Where water is opulence

In Southern California, water is opulence.

Overlooking Santa Barbara, on a winding lane of walled estates, a Shangri-la garden exists called Lotusland, planted with the drama and intensity of the opera diva who owned and created it. Lotusland boasts at least four large water features: a small lake in its Japanese garden; an enchantingly pale, pale blue, shallow “wading pool”; an immaculately clean and enticing swimming pool, kept full but unused since the owner’s death in 1984; and The Water Garden.

The Wading Pool is painted an ethereal tint, the blue accentuated by a narrow white-painted border. Roughly kidney shaped and not quite Olympic in length, a “beach” of large abalone shells rim the entire pool.  Perched on the edge, a three-tiered fountain, about 6 feet tall, formed of two-foot-wide giant clam shells and coral, each shell worth a small fortune, spills musically into the pool. I want desperately to lie down in this pool and listen to “Bali Ha’i”.

A photograph of the main Water Garden now graces my laptop’s desktop. The sunny scene transports me on gloomy Seattle days. The old cabana sits in the background, a small building, though large for a cabana. My eye goes repeatedly to it. Tall trees frame it and the sun falls full and bright on it, picking out the light pink stucco and brick-red Spanish tile from the surrounding greenery. Basic in its plain rectangular footprint, a colonial Spanish mission-style double-arch entry lifts it out of simplicity. The two arches, with three supporting columns, lead to an antechamber, suggesting a cloister. In the inner wall of the antechamber are two doors - the former changing rooms.

A cluster of papyrus grows just outside the cabana, beside the entry. Very tall, some of the stems stand upright, their feathery mops dusting the lower edge of the roof eave. Other stems lean to the left, fanning across the arch, their flower heads burst chartreuse against the pink stucco and dark cloister.

 The sun, the pale pink stucco, and darkness beyond the arches seductively draw me into this California dream.

The property’s original swimming pool spans the mid-ground of the photo. Now an opaque, pale green rectangle of duckweed, it forms the central axis of the current Water Garden, reflecting the rectangular shape of the cabana, but not its image.  A few pale yellow strips of sun lay like rags on its duckweed surface. On both sides of this pale geometry, irregularly shaped, more naturalistic ponds host lotus, waterlilies, papyrus, and reflections - of sky, surrounding trees and bordering vegetation. A wavy image of the pink cabana floats on the foreground pond.

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A place of enchantment and heady excess, Lotusland’s “garden rooms” are more Belle Epoque ballrooms.

Lemon trees trained over an arbor form a very long arcade, a dapple-shaded passage across a vast lawn. Their slim trunks alternate with wooden beams of the same weathered gray hue to form airy vertical supports. Overhead, hundreds of lemons in various stages of ripening hang thick beneath sturdy evergreen leaves. Such a wealth of fruit thrills me. Walking slowly under this arbor, I feel both sheltered and nourished by this Eden-like vision. I imagine that Eve must have felt something like this wonder and delight.