The hook
A Polish opera singer married six times spent forty years turning a Montecito estate into nineteen theatrical gardens, and paid for the rarest one by auctioning off her jewels.
01Why it's worth it
Ganna Walska was a coloratura soprano famous mostly for not being very good; a rich husband's overhyping of her career fed straight into the script of Citizen Kane. In 1941 she bought a 37-acre estate in Montecito, and once the last of her six marriages ended she stopped performing and poured the rest of her life into the grounds instead. What she made, Lotusland, is nothing like an ordinary garden: nineteen distinct themed landscapes, more than three thousand species, each one staged like a set. There's a blue garden of silver and blue-gray plants, a topiary garden with a working horticultural clock, an aloe garden around a pond edged in abalone shells, and her masterpiece, a collection of rare Jurassic-era cycads she funded in 1977 by auctioning her jewelry. It's eccentric in the fullest sense, one woman's decades-long vision with nobody to talk her out of anything, and it survives partly because you have to reserve ahead, which keeps it quiet.
02How to experience it
It's in Montecito near Santa Barbara, about five hours from the Bay. Visits are by reservation only, on guided tours, and they sell out, so book well ahead. The cycad and blue gardens are what people come for; give it a couple of hours for the full loop.