Lotusland

Lotusland is a 37-acre garden in Montecito, six kilometres east of Santa Barbara. Madame Ganna Walska, who lived on the estate from 1941 until her death in 1984, planted it as a sequence of themed gardens, each more eccentric than the last — a Blue Garden, a Cactus Garden, a Japanese Garden, an outdoor theatre.

Access is by guided tour only, with a strict reservation system; advance booking is essential, sometimes weeks ahead. Tours run February through November. The Blue Garden, with its silver-blue agaves and Atlas cedars, is the most photographed feature; the Aloe Garden, ringed by giant clam shells with an abalone-shell fountain, is the most surreal.

things to do sight garden
A story
Madame Ganna Walska was a Polish socialite and aspiring opera singer (her singing was, by most accounts, not great) who married six wealthy men in succession. She bought this 37-acre Montecito estate with one of their fortunes and spent forty years turning it into a series of obsessive botanical fantasies — a blue garden made entirely of silver-blue foliage, an entire collection of horticultural curiosities. She lived alone here with her plants until she died at 96.