Lotusland: How Polish Opera Singer Ganna Walska’s Spectacular Public Garden Came To Be

Born Hanna Puacz in 1887, in Brest-Litovsk, Poland, at the onset of her musical studies, 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 nods to her favourite music, the waltz. Over the next decades, after studying, she sang opera in New York and Paris and toured America and Europe, attracting the attention of audiences, critics, and suitors on both sides of the Atlantic. She married six times, wrote her autobiography, and continued to study both vocal music and spiritual teachings in search of creative fulfilment and personal enlightenment.

After residing in Paris and New York, Madame Walska turned her sights toward California’s sunny climate and free-thinking residents. Following 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 honour of the sacred Indian lotus growing in one of the ponds on the property.

She then 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. Madame Walska herself was a designer and loved to amass eclectic and rare species of plants.

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, in the 1970s she auctioned off some of her jewellery in order to finance her final creation – the cycad garden. Up until the last few years of her life, she was the spirited, intractable “head gardener” of Lotusland. Ganna Walska died March 2, 1984, at Lotusland, leaving her garden and her entire estate to the Ganna Walska Lotusland Foundation, to ensure that her legacy would remain in her gardens.

Today, the Foundation continues to preserve and enhance the unique, historic estate, care for and improve its collections, and develop its conservation and horticulture programmes to educate and inspire visitors, and advance our understanding and appreciation of plants in relation to the protection of the planet. Because Lotusland is a public garden operating in a private, residential neighbourhood, advance reservations are required. Regular tours are bookable between mid-February and mid-November each year.



Feature image: Ganna Walska’s scrapbook (via Lotusland)