Lo
tusland, a garden near Santa Barbara, California, inspires photographers. Its creator, Madame Ganna Walska, inspired writers and photographers. Many books, chapters of books, and magazine articles in the Miller Library use words and images to tell the amazing stories of both the garden and its maker.
My favorite of the books is Lotusland: A Photographic Journey (1995). As the title suggests, this is an art book. Captions are in an appendix so they do not distract from the images. The work of three principle photographers combines with historical pictures to give a wide range of close-ups, landscapes, and vistas – all curated into an outstanding exhibit.
Popping up here and there is the text by author Theodore Roosevelt Gardner II. He is at his liveliest in a chapter on the six husbands of Madame Walska.
He writes, “Through the kindness of time, the husbands of Madame Ganna Walska have become statistics. A book or more could easily be written about each one of them…” What follows is a field guide to these men, with all the vital details including occupation, his (and her) age at the time of marriage, the estimated length of courtship (usually very short), and, perhaps most important, the financial settlement at the end of the marriage.
Published in Garden Notes: Northwest Horticultural Society, Spring 2017