Quail Gardens an Island of Beauty in Expanding City

It is a peaceful place. Lovers sometimes meet here on their lunch hours. Meditators bring their mats. People yearning for a quiet read carry books into Quail Botanical Gardens and relax under Australian silver wattle trees, or beneath the clawlike brown blossoms of the Mexican handflower tree.

“The Aztecs used to grind the handflower blossoms and make a tea,” Alison Voss said. “They used it as a heart medicine, an eye wash and a cure for hemorrhoids. Most people I mention that to seem a bit surprised that the Aztecs even had hemorrhoids.”

On a cool, soft Monday morning, Voss was wandering down one of the garden’s twisting paths. She lives there--in a 68-year-old house with picturesque paneling and unpredictable plumbing--because her husband, Gil, is the curator. The murmur of a group of Japanese tourists drifted from over by the second waterfall. The air smelled moist, tangy with the mingled scents of rare and common plants.

“This one smells like peanut butter. Rancid peanut butter,” she said, gently fingering the thin green leaves of a cassia. “We do a lot of special tours here. One of my favorites is the one for the blind. It’s all sensory. The scents. The feel of the leaves . . . glossy . . . spiky . . . some as furry as cats.”

There are 12,000 to 13,000 botanical gardens in the world, “all different from each other. Many people don’t even realize this is a botanical garden. They see the sign out front and think we’re just another county park,” Voss said. “But because of San Diego’s unique climate we’ve got one of the most diverse outdoor collections of trees and plants in existence. It’s very exciting.”

It is also a lot of hard work. A unit of the county Parks and Recreation Department, Quail Gardens doesn’t have a large budget. It doesn’t have a large staff.

“Gil and two ranger-gardeners. That’s it,” she said as she paused to peer at two enormous, sausagelike growths hanging from an African tree whose common name is, appropriately, the sausage tree.

One of the reasons Quail Gardens is flourishing, Voss said as she rounded the corner to a waterfall, is that it has so many willing volunteers.

The Quail Gardens Foundation has been raising funds since the garden opened in 1957. The Quail Docent Society was begun by Voss only six years ago “with 11 members,” she said. “Now there are 88.”

The docents, she explained, come from all walks of life. Depending on their talents, they do everything from working in the herbarium to building fences.

Voss interviews the prospects. She trains them to guide tours of the garden (“A tremendous amount of work and research. But fun.”) and coordinates all 88 of them. The county, she said, doesn’t pay her for doing it. Like a minister’s wife, she works as part of a package deal.

“The ideal docent is someone who enjoys people,” she said. “Someone who is eager to learn and who enjoys sharing what they’ve learned with others.”

Some of the docents have nicknamed her Mom, although nearly all of them are older than she is. “All the way up to 90. I cherish every one of them,” she said with obvious feeling.

Voss is in her mid-30s. She has toffee blonde hair and the kind of healthy looking tan you would expect someone who lives at a botanical garden to have. Before she became involved with Quail Gardens, she worked as a county library technician and was a docent for the San Diego Museum of Art.

Huge Torrey pines loom above the garden’s newest waterfall. The banks on either side are thick with bamboo and palm trees.

“Collectors from all over the state contributed rare palms for the waterfall. It’s going to look like a jungle here soon,” Voss said happily. She waved to a rosy-cheeked elderly gentleman--”One of our regulars”--hiking down the hill. As she lowered her hand, the automatic mister hidden in the pines flared suddenly into action. A thin silver spray sifted down through the gray-green foliage.

“We get a lot of art groups coming here to paint,” she said. “One morning, a group had just settled down beside the waterfall when the misting system turned on.”

Living in the garden has presented other problems as well, she said:

“We’ve had illegal aliens bathing in the waterfalls. We’ve had lovers who disappeared into the bushes and who were still there at closing time.”

Lovers in the bushes, Voss said, are common. Quail Gardens, with its exotic, blossoming trees, its Japanese windflowers and luminous trumpet bells, is a romantic spot.

Not all 30 of the garden’s acres are cultivated. Two coveys of quail live on several acres that are kept as chaparral for the wild creatures--a refuge amid booming Encinitas’ shopping centers and housing developments.

“We feel like we’re an island in the midst of ever-frenetic development,” Voss said. In a few months, she added, a hospital and a retirement home will be built “right on our fence line. But, as the buildings come up around us, it makes us even more protective of the selection we have here.”

She halted on the path beside a tattered-looking tree. The leaves, stirred by a morning wind, had a pliant feel to them and ragged edges, like worn flannel dustcloths.

“This isn’t something that would catch your eye, but it’s the rarest tree in the garden,” she said. “The South African Greyia radlkoferi. Or Natal bottlebrush.”

At Quail Gardens, the plants are planted in phytogeographical order, to represent different areas of the globe, “more or less. You’re never finished,” Voss said, stepping over a lace-capped hydrangea that was encroaching on the path.

The fuzzy, pawlike leaves of a yellowish kangaroo plant brushed against her shoulder. “Some of the plants people have donated to us have been waiting in the nursery for years,” she said. “There’s always something to do.”

They are, however, working to a plan, a 25-year scheme that Gil Voss devised when he became the horticulturist here six years ago.

“The next step is the most ambitious we’ve ever tackled: the Phase 3 waterfall,” she said.

It will begin with a bridge crossing an eight-foot cascade and pour down into a pond near a giant silk floss tree.

Phase 3 also will diversify Quail Gardens’ unusually varied collection even more.

“There are so many endangered species now,” she said. “We belong to the American Assn. of Botanical Gardens and Aboreta. The members have common goals. One is to link up with each other by computer, so we don’t all try to rescue the same endangered species.”

In June, the group held its annual meeting in Hawaii. Directors from all over the United States and Canada traveled there.

“They asked me to give a talk on the role volunteers play in a botanical garden,” Voss said. She was the last speaker of the day. She remembers sitting through everybody else’s talks, clutching her notes, feeling nervous.

“But as soon as I started to speak I forgot to be nervous. I was talking about my favorite subject,” she said. “Gardens wouldn’t be anything without people. And for Quail Gardens, they’re vital. We’re a community resource, a community treasure. And we depend on the community to keep going.”