SANTA BARBARA BOTANIC GARDEN: TESTED BY FIRE AND TIME Lessons in great design and fire ecology at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden By: Bill Marken It will be a different sort of spring at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden this year. The iconic, photo-op scene just inside the gates will look much the same a meadow of glistening California poppies and other wildflowers framed by oaks and with the sandstone peaks of the Santa Ynez Mountains as a backdrop. But throughout the rest of the garden notice the blackened stumps, singed foliage, denuded slopes and other unmistakable signs of the devastating Jesusita fire that blowtorched its way through the garden this past May also destroying 80 homes and burning 8,733 acres in the area. Photo: Henry Fechtman Make no mistake, the garden still beautiful and one of great treasures is well worth a visit (it reopened soon after the fire). But now the visitor experience also includes a firsthand lesson in the ecology of fire demonstrating how flora is hardwired to respond to periodic burns. Educating the public about the peculiar nature of plant life was among the founding principles of the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden. The garden was officially founded March 16, 1926, deep in a canyon several miles up from the lovingly maintained old Santa Barbara Mission. Ten years later, the visionary founders decided to limit the garden to California native plants. They recognized the INDEX incredible diversity of nearly 6,000 native plants, and wanted to promote experimentation with natives and display their suitability for home gardens. Even in those water-profligate days, in a 1930 annual report, the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, which oversaw the garden, praised drought-resistant native plants, which conserve the water But despite its mission to celebrate, study and demonstrate the use of natives, the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden shortchange design. Unlike most botanic gardens of the day, it was not planned as a display space for individual specimens. Regional plants were grouped by ecological communities: meadow, desert, chaparral and such. But design and designers ruled. Top names were called in, especially in the late 1920s, the and Beatrix Farrand, from the East Coast, with her strong formal sensibility, and Lockwood de Forest Jr., who lived and worked in Santa Barbara, with his feeling for naturalism their powerhouse collaboration establishing much of the direction and look. Individual plants were subordinate to spatial and aesthetic considerations. Making the most of the site, local stone was used and scenery framed, borrowing magnificent views of distant mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Instead of a zoo-like plant collection, the result is more like a walk into wild California as it used to be even though it is entirely designed.