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.
* *
*
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.
