Broughton Quarterly - Fall 2007 - (Page 26) Madame’s Magnum Opus By Virginia Hayes Socialite. Opera singer. Collector. The ever capricious Madame Ganna Walska poured herself into everything she did, including the whimsical botanic garden at Lotusland—her 37-acre fantasy of botany and Buddhism. Here, curator VIRGINIA HAyES takes us on a stroll through the fertile gardens of the Madame’s imagination. F or some people, collecting gets into the blood and an innocent hobby becomes an obsession. Madame Ganna Walska, who bought a Spanish-style estate in Santa Barbara in 1941, collected a number of different items, including husbands—six of them, from a Russian count to a scholar of Tibetan Buddhism. She also accumulated an impressive array of jewels, several properties, and countless designer outfits, including dozens of Erté ball gowns and costumes and hats from the famous Mr. John. She had enough French furniture to furnish several houses, a priceless collection of Tibetan religious art and artifacts, and many other fine antiques and paintings. Her life before she moved to California consisted of alternately enjoying country living at her chateau outside Paris and seeing and being seen during the busy opera season from her Park Avenue apartment in New york City. She spent hours of her time working to perfect her voice and mounting her own operatic productions. She supported a number of innovative theater and dance productions, both in Paris and later in Chicago. In short, her life was one of art, luxury, and largesse. No wonder collecting came so easily to her. California must have worked its magic on Madame Walska, though, and she started to see the landscaping possibilities on her 37-acre property. She began acquiring a new collection—this time of exotic plants. Starting with cacti, she was soon filling the grounds with specimens of every sort. Aloes, other fantastically shaped succulents, palms, cycads, bromeliads, a circus of topiary creatures, and a bevy of aquatic plants, including the mystical lotus, were massed in dramatic displays on the estate she called Lotusland. But Madame Walska didn’t stop with plants; she also accumulated antique carousel animals that made an appearance at her garden parties, Japanese lanterns to grace the Japanese-style garden, 17th century stone statues of dwarves and humpbacks to populate the theatre garden, and giant clam shells to spill water into the shell pool and decorate the white sand beach she installed next to her swimming pool. Victorian-era blown glass gazing balls made a comeback in her garden and boulders studded with amethyst crystals, basketball-sized chunks of green mariposite, blue sodalite, 26 Broughton Quarterly Fall 2007
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.