For The Union-Tribune
New gardens can be a tricky thing to create. You have this empty or, perhaps, mostly empty, canvas to work with and wonderful things can happen — but they won’t happen for a while. Plants start out small and with space between them. If they’re flowering plants, their blossoms may not appear immediately. It will take months for them to reach their full height and width, or longer — even years — depending on the plant or tree. But if you know what you’re doing and have a vision, that garden will be a marvel.
San Diego’s Balboa Park has a newly renovated Botanical Building. You may have seen it under construction for the past several years. But Phase 1 of renovations is complete; it’s now open and you’ll want to see the garden that local horticulturist and landscape designer Nan Sterman designed inside it. And, like a new garden at home, you’ll want to understand its background and Sterman’s vision to enjoy it as it matures. Phase 2 of renovations, which will include exterior landscaping, is underway.
The 13,000-square-foot Botanical Building, now a historical landmark, was originally built as a feature of the 1915 Panama-California Exposition. The building, designed by Carleton M. Winslow, is laid out on the park’s mesa in an east-west line. A long pool in front in front of the building, the Lily Pond, goes straight south to intersect the main east-west walkway where the park’s museums sit, along with The Old Globe theater.
The Botanical Building is a lath house, which refers to a structure made of laths, or strips of wood or metal lying next to each other with space in between, like a rib cage. The laths reduce sunlight to protect plants and facilitate air flow. At the Botanical Building, the lath roof provided 50 percent coverage.
In its most recent iteration, the Botanical Building planting beds had an east-west orientation along the walls of the building and through the center. In the new layout, the planting beds have the same basic orientation, slightly narrowed to allow for wider pathways that conform with accessibility requirements. Today, the landscape planters take up 5,200 square feet, according to Michael Spohr, senior project manager with Estrada Land Planning, the landscape architects of record.
Sterman was hired originally in 2022 to create a plant list for the building. Already larger plants had been identified for salvage and stored in the park’s nursery during construction. Others were protected in place because they were too fragile to be moved and, in one case, too large.
It was up to her to decide which plants in the nursery would go into the new garden and what should be purchased, but she, of course, needed to have a concept for it.
“It made me go back and read Alfred D. Robinson’s article for California Gardener magazine,” recalled Sterman, the host of “A Growing ion” on PBS. She runs Nan Sterman’s Garden School at waterwisegardener.com and also writes a monthly column on gardening chores for The San Diego Union-Tribune. “This building was his idea, and it started with a dream that he wrote about in the article. In his dream he had left San Diego for awhile and when he was coming back he was going through the exposition with a friend. He described walking into this giant resort, a lath building where there was a 300-square-foot area with a band playing and six arms that came out of each lath filled with exotic plants. He went on and on about palms and this and that and what a wonder it was. And he ended with, ‘How come San Diego didn’t do this 50 years ago?’”
Robinson’s dream did come true. The lath house was built, although at a different scale and shape and its original collection included mostly tropical looking plants. Over the decades, that theme continued through gradual revisions including a 1959 renovation and more recent efforts. Surprisingly, there was no specific plan anyone could locate for the contents or design of the 1915 garden.
By the 21st century, the fundamental problem was that the building, including the redwood laths, had deteriorated. It had endured a lot beyond natural decay from weather. The U.S. Navy used the mesa for training during both world wars. The Botanical Building itself had offered parking for Jeeps in World War II, Sterman noted.
“To give you a sense of how dilapidated it was, when we started peeling off the layers of the onion in two little cupolas it was shocking,” she said. “There was barely anything but the ribs left. I don’t know how anything was standing.”
Additionally, Sterman said, it was crammed full of plants that were mature but there was little to no design to it.
“So you really didn’t notice the individual plants, because they had all grown together,” she recalled. “Every good garden goes through an editing process and that one had not been edited in forever, and many of those plants had been there, probably since the late 50s, early 60s.”
She pointed out that because gardens are dynamic, you have to consider how wide new plants will get, and how tall. If you don’t, you may end up with a kind of jungle. And, as Sterman explained, the building is obscured.
“In this case, it was dense; it was dark. It was wonderful, but you didn’t notice anything about the building itself,” Sterman said.
“So, I feel like the garden that I’ve designed is intended to be the starting point of the next 100 years, and even when we brought back the big, salvaged plants, there was more open space. It will fill in — my intent is for it to fill in — but there’s more open space now, and the architecture and the plants are more in balance. In fact, when you walk it, it feels much brighter, even though in theory with new walls there’s much less light.”
Sterman explained how the plants and architecture now play off each other.
“When you look at the redwood siding and those beautiful, soft green window panes, and then the colors of the foliage and the textures of the plants, they create an art piece together whereas before it was just strips of wood. Now they’re part of the whole gestalt, and the plants are an anchor. It feels like there’s really a high, tall dome and really high, tall ceilings. It didn’t feel that way before. Ultimately you want an interplay of the lath and the plants.”
To figure out what plants to grow, Sterman noted that at the most fundamental level they had to grow in the light the lath building would get. Landscape architect Vicki Estrada, owner of Estrada Land Planning, did a light model to determine how much sunlight each garden bed would get through the year. They knew they had 50 percent light coverage due to the laths, but with an arcade restored along the length of the southern part of the building, they now had light-blocking walls that previously hadn’t been there. Given the building’s siting, it would have a shadier eastern side and sunnier western side. Together, that meant that the bulk of the plants Sterman uses in gardens that she thought would be perfect for the project wouldn’t thrive here. Plants used to full blazing sun would struggle in conditions with less than 50 percent sunlight.
Sterman turned to Facebook to ask people what they loved about the Botanical Building and found that instead of identifying plants, they expressed how it made them feel. It was their urban oasis. With that Sterman came up with her theme.
