Quien Sabe Update

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A quick update with some more information about the garden at Quien Sabe, in which several people were kind enough to be interested.

 

Its exact address is 224 Buena Vista Drive, Montecito. At least some of the original planting from the 20s is said to survive: I have the email address of someone who visited fairly recently and hope to get more details from her.

 

Donald Culross Peattie and his family rented the property from 37 to 42. Other people rented it after them. It may even be that other people rented it before them. The notion seems to be that John D Wright and his wife, for and by whom it was originally created in the early 20s, suffered heavy losses in the crash of 29 and had to cut back - eventually to the point of leaving California entirely.

 

Wright was the son of a clergyman (so not from a particularly wealthy backgro! und). Eventually he became a well-known author of books on teaching the deaf and ran several specialist schools of that sort - though it's not easy to see how that in itself could ever have produced the sort of income needed to plan a house and garden on the sort of scale George Washington Smith, Peter Riedel and Mrs Wright originally planned at Quien Sabe. Mrs W, by the way, was much younger than her husband and probably had Mexican or perhaps Cuban roots: so her particular interest in cacti was perhaps more than just the sharing of a then-current Californian fashion.

 

There are supposed to be photographs of the garden in its heyday (and perhaps more information about it) in a book called The Country Life Book of Gardens, published by CL, the English magazine, in 1936. I can't track this down on the internet (not having an author or editor's name doesn't help) and CL's own library irritatingly doesn't have a copy of it. I'm told there's a copy in the university library at Santa Barbara but apparently there isn't a librarian there at the moment who can be asked about it. If anyone's interested enough to be able to go and have a look...!

 

Later, by the way, the Peatties lived at a couple of houses in Santa Barbara itself, the first rented, the second (against their non-buying principles!) actually bought. I'm trying to find out more them - whether they had gardens and if so if they still survive. One was called Weldwold and overlooked Mission Canyon. The other, the one they bought and in which they lived until Donald and Louise Peattie died within months of each other in 64 and 65, was an old house on Glendessary Lane but I don't as yet have a name for it.

 

And that's where I am at the moment. What I'm still missing - and what I'd still dearly like to have - is more really detailed information about the garden at Quien Sa! be - what it looked like, exactly what plants it contained. Ideally, information about it both as it was and as it is. But after all, thanks to many people's generous help I've already discovered far more than I'd any right to expect...

 

Tim L