Peter Riedel and Quien Sabe

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The internet is full of (often fascinating) information about architect George Washington Smith but there is little about horticulturalist (my old-fashioned British version of the word!) Peter Riedel. This article - http://www.richardmann.com/montecito/real/estate/tips/menwhomademontecito.php - gives the best account I've so far found of his place in a whole tradition of planting in the gardens of Montecito and Santa Barbara at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Riedel must either have been quite young when he worked at Quien Sabe in the early 20s or very old when he died, because his book Plants for Extra-Tropical Regions was only published in 1957 by the California Arboretum Foundation. (See the story atwww.latimes.com/features/printedition/home/ la-hm-tabebuia31mar31,1,2865519.story?coll=la-home-printedition)

 

Can anybody add any more flesh to these few bones of information about his career?

 

Tim

 

PS The above page has also got me interested in Ralph Kinton Stevens, English turned Californian nurseryman, with a nursery on the site which later became Lotusland - who in his 'spare time' also made clay figurines and played the banjo - and, perhaps from an excess of output, died at 50! Anybody know anything more about him than what's on that page?