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AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS 



February, 1908 



who visited Los Angeles twenty years ago are amazed at the 

 wonderful city to-day, with its 350,000 inhabitants, and 

 towns like Pasadena, with a population of 35,000. 



The soil of Southern California is very responsive, and it 

 is no exaggeration to say that one can make more of a show- 

 ing here in five years than in the East in ten. This has been 

 another reason for the rapid upbuilding, and as a result, 

 where the tourist expects to see pioneer towns, he finds beau- 

 tiful places, as at Pasadena and Santa Barbara. Redlands 

 and other towns seem to have leaped into the limelight and 

 are famous for their beautiful homes. The really interest- 

 ing feature about it is to see how clever eastern landscape 

 gardeners have seized the opportunity afforded by the climate 

 and wealth to produce beautiful places. 



Just how a marvelous change can be produced is seen in 

 the following. A vacant lot covered with weeds, without a 

 tree on it, was taken in hand by a gardener while the house 

 was going up in October. He purchased four date palms of 

 the Canariensis variety, twenty feet high and weighing 

 several tons, with a magnificent spread of branches. The 

 writer watched them being moved. They were tunneled, 

 wrapped, boxed, hoisted on to a dray, hauled a mile to the 

 lot where an excavation had been made, lowered carefully, 

 and filled in. These palms formed a splendid row in front 

 of the house, and they did not fade, did not lose a leaf. 



Then the gardener laid out his garden. He brought 

 seven-year-old oranges, lemon and grape fruit trees, put in a 

 good size eucalyptus, peach, apricot and a number of other 

 trees. This was in October. The house was finished in 

 February, at which time it was surrounded by a lawn and 

 garden. It had trees and shrubs which in the East would 

 have taken several years to grow. That was seven years 

 ago, and during this time pines and other trees were planted 

 which are now thirty and fifty feet high. If one was asked 

 to guess the age, judging by Eastern standards, he would 

 say fifty years. Such are the possibilities in Southern Cali- 

 fornia. A barren lot can be taken and planted and in a 

 year be covered with semitropic vegetation and made to look 

 as though it had always been so. 



And here is the secret. A man of sixty comes to the 

 country. He is asked if he is going to build, and replies, 

 "No, I shall not live to see it finished." He is finally in- 

 duced to try it, and to his amazement finds that a year later 

 the passing stranger would take his place for one of the old 

 ones of the town. This has a charm for many men who 

 have been engrossed in business until the counting room is 

 second nature. They come here on the down-hill side of life 

 and find there is ample time for home building yet, and 

 ample opportunity to make one of the most beautiful and 

 entertaining experiments, one which is not only a delight to 

 the man himself, but the neighbor, the passer-by, the experi- 

 ment of taking a barren lot and by touching it with the 

 wand of money and good taste, converting it into a virtual 

 paradise of flowers and shrubs. Hundreds of examples of 

 this may be seen in Southern California from Santa Barbara 

 to San Diego, where the crudest places have been made a 

 delight to the eye. 



Such an experiment is shown in one of the photographs 

 which accompany this paper, showing the work accom- 

 plished by Adolphus Busch of St. Louis, who appears to be 

 the kind of a citizen who takes delight in giving other people 

 pleasure, who thinks it worth while to help the town look 

 its best. The evidence of it is that here and there you see 

 in Pasadena a lot with no house on it, but laid out with a 

 beautiful lawn and a man at work on it every day. It 

 puzzles some people to understand why this lot is cared for 

 so carefully when there is no one living on it; but the owner 

 of the lot is thinking of the people who pass every day and 

 have to look at it, and for their benefit he makes it attractive 

 — practical philanthropy to the whole people the reader will 

 agree. 



The writer has said this about Mr. Busch as a sort of in- 

 troduction to more elaborate work he has carried on with 

 the same motive — to give the public something beautiful to 

 look at ; at the same time it is referred to to illustrate the 

 point that wonders can be performed in this country with the 

 crudest material. 



Pasadena stands at the head of the San Gabriel Valley, to 

 the west, and is rapidly filling the space from the Sierra 

 Madre to the Mission hills, a space of eight or nine miles. 

 Its western boundary is the Arroyo Seco — a deep, attractive 

 canon bearing a little stream and filled with the natural 

 verdure that has drifted down from the mountains. A boule- 

 vard has been built on the highest ground abutting this 

 canon, cut through the original orange groves planted 

 twenty-five or thirty years ago, and on its front are some of 

 the finest places in California. The arroyo side, the canon 

 front, through some perverse reason, is the back door when 

 it should be the front, and for many years it was left rough 

 and unattractive, but it is gradually being cared for, which 

 means, left to nature or kept in good shape. 



The most impossible, difficult region along this arroyo, 

 it happened, was back of Mr. Busch's place which faces the 

 boulevard to the east. In the old days there was a very 

 small canon here and the rain water from the vicinity cut it 

 away. Oak trees grew in it, and a really attractive little 

 canon took shape, used by all the old timers as a cut off. 



When the street was closed it left an unsightly gulch and a 

 cape or promontory of land which apparently was impossible. 

 True, the oaks were fine, and in winter the Ademostoma and 

 Heteromeles made the little canon bloom; but in summer it 

 was an eyesore, as the cliffs washed away and fell in, and 

 it presented an uncompromising appearance, until Mr. Busch 

 appeared, and then so far as can be learned his artistic eye 

 seized upon this undesirable spot on the arroyo and saw 

 great possibilities, and giving a brief outline of his scheme 

 to a landscape gardener he told him to go ahead and make 

 it as beautiful as he could, so that the public would have 

 something to enjoy as they passed by the arroyo road. The 

 picture of what it is now is given and shows one of the most 

 beautiful of sunken gardens; not for its elaboration of de- 

 tail, but for its simplicity. The scheme seems to be grass 

 and lawn, and nothing in the world is more attractive. The 

 gardener left the place very much as it was, but he filled in 

 the gulch where it had washed and took the canon, the old 

 wash, as his sunken garden. The side of the cliffs that were 

 so disagreeable to the eye he terraced so that the torrential 

 rains would not wash them away; then when he had the 

 region graded, after months of work with scores of men, he 

 covered the surface with loam and leaf mold, working it 

 over and over until it formed an "epidermis," and then 

 planted grass. As the first rain came that year some genii 

 appeared to have waved a wand, as, like magic, this rough, 

 weed-haunted spot became a think of beauty. I think the 

 most beautiful thing I have seen in nature was the meadow 

 in the great park south of Boston where you can see it rising 

 like billows and disappearing literally over the edge of the 

 world. 



This sunken garden is such a park in miniature, beautiful 

 rounded hills, curves of perfect beauty, restful to the eye, 

 soothing to the mind, and suggestive of contentment. There 

 may be larger sunken gardens, more elaborate ones, but this 

 means more than any of them, as to keep up and maintain so 

 vast an area of green grass in summer in California means 

 the expenditure of not only a small fortune yearly but the ut- 

 most care on the part of a small army of men. Yet this is 

 done, winter and summer, that the passer-by may enjoy it. 

 Is it appreciated? I think so, as thousands of people go to 

 see it. A little street leads to it, where one can stand and 

 look down on it, the great hill of green melting into the 

 greens of the arroyo. You can follow the green canon 

 to the left as it sinks away, see fine old California oaks in 



{Continued on page 68) 



