Previous Owners

Ralph Kinton Stevens, an important early nurseryman, had his family home and commercial nursery on the property that is now known as Lotusland from 1882 until his death in 1896. Many of the large palms and other trees on the estate date to this period. Long after his death, his widow sold the property to George Owen Knapp in 1913, who in turn sold it in 1916 to E. Palmer and Marie Gavit of New York.

The Gavit family owned the property from 1916 to 1938. Reginald Johnson designed the main residence for them in 1919 and it was remodeled and additional buildings designed by George Washington Smith in the 1920s. Mr. Smith also designed the perimeter wall, the original swimming pool that is now the lotus pond, and adjacent bath house. The Gavits landscaped their estate, which they called Cuesta Linda, with extensive gardens, described in 1929 as "semi-formal Italian," with designers listed as Paul Theine and Peter Reidel. There is a very good possibility that Lockwood de Forest was also responsible for part of the designs.

Sir Humphrey O. Clarke, a British diplomat, bought Cuesta Linda from the Gavit estate in 1938. He and his family occupied the property from 1939 to 1941, making some architectural changes to the main residence. There is no record of changes or additions to the grounds.

Madame Ganna Walska, who purchased the estate from the Clarkes in 1941, made no major changes to the buildings on the estate. She did, however, make extensive and dramatic changes to the grounds. During the 43 years that she lived at Lotusland, Madame Walska redesigned most of the Gavit period landscaping, creating many new and wonderful gardens.

Madame Ganna Walska

The woman who was to become the extraordinary Ganna Walska had quite ordinary origins, born Hanna Puacz in 1887 in Brest-Litovsk, Poland. At the onset of her musical studies, Hanna Puacz took the stage name of Madame Ganna Walska -- Madame was the customary title for well-known actresses and operatic singers in Europe, Ganna is a Russian form of Hanna and Walska reminiscent of her favorite music, the waltz. Over the next decades she sang in New York and Paris and toured America and Europe, attracting the attention of audiences, critics, and gentleman admirers on both sides of the Atlantic. She married six times, wrote her memoirs, Always Room at the Top, and continued to study both vocal music and spiritual teachings in search of creative fulfillment and personal enlightenment.

The Creation of Lotusland

After residing in Paris and New York, Madame Walska turned her sights toward California’s sunny climate and free-thinking residents. At the encouragement of Theos Bernard, her sixth and last husband, she purchased the 37-acre Cuesta Linda estate in Santa Barbara in 1941, intending to use it as a retreat for Tibetan monks, and renamed it "Tibetland." The Tibetan monks never appeared, and sometime later, after divorcing Bernard, Madame Walska changed the name of her estate to "Lotusland" in honor of the sacred Indian lotus growing in one of the ponds on the property. She thus began what would be a gradual transformation from well-known socialite to garden designer. Most of her energy and resources were poured into creating a botanical garden of rare plants using her natural artistic talents to create a fantasy world of exquisite beauty. To accomplish this she worked with a number of landscape architects and designers, including Lockwood de Forest, Jr., Ralph T. Stevens, William Paylen, Oswald da Ros, and Charles Glass. She herself was a designer and loved to mass single species of plants together. She wanted the best, the biggest, and the most unusual plants available and was often willing to pay any price to get them. So determined was she to finish the work she had begun that in the 1970s she auctioned off some of her jewelry in order to finance her final creation -- the cycad garden.

Up until the last few years of her life, she was the feisty, intractable "head gardener" of Lotusland. She died March 2, 1984 at Lotusland, leaving her garden and her fortune to the Ganna Walska Lotusland Foundation.