House and Garden 
VoL. XIII JANUARY, 1908 No. i 
Nooks and Corners in the Christmas 
Gardens of California 
By CHARLES FREDERICK HOLDER 
T he lover of artistic and picturesqiiegardens finds 
an interesting and novel field in Southern Cali¬ 
fornia. In Los Angeles there are many typi¬ 
cal sunken gardens, and on Orange Grove Avenue, 
Pasadena, the famous Busch place has perhaps one of 
the most striking gardens of this kind in the country, 
a small canon being given 
up to it. The rolling, un¬ 
dulating lawn here is partic¬ 
ularly a thing of beauty. 
Mr. Busch at the time of the 
St. Louis Fair was a mem¬ 
ber of the art committee, 
and that this love for art 
extends to landscape gar¬ 
dening is shown in the great 
garden which extends from 
his Pasadena house to the 
Arroyo Seco. 
I have mentioned this 
place not to describe it 
particularly but to illustrate 
what can be done with the 
most repellent and seem- 
ingly hopeless ground in a 
short time. Two years pre¬ 
vious to the present writing 
the sunken garden with its 
splendid reaches of turf was 
an impossible hill rising 
betw^een two small canons, 
a piece of ground which 
doubtless had never felt the 
keen edge of a plough or a 
cultivator of any kind; in¬ 
deed, a more unpromising 
piece of country it would be 
difficult to find, yet it was 
transformed by the clever 
artist in landscapes into a 
rolling surface of beautiful 
velvety green in lines of 
beauty. The lawn slopes down to the edge of the 
arroyo and is laid out in an attractive manner, the 
gardener taking advantage of the natural beauties of 
the land, which is in places covered with live oaks. 
On the higher level the canons which run through 
this place have been completely sodded, and at the 
lower end stand a beautiful 
group of live oaks which 
throw their wide branches 
over a large surface, fur¬ 
nishing refreshing shade. 
I'his great garden is also 
planted with trees and in 
two or three years will be 
one of the most attractive 
private parks in Southern 
California, suggestive of 
what a citizen can do for a 
town, as the gardens are 
thrown open to the public 
several days in the week and 
have been visited by thou¬ 
sands of people from all 
parts of the world, which in 
itself is remarkable as there 
are no startling features, 
merely a corner in Southern 
California made green and 
radiant by the magic touch 
of water, a remarkable ex¬ 
ample of the effect of lawns. 
During a recent trip East 
the writer visited many of 
the famous public gardens 
of America and came away 
with the impression that the 
most charming vista he had 
seen in crossing the conti¬ 
nent was the vast lawn or 
well cut field of Franklin 
Park of Boston where a 
green rolling lawn stretched 
Copyright, 1907, by The John G. Winston Co, 