“My interpretive theme is ‘Other Worldly,’ ” she said. “That gives me license to do whatever I dream up. So that set the scene. And I was able to come up with a list of plants that were customized for which side of the building they were going to be on, depending on how much sun or shade they can tolerate. The center would be the transition.”
Sterman created her plant list and then, under the project’s architecture firm, Platt Whitelaw Architects, she designed the garden.
The eastern side of the building represents the garden’s original tropical vibe. There are palms and cycads, and more updated plants than would have been in the building a century ago. In this section she relied on foliage for color and texture.
For instance, there are strong pinks from the bloodleaf (Iresine rhizomatosa) and the ‘Electric Pink’ cabbage palm (Cordyline banksia), and deep purple from Joyful Jasper, a rhizomatous begonia (Begonia ‘Joyful Jasper’). The ‘Red Chestnut’ bromeliad (Vriesea fosteriana) has bizarre striped, green leaves with a tinge of rust red. This is also the area with the preserved-in-place plants: an Australian tree fern (Sphaeropteris cooperi), Roxburgh fig (Ficus auriculata), loulu lelo (Pritchardia hillebrandii), elegant palm (Ptychosperma elegans), lady palm (Raphis excelsa), and a mango tree (Mangifera indica).
“On the west side what I wanted to do was bring in a completely different palette of plants that celebrates texture and foliage and cool blooming and fragrant plants — really unusual plants that you don’t see in other places,” Sterman explained. “They’re also pretty waterwise. And even on the east side I was careful in what I chose to make sure I wasn’t choosing water hogs. Clivia needs no water. Cycads, most of them are very waterwise. They look lush and you assume they’re very thirsty, but they really aren’t.”
On the west side, the plants are younger and much smaller but full of surprises. Purple shamrock (Oxalis triangularis) gets props for its brilliant color and trifoliate leaves. There’s an intriguing tree daisy (Montanoa grandiflora) with large lobed leaves that Sterman said will produce big clusters of white daisylike flowers with yellow centers. Then there are the shaving brush bulbs (Haemanthus albiflos) — lots of them, like little bright green soldiers. They’re tiny now, but Sterman said they will grow and produce filamentous white flowers with yellow tips, which look like, of course, shaving brushes.
While you’re there, pay attention to the small pool with a copper fountain at the east entrance. It’s surrounded by lobster claw heliconia (Heliconia rostrata), whose giant leaves form a backdrop and frame for the fountain.
“We needed something with height there,” said Sterman. “It had to go around the fountain without impinging on the fountain. When you walk in that door, I wanted it to frame the fountain. There’s a vignette right in front of you. You’ve got the fountain with that gorgeous copper bowl. You’ve got the foliage behind. You know there are things beyond that, but they’re hidden from view. So it’s an invitation.”
And take a look at the gnarled trees at the center of the building’s north side. There, a door leading to a staff area needed framing, but Sterman was stuck. Over the 2 1/2 years she worked on the project, she had spent plenty of time at the park’s nursery. She’d walked by a couple of giant old dracaena (Dracaena marginata) repeatedly but barely noticed them.
“They had been in 24-inch boxes and were so old the boxes had rotted away; it was just masses of roots,” she said. “And you know how you look at something, and you look at it and look at it a million times, and one day you look at it, go, ohhh. It just strikes you differently that day. I was standing there, and it dawned on me that we have to use them for either side of that door. They were perfect. And if they hadn’t been that big and old and gnarled they wouldn’t look as impressive as they do. But they give the space a sense of longevity. It’s like they belong in that space. But I couldn’t anticipate that ahead of time.”
And don’t let the youth of this garden fool you. You’re getting the once in a lifetime opportunity to see a young public garden come to life. The plants, said Sterman, are already growing quickly, getting taller and filling in, as planned.
For instance in the center of the middle bed on the west side are three Dracaena arborea, or slender dragon trees. They’re smallish now but Sterman is thinking 10 years ahead and how when they’re mature, they’ll balance the height of palms on the east side. And check out the trees on far east side on either side of the big entrance door. They’re a pair of Chinese fringe trees.
“That’s the biggest experiment, whether they’ll be happy in that spot,” Sterman said. “And they’re deciduous. I intentionally chose that. I wanted something that would change with the seasons. They’ll be quiet over the winter when they’re dormant, but then they leaf out in bloom in the spring and it’s wow, like animation.”
Because Sterman has selected some unusual plants that are easy to grow in our climate, she hoped that visitors would take note of their names and info on Forever Balboa Park’s website. What would be great, though, would little identification signs in the garden for the plants so that visitors can note them while looking at them.
There are lessons for home gardeners in this new garden, said Sterman. “Like home gardeners I had to think what’s my light, my soil, my exposure? What colors are going to work in here? What irrigation? You want to have layers of height.
“I’ve discarded the concept of instant landscape,” she added. “I’m thinking about height, width, and time. In my brain I might be putting in a plant that’s 4 inches tall today, but I’m seeing it in my mind as the 20 feet tall that it’s going to be in five years at maturity. And how is that going to interplay with the plant next to it that’s going to be 6 feet tall? Actually, what I’m doing is I’m choosing plants based on how I want to assemble the mature garden, not the new garden.
“Plant too densely and you have the high maintenance of cutting up the plants you spent money on. And they’ll never look right. You just have to be a little patient.”
Botanical Building visitor info and updates
The Botanical Building is free and open daily from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 1550 El Prado in Balboa Park, except on city holidays.
For an interior garden map and future project updates from Forever Balboa Park, visit foreverbalboapark.org/botanical-building-interior-garden-map.
