I can’t stop looking at these impossibly beautiful images by photographer, Claire Takacs from a new book on Garden Photography, Dreamscapes, featured on Gardenista this past week: Letter From California …
All the images are of Lotusland, on the coast of California, click the link above to see more images.
Gardenista provide some of the background to the development of Lotusland:
The story of the birth of Lotusland is as extraordinary as its survival. An amalgam of two properties, the gardens around the Spanish hacienda-style house were extended in the 1940s by Madame Ganna Walska, a Polish opera singer with a colorful love life and a half dozen husbands. When she finally settled down in California, the recent end of her first career and the departure of husband number six allowed Walska to focus exclusively on building a theatrical garden.
A tropical plant collection, including a variety of mature palms, had already been put in place at the end of the 19th century by a former owner, nurseryman Kinton Stevens. Walska spent four decades creating a sequence of gardens to showcase a growing collection of cacti, succulents, ferns (as well as more conventional plants, including roses). An acquired fortune allowed Walska to collect widely but well, becoming a cactus connoisseur, presiding over a garden of particular botanical interest.
The spirit of the garden’s creator lives on.
Do click to Gardenista to read more.
Or buy the book, Dreamscapes, at all the usual sellers.
I’m feeling Mother’s Day gift vibes here but it may sneak its’ way into my collections of arts books and if I’m ever, perchance, in California…
Enjoy.
Lotusland: Giant weeping succulents at the entrance of the 1890s house.
Lotusland: Giant blue Agave x franzosinii stand guard at the entry to the Blue Garden, while Festuca glauca grasses provide a ground cover beneath Chilean wine palms.
Lotusland: Beautiful sea-green, former swimming, pool.
Lotusland: The Water Garden with floating Asian lotus Nelumbo nucifera, national flower of India and Vietnam.
Lotusland: In the Blue Garden, chunks of blue-green glass separate the pathway from blue fescue, Festuca glauca, beneath blue Atlas cedars.
Lotusland: Suspended Sedum morganianum, hanging from Lotusland’s cedar trees.
