One of the hillside gardens at "The Terraces" 
A Chat with My Patrons 
When I was a boy of seventeen the opportunity came to me to collect a few bulbs 
of wild California flowers for an eastern American firm who were the first to discover 
the beauty of our wild native plants. I was able to secure only fifty of them for which 
I received the sum of seventy-five cents, but with the order came encouragement to 
learn the wild flowers and from this small start grew a trade which has aggregated main' 
millions of wild bulbs and plants. 
The next year I left my farm home in this county and for seven years I taught 
school, studying botany and collecting plants at odd times. My field of endeavor grew 
