The Santa Barbara Botanic Garden is blooming — and booming — as it celebrates its 100th anniversary month in Mission Canyon.
The storied meadow with a mountain view is alight with poppies, sea pinks and blue-eyed grass. The Backcountry, a creekside playground with huts, a maze, rope bridges, wooden bears, a tire swing and a row of tree stumps to jump on, is full of happy children.
“Yoga in the Redwoods” sells out, and so does the garden’s annual conservation symposium. Earlier this month, 400 people attended the yearly Beer Garden fundraiser. And on Friday, dignitaries were on hand for a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the garden’s new grove for Torrey pines, the rarest pine trees in the country.
Attendance at the garden has surged in recent years, said Steve Windhager, the executive director. The Backcountry has been a big draw for families; and in the pandemic, people rediscovered the benefits of nature.
Under a conditional use permit from the county, visitors to the garden are capped at 110,000 per year. Windhager said he would favor raising the annual cap to 130,000, if the neighbors agree.
“We don’t advertise, ‘Come to the garden,’ because we don’t have to,” he said. “We’re hitting our limits already.”
The garden at 1212 Mission Canyon Rd. officially turned 100 on March 16. That’s the day back in 1926 when Anna Dorinda Blaksley Bliss of Montecito, a suffragist and philanthropist, donated the money to buy 13 acres next to Mission Creek as a memorial to her father.
Today, the garden covers 78 acres and is a showcase for more than 1,000 species of plants native to California, including coast redwoods, desert cacti, oak woodlands, manzanita chaparral and Channel Island wildflowers. Centennial programs and events are planned here through the fall.
“Native plants are the foundation of all life on the planet … That’s what the Botanic Garden is all about,” Windhager told an audience of supporters in front the Pritzlaff Conservation Center on Friday. “… We’re going to celebrate all year long!”
In his remarks, state Assemblyman Gregg Hart, (D—Santa Barbara), said that amid difficult political times, it was reassuring to “see all of you, and understand the depth of our commitment in making the world a better place.” The garden, he said, “will probably be even more critical in its next 100 years than it has in the past.”
Then and now
The outlook here was not always so rosy. In 2010, when Windhager left his position as head of research and conservation at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, Tex. to take the top job at the Botanic Garden, he encountered an institution in disarray.
Eighty percent of the garden had burned in the Jesusita Fire, just the year before. Making matters worse, Windhager’s predecessor had run through more than half of the garden’s $25 million investment portfolio, designing multiple unpopular versions of a “Vital Mission Plan” for a “modern research campus.”
By the time Windhager arrived, the plan had been downsized somewhat, but it still included the construction of a large education and library complex, expansion of the gift store building, and a new ticket booth and restrooms. Several structures were slated for demolition.
Members of the Mission Canyon Association, a homeowners’ group, and Friends of Mission Canyon, representing neighbors at the top of Mission Canyon Road, were up in arms about what they viewed as commercialization of the garden and over-development in an extreme fire zone.
In 2007, amid a public uproar about “Disney-fication,” the county had ordered the garden to stop construction on the “Meadow Terrace,” a tiered plaza with rock walls for exhibits and events. The meadow had been designated by the county as a historic landmark.
By 2010, the garden was operating significantly in the red, with a budget deficit of $1 million. Ten garden employees had been laid off, and 62 volunteers had gone on strike in protest.
In an interview last week, Windhager, who has a B.A. in philosophy and a Master’s Degree in environmental ethics, summed up the controversy as a failure to engage with the community.
“The garden is communicating better with our neighbors now,” he said. “I try to listen as well as talk, with the goal of understanding the concerns so that we can address those.”
Today, Windhager said, the garden is back in the black with an annual budget of $9.5 million, up from $2.3 million in 2010. The investment portfolio stands at $17 million, up from $10 million when Windhager came on. Garden membership is at 6,000 members, a historic high.
Future plans
The garden’s plants, shrubs and trees started “greening up” within two years of the fire of 2009 and are now fully healed, Windhager said. These days, he said, especially during springtime and on holiday weekends, it’s a good idea to make a reservation to visit. (Members don’t need reservations.)
“When the weather’s beautiful, we will oftentimes unexpectedly get a flood of visitors,” Windhager said.
