This is my love letter to botanic gardens, which are not only beautiful places to wander and enjoy the landscape, but are a refuge and haven for families, and the places that teach us how to transform our own plots of earth into our dreams.
There are many botanic gardens in Southern California – the Los Angeles Arboretum, the Theodore Payne Gardens in Claremont, the grand dame of all in the Huntington Library and Gardens in San Marino. But my first heaven was the UC Riverside Botanic Garden, tucked onto the eastern edge of the campus in Riverside.
Begun in 1963, it contains 40 acres of themed landscapes, such as Lilac Lane, which is lined with varieties that can withstand our California summers; the Cactus Garden, featuring hundreds of cacti, including a huge boojum tree; and the Rose Garden, with formal rows of roses, and beautiful shaded pergolas covered with blossoms of climbing roses.
In 1986, two years before I began teaching at UCR, I taught my niece Holla to walk on the gentle paths in the camellia and azalea gardens. I’d found the Botanic Gardens accidentally, while on the way home from the library, where I went on the weekends to read and imagine I’d be a writer.
I was teaching English as a Second Language at the time, and my husband was working nights at a juvenile corrections facility. I would wander in the botanic garden with my notebook, working on my first novel. Then, when my brother needed help with his year-old daughter, I kept her for some weekends, and took her with me.
I realized that the gardens were much safer than some local parks, where unruly people and loose dogs frightened her. But more than that, the beauty of paths through the Rose Garden, and the Cactus Garden, were perfect for me to carry her, read aloud the lovely names of the flowers and plants, and then set her down to practice her first steps.
My daughter Gaila, born in 1989, took her first steps in the same camellia gardens. Delphine, born in 1991, ate her first solid foods (cheese and crackers and a tiny slice of apple!) on a blanket near the azaleas, under the blooming plum and quince trees of March. And Rosette, born in 1995, ate her lunch with me after I taught class on campus. She and I sat in the cactus garden — her favorite because of the lizards and birds and sun — eating our peanut butter sandwiches and Doritos, seeing the droplets of water collected on the spines of barrel cactus and opuntia and ocotillo.
My girls and I love a botanic garden plant sale. They’re so popular, you have to arrive early, and bring your Radio Flyer red wagon, as we did, so Rosette could ride with the purchases. My ⅓-acre corner lot in Riverside, where we live in a 1910 former orange grove farm bungalow, has been planned and planted with ideas and plants bought from the UCR Botanic Garden and The Huntington.
In the wide parking strip where the original carob trees from the 1920s finally fell down and were removed, I planted Mexican petunias from UCR. They’re known as invasive in other states, and they will definitely take over a plot, but they’ve provided endless entertainment for decades of children. The purple flowers are like silken trumpets, lasting only a day or two, and then long torpedo-like seed pods form.
They’re activated by moisture, and will explode with a loud pop, throwing small round buttons everywhere. For 30 years, my daughters, their friends, and now the next generations of small children enjoyed this: Crouch down on my sidewalk, collect the seed pods in your palm, spit a few times on them, and turn your face away while they burst open! Or, pile them on the concrete and drizzle the hose, and they sound like baby firecrackers…
Of course, this means I have to pull out baby Mexican petunias all year — but it’s worth the laughter.
My garden also has Peruvian Lilies, perennials most people know from florists as alstroemeria, that spread from bulbs. I bought those many years before they were readily available, because of the gardens at UCR, along with Abutilon, with blooms that look like tiny ballerinas. The original two Abutilon plants grew into hedges, and eventually died, but volunteer plants took over, and this garden has never been without those blooms since 1995.
We’ve gone for years to the UCR Botanic Gardens just because these places function as lovely entertainment, better than a zoo at times, more accessible for children, and always educational.
At The LA Arboretum, where Delphine’s future husband Kunmi proposed, we love the peacocks and ponds; The Huntington is so famous in our family that it is the first place we take visitors, for the majesty of the Chinese Garden, the Japanese tea rooms, the Australian landscape and the bamboo forest.
But what we love about the UCR Botanic Garden is the way it has become home — and more than the plants, it’s the way we learn about native landscapes and introduced landscapes.
The turtle pond, which nestles inside a ravine of native alders and chaparral, was Delphine’s first obsession, and she never tired of seeing the reptiles sunning on the rocks, and the way the cattails grew at the edges. In the cactus garden, the aloes burst into bloom with dangling orange tubes, and the agave send their silver-blue spears to the sky. I taught my girls what I knew as a child — we sewed with the thorn, as it was attached to many strings of fiber in the agave leaf.
Their favorite was the wild edge of the Botanic Garden, as we would sit in the bamboo tunnel to think about the world, take the trail through the huge fig and eucalyptus trees in the Australian garden, and then head up the four miles of trail into the parts of the garden left to native brittlebush, sage and sycamore.
We’ve found mountain lion tracks in the mud, and seen the ghosts of coyotes slip around a boulder, and always there are the hawks, hummingbirds and the sound of the Santa Ana breezes through the trees.
My mother, born in Switzerland, had never been to the garden until we took her, when the girls were small. A self-taught Swiss gardener, she loved succulents and roses. We spent many days in the Rose Garden, and my mother, when she retired, became a volunteer at the gardens, especially loving the Rose Pruning Demonstration Weekend, when we all helped her teach people how to prepare roses for winter.
My own garden now had 70 roses, including climbers and English roses, because my mother taught me how to grow amazing varieties, and she taught hundreds of new gardeners the same at every demonstration or plant sale. She spent years potting new abutilon and alstroemeria, iris bulbs and lavender plants, along those same paths where I taught my girls how each flower opens to beauty, and every path leads to a new universe.
This is what a botanic garden gives to a community, and how the plants, trees and people replicate generations of love for the natural world.
Susan Straight’s most recent novel, “Mecca,” is set in Orange, Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, and the desert of Coachella.
