CURRENT EVENTS

Ranchos to Castles: a Tour of San Luis Obispo County
Friday, September 9—Sunday, September 11, 2011
San Luis Obispo, California
Annual Conference of the California Garden and Landscape History Society
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PAST EVENTS

Tours & Talks: Landscape as Sanctuary
Saturday, April 17, 2010, 10 a.m.—2p.m.
The Elegant Campus of Scripps College, Claremont, Calif.

Join us as Eric T. Haskell, professor of French Studies and Humanities at Scripps College and director of the Clark Humanities Museum, speaks on “Scripps’ Lasting Landscapes and the Getty’s Campus Heritage Initiative.”

In 1926 when the Scripps College was on the drawing boards, architect Gordon Kaufmann and landscape architect Edward Huntsman-Trout, inspired by the vision of Ellen Browning Scripps, sought to create a unique environment for learning. Their dynamic collaboration produced an academic Eden whose scale was residential and whose hallmark was elegant simplicity. The unity between buildings and grounds was stressed, and their shared aesthetic vocabulary was from the outset intended to speak the same language. Miss Scripps words capture the essence of this unique vision of uncommon aesthetic power: "I am thinking of a college campus whose simplicity and beauty will unobtrusively seep into a student's consciousness and quietly develop a standard of taste and judgment."

Scripps College is a repository of 1930s architectural and landscape elegance. For example, its grand allée of American elms, designed in the early 1930s and planted in 1939, has framed college graduations since 1947.

Selected for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places in 1984, Scripps College received a Getty Campus Heritage Initiative Grant in 2002.

Scripps College

Tours & Talks: On the Razor’s Edge
Saturday, May 22, 2010, 10 a.m.—3 p.m.
The King Gillette Ranch, Calabasas, Calif.

Our grandfathers knew one of the wealthiest men in America rather intimately – every time they opened a packet of disposable razor blades, there he was, on the wrapper. And his name was really King. In 1926, he bought the 360-acre Stokes Ranch in the heart of the Malibu Creek Watershed. Gillette built several homes here, most notably the 1928-1929 Wallace Neff designed Spanish Colonial Revival house, Neff’s masterpiece of the pre-War era.

But Gillette was only one owner to make his mark on the landscape. Please join us as a cultural anthropologist from the National Park Service gives us a behind-the-scenes tour of the recently-acquired King Gillette Ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains.

One of the most stunning locales in the Santa Monica Mountains, the biologically diverse parkland contains broad meadows and low ridgelines, valley and coast live oak savannah, grassland, coastal sage scrub, chaparral, and riparian woodland.

King Gillette Ranch

Tours & Talks: Never Met a View I Didn’t Like
Sunday, July 11, 2010, 10 a.m.—2p.m.
Will Rogers State Historic Park, Pacific Palisades, Calif.

He was charming, brilliant, and in the 1930s the most popular (and highest paid) actor in Hollywood.

Will Rogers was, also, a far-reaching thinker about the peerless California landscape. His 186 acres overlooking the Pacific in what became Pacific Palisades includes an elegant ranch house of 31 rooms, a stable, riding ring, roping arena, polo field, golf course and a network of hiking trails.

Join us as we tour this magnificent property and learn about recent preservation efforts.

Will Rogers State Historic Park

Tours & Talks: Nature of the Place
Saturday, October 2, 2010, 10 a.m.—3p.m.
Date changed from September 25
Rancho Los Alamitos Historic Ranch and Gardens, Long Beach, Calif.

The remarkable historic landscape of Rancho Los Alamitos will unfold before your eyes as we tour its four acres of gardens, designed by some of the most significant landscape designers of the early-to-mid 20th Century, and its early 19th Century adobe ranch house and barns.

Rancho Los Alamitos Director Pamela Seager will illuminate for us this property’s successful road to preservation.

Rancho Los Alamitos

Tours & Talks: Keeping Up With the Joneses
Saturday, November 13, 10 a.m.—4 p.m.: tour
Beatrix Farrand’s Southern California Gardens

Beatrix Jones Farrand was born into one of the wealthiest families of old New York – and the “keeping up with the . . .” reportedly refers to her family! This niece of Edith Wharton took up landscape design in her early twenties, confounding what was expected of such a grand young woman in the 1890s.

In 1927, her husband historian Max Farrand was appointed director of the Huntington Library – and Southern California would be blessed with Beatrix Farrand gardens: the director’s house at the Huntington; the courtyard of Dabney Hall at Caltech; parts of Occidental College; and the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden among them. On Saturday’s tour we will explore the remnants of a few of her gardens.

On Sunday, November 14 at 2 p.m. garden historian Judith Tankard will discuss her latest book, Beatrix Farrand: Private Gardens, Public Landscapes at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, www.huntington.org.