RE: Quien Sabe, Santa Barbara

I have the book, Southern California Gardens by Victoria Padilla, but the garden you mentioned by the author you mentioned is not on the list of gardens open to the public in 1915 in her book. Neither Culross Peattie nor Quien Sabe is listed in the General Index of the Book nor the Selected Bibliography, so it seems that book is a dead end.

Robin Corwin
Studio City, CA
Los Angeles area
Zone 9/10, Sunset Zone 21,


From: <tim.longville@BTinternet.com>
Reply-To: tim.longville@BTinternet.com
To: medit-plants@ucdavis.edu
Subject: Quien Sabe, Santa Barbara
Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 21:48:30 +0000 (GMT)

In the 1930s, the naturalist Donald Culross Peattie 'went west' to California and rented a house and garden called Quien Sabe, in Santa Barbara. The garden, created by some (unnamed) earlier owner as a series of 'rooms,' each devoted to the flora of a different part of the world, is vividly described - in the semi-abandoned and overgrown state in which Peattie 'inherited' it - in the chapter called A Garden Alliance in his 1940s book Flowering Earth. (A Garden Alliance because the garden became a collaboration between himself and the Japanese gardener he inherited with it.) I've tried internet search engines for further information about what sounds like a fascinating place but have entirely failed to come up with any. I wondered if anyone here knows anything about it: has it survived and if so in what form?












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