‘It’s always been endangered, but we’ve held onto it.’
The Descanso Gardens Guild opened its annual Spring Garden Show last week under a blast of summer weather.
Although the heat may have pressed an early wrinkle into the Iceland poppies and famed camellias of the 165-acre garden in La Canada Flintridge, it seemed only to buoy the spirits of the guild.
About 250 guild women, and a handful of men, gathered Friday afternoon for the private party that begins the nine-day show and plant sale.
The preview party gives guild members--who number 3,000--a chance to drink champagne, get first crack at buying plants and add to the guild’s kitty at $15 apiece.
The garden show, continuing through Saturday, consists of several separate shows, really. First, in the Georgia Van de Kamp Exhibition Hall, garden clubs from all parts of the Southland have set up theme displays such as the garden by the beach, the condominium garden and the vegetable garden.
On the patio outside are arrangements of showy flowers such as azaleas and cymbidiums.
Here, the amaryllises caught the attention of two women in sun dresses who moved deliberately from table to table.
“Is that the color of yours, Virginia?” one of them asked.
“Not with that shade of pink and the stripes,” Virginia said humbly.
They moved on slowly to a group of clivias.
“Now, you pronounce it cli-via and I pronounce it cli-via. Most people I have heard call it clEYE-via.” Virginia said uncertainly.
“Well, cli-via is right,” her friend said positively.
From the patio, the show leapfrogs over a small Japanese bridge into a meadow, where professional nurserymen have filled small niches between the California live oaks with samples of their work.
Down a different path, women of the guild sell plants that they have propagated during Tuesday meetings with Descanso’s superintendent, George Lewis.
They expect to sell 10,000 plants during the show, priced from 50 cents to $8.
The money will go into Descanso Gardens, whose development in the era of Proposition 13 has depended entirely on the the guild.
In its 30 years, the guild has raised several million dollars. The money has built a neo-Craftsman-style entrance, a hospitality hall and kitchen, a Japanese tea house and garden, and the impressive exhibition hall, named after a member of the Van de Kamp bakery family who was, until her death, the guild’s contact with the world of corporate giving.
Although the garden now seems perfect, there are still changes planned.
“I’d like to see the next 25 years go toward the grounds,” said Nancy Dunn, a longtime member.
Dunn, slender, tanned and bright in red and white gingham, took time out from the party to lead me on a one-person tour of the garden. She’s a docent, and gives tours each Tuesday to school children and on Sundays to all comers.
She started briskly up an asphalt path beside a large plot of irises, the work of 64-year-old guild member Jeanne Plank, who comes every weekend to cultivate.
“This is what a volunteer can do,” Dunn said.
Along the way, Dunn told the story of Descanso. It began as a part of a Spanish land grant made to Jose Maria Verdugo in 1784. Later, the Verdugo heirs parceled off the land.
E. Manchester Boddy, owner of the old Los Angeles Daily News, bought the last 165 acres in 1937 to feed a passion for camellias. He bought watershed in the nearby mountains, hired Chinese laborers to build aqueducts and began what is today the largest planting of camellias in the world.
Now, Dunn’s idea is to improve the 250-acre watershed that still supplies all of Descanso’s water. She’d use the surplus to join two duck ponds and build a waterfall.
At the lower pond, peering in, Dunn said: “There’s a bass in here so big that it will eat baby ducks.”
Then she strode up a hill. At the upper pond, she resumed her story, which had dropped off with Boddy’s paying a quarter apiece for the camellias of the Japanese nurserymen taken off to internment in World War II.
In 1953, Supervisor John Anson Ford--”the only cultural-minded supervisor we ever had,” Dunn sniffed--got Los Angeles County to buy Descanso.
Four years later, however, there was a move to sell the property to developers.
“That’s when the guild was founded and our battles began,” Dunn said.
They beat the development plan.
“Then Caltrans had not one, but two, plans to put the 210 Freeway through Descanso,” Dunn said.
Obviously, the guild won that one, too.
“So it’s always been endangered, but we’ve held onto it,” Dunn said. “I try to teach the children: ‘You can fight City Hall.’ ”
The tour ended at the tea house, built by the Japanese community “in spite of what we did,” Dunn said.
“Look up here,” Dunn said.
A small, shady creek splashed over boulders.
“If you just want serenity. . . . You can’t get it talking with me.”
And up the path she walked, noticing that the party was over and the gates were about to close.