An increase in garden attendance to 130,000 visitors per year could be accomplished, he said, without increasing the caps on the number of people allowed on the premises at any one time. Those caps are set at 205 people during the fire season and 255 during the rest of the year. (The Beer Garden event is the only exception to the rules.)
“If we had the ability to have more total people, we might reduce admission to encourage people to come at less busy times in the mornings and afternoons,” Windhager said. “That’s where the growth would happen: making our slow days a little busier. If we had a little more flexibility, we might have free days for kids or community groups.”
Some neighbors have expressed concerns about increased light and noise from garden events at the Conservation Center, Windhager said, and discussions are ongoing. Any increase in the cap on yearly visitors would require a permit amendment.
“We’re still working with the Mission Canyon Association to figure out the number of visitors,” Windhager said. “Our goal is to work out differences of opinion in advance of going to the county.”
As a case in point, Windhager said he hopes to submit a $10 million capital improvement plan to the county next month for review, accompanied by letters of support from both the association and Friends of Mission Canyon.
The plan includes renovations to several old buildings, replacing, for example, the knob-and-tube electrical wiring. It would provide handicap ramps for the garden entryway, the stairway to Mission Canyon Road and the Conservation Center. The main parking lot would be widened by about a foot.
“We’re recognizing we’re 100 years old; our buildings are 75 years old and don’t meet current code, and they’re problematic,” Windhager said.
Hutch Axilrod, the association president, said the group supports the improvement plans. He said Windhager had commissioned a study of the potential traffic impacts and “was very thorough and reached out to all the neighbors and had repeated meetings.”
“They really have done their homework on this,” Axilrod said. “Steve has been a real pleasure to have on as director. He’s been really forthcoming. We love the garden up here.”
The $10 million in capital improvements is proposed as part of a $30 million fundraising campaign, Windhager said. In addition, it would provide $10 million for garden programs and $10 million for an endowment.
Saving endangered trees
As a research institution, the garden runs an herbarium for dried plant specimens, a seed bank and a genetics laboratory, with an emphasis on the conservation of native plants.
On Friday, Keith Nevison, director of horticulture and operations, told the audience assembled for the ribbon-cutting about two new groves, or refugia, that will help save endangered Catalina ironwood and Torrey pine trees from extinction.
Only110 ironwoods, with their fern-like leaves and peeling bark, are left on Catalina Island, Nevison said. Garden curators collected cones on the island to grow seedlings from seeds, a process that took two years. Last month, the garden planted 45 ironwood seedlings as a “living collection.”
Torrey pines, gray-green trees with a picturesque canopy, are doing better, Nevison said. There are 12,000 on Santa Rosa Island, up from only a few hundred in the late 1880s, when sheep grazing was predominant there. But they are under stress at the Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve north of La Jolla, the only other place in the world where they occur naturally in the wild, Nevison said.
The garden has planted 45 Torrey pine seedlings, using pine nuts from cones that were collected on the island. The pine nuts, like the seeds of the ironwoods, cannot easily be preserved through traditional seed banking.
The restoration work to collect the seeds for the Catalina ironwood and Torrey pines goes back 10 years and was paid for by a $25,000 grant from the U.S. Forest Service and American Public Gardens Association, Windhager said. The garden then drew on operational funds to experiment with the seeds and get them to germinate and grow.
The Alice Tweed Tuohy Foundation of Santa Barbara donated $80,000 for the stone stairways and paths to the Torrey pine grove.
On Friday, Nevison had some fun facts for the audience assembled at the Conservation Center: The largest Torrey pine in the world, 125 feet tall, is on Carpinteria Avenue in Carpinteria, next to the Lucky Llama coffeehouse, he said. And, Nevison said, Fanny Stevenson, the wife of Robert Louis Stevenson, the famous author, planted the Torrey pines of Padaro Lane in the Carpinteria Valley.
The garden’s new ironwood and Torrey pine groves are located on slopes to the east and west of the Conservation Center grounds, respectively. A new pathway leads down some steps and along the Torrey pine grove, parallel to Mission Canyon Road.
“This future forest is going to be very impressive,” Nevison said. “… Plan on coming back. Plan on having that relationship with your kid or grandkids to come back here to see these trees over time.”
Melinda Burns is an investigative reporter with more than 40 years of experience covering immigration, water, science and the environment. She was a senior writer at the News-Press during a 21-year career at the paper, ending in 2006.
