvard had a more live, learn and take time to smell the meristem culture lab !