Lotusland, Montecito. Ganna Walska bought this estate in 1941 as a retreat for Tibetan lamas, at the urging of her sixth husband, a self-styled mystic named Theos Bernard. The lamas never came. The marriage didn’t last, and she renamed the property after the lotuses in the old pond, and spent the next forty-three years on the garden.⁠ She had been a soprano in Paris and New York, had sat for Erté, and owned a château outside Versailles. In 1971 she sent her jewels to auction and put the money into cycads, which is why Lotusland now holds one of the best collections on the continent, including Encephalartos woodii, a plant that no longer exists in the wild. Beyond the cycads, there are dragon trees from the Canary Islands with trunks like poured wax, Chilean wine palms thick as chimneys, a whole slope of golden barrel cactus, and a blue garden where every plant agave, fescue, cedar was chosen for the colour of its leaf rather than its flower. Near the back, an Australian garden: banksia, grevillea, kangaroo paw, and eucalyptus that smelled like home. xx⁠ ⁠