The beaten track was not for her. In front of her house, Madame Ganna Walska gathered crowds of cacti, ordered legions of topiary plants, and let the ferns spread in tides of finely cut foliage. “More is better”, she liked to repeat. Maximalism was the hallmark of his jardin – which remains unchanged today – but also of his person. Ganna Walska was a modern legend, who is said to have inspired Orson Welles for the screenplay of Citizen Kane. But if she tried to make a career in the lyrical art, “his most enduring legacy has less to do with the stage than with the land,” writes the American architect Marc Appleton in Lotusland (Rizzoli New York), a monograph devoted to the botanical monument of the same name in Montecito, California.
Born in 1887 in the Polish city of Brest-Litovsk (now Brest, Belarus), Hanna Puacz, her real name, fled with a Russian count to Saint Petersburg when she was still a teenager. When they divorced seven years later, she adopted the name Ganna Walska and, determined to become an opera singer, moved to Paris before flying to the United States on the eve of World War I. She had already known five marriages (and therefore five divorces, which enabled her to amass a colossal fortune) when she met Théos Bernard, master yogi twenty years her junior. The one who calls himself the “White Lama” will become her sixth husband. It was he who in 1941 persuaded her to buy Cuesta Linda, a 15-hectare estate nestled in the hills near Santa Barbara, with the aim of making it a retreat place for Tibetan monks (the place is then renamed “Tibetland”). When they separated, the failed 54-year-old singer found herself alone in her kingdom, ready to devote all her energy to what would become Lotusland.
The estate had already been cultivated by the previous owners, who had designed an Italianate garden there, planted with cypresses. Walska makes it a garden declined in several thematic spaces, which, in its originality “escapes all traditional order and all logic”, as Appleton points out. Ignoring conventions, wanting in particular that the beds closest to the dwellings be the most formal, Ganna Walska chose to bring together a collection of cacti of various shapes and sizes, forming an oversized flower bed of succulents, proudly surrounding her coral pink building – the all giving the impression of having been suddenly teleported to Mexico.
From pool dilapidated, Walska made an aquatic garden (the Water Garden) welcoming her beloved lotuses, which, in Buddhist philosophy, are a symbol of rebirth. The Blue Garden, another thematic space, is devoted to plants with glaucous leaves, that is to say, whose green tends towards blue. Majestic Cedrus atlanticato the blue palm of the Mexicopassing through grasses and a staggering assortment of agaves, it is an enchanting corner that retains the lesson of the monochrome garden of Gertrude Jekyll – an influential figure in garden design in the 19th century.e century – to decline it through a selection of exotic plants. Similarly, the well-marked exercise of the Japanese garden escapes the usual patterns and adapts to the environment and the personality of the designer.
Walska had an insatiable appetite for plants and in particular for unusual specimens from the New World. “When she fell in love with something,” Appleton notes, “she wasn’t content with just one or a few copies, but had to have a plethora of them.” » The exuberance of the collections is precisely one of the reasons for the fascination exercised by Lotusland, as well as its indefinable character. As we still hear today during guided tours, Madame liked to create sets with a strong scenic impact: she who owned the Champs-Elysées theater from 1922 to 1970 had a keen sense of representation. For her character too: Walska liked to wear her collection of precious jewels or decorate her garden with showy elements, flirting with kitsch – shell fountains in mind.
At the end of the 1970s, shortly before her death in 1984 at the age of 97, Ganna Walska ended up auctioning off her huge collection of jewels, with the aim of composing the last thematic space in her garden – from nicknamed “the million dollar garden”. The proceeds from the sale enabled him to create the Cycad Garden: a battalion of 450 cycadophytes, a group of plants with seeds and without flowers, which appeared on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago. And which today turns out to be one of the most precious possessions of Lotusland.