New Director Wants County’s Gardens to Grow in Popularity
A garden-variety garden inspires adjectives like lush, fertile and verdant.
That’s fine, but it’s not good enough for Ken Smith.
The new director of Los Angeles County Arboreta and Botanic Gardens wants the county’s four public gardens to be more intriguing. Or exciting. Or even . . . compelling?
“That’s one of the problems with botanic gardens--there is no sense of urgency to visit them today, tomorrow or the next day. They are always there,” said Smith, 58, who assumed the $90,000-a-year post as arboretums director at the beginning of the month. “Occasionally, you need to create a sense of urgency.”
That will be among the primary challenges for Smith as he tries to rejuvenate the four gardens--the State and County Arboretum in Arcadia, Descanso Gardens in La Canada Flintridge, South Coast Botanic Garden on the Palos Verdes Peninsula and the Virginia Robinson Estate and Gardens in Beverly Hills.
Smith wants to jazz up the sleepy parks--now nearly the exclusive domain of garden clubbers, schoolchildren and the horticultural cognoscenti--so that they can attract enough visitors to sustain themselves without the $3.5 million a year they now receive in taxpayer support.
The greening of the county’s gardens, however, will not be easy. Smith will have to cope with staff reductions, budget cuts, water restrictions and increasing demands on private foundations for financial support.
Into this brier patch steps not the botanist or bureaucrat who was expected to get the job, but a Southern businessman and promoter who joked upon his arrival that he “might not recognize grass if he was standing on it.”
Smith comes to the musty, academic headquarters of the arboretum in Arcadia from Cypress Gardens in Winter Haven, Fla. He was president until last year of the glitzy entertainment center, which features lush gardens, water-ski shows, a model train museum, a zoo, and hostesses dressed in Antebellum-style hoop skirts.
Within days of his June 3 arrival at the arboretum, Smith was plotting how to improve the gardens and attract more visitors.
His plans include:
* Extending hours of operation in the summer. “We are closing at 5 in the evening. That is just getting to be a delightful time in the gardens.”
* Making a “modest” increase in the $3 entry fee for adults. “What are movies going for in Los Angeles?” he asks. “Are we saying we are worth less than half that?”
* Luring corporate sponsors for the gardens. Smith suggests, for instance, that a fertilizer company might supply its products free in exchange for the distinction of advertising itself as “the official fertilizer of the gardens of Los Angeles County.”
* Building new displays, perhaps a floral map of California or a series of plantings around sundials, with readings of times around the world.
“We are very encouraged about the way he is going about this and really helping all of us to do our jobs better,” said Richard Grant, president of the 4,000-member California Arboretum Foundation, which supports the Arcadia facility.
But there are skeptics. One department employee questioned why the county hired a director who has an entertainment background but is unschooled in horticulture or botany. “If it is going to be a botanical gardens, then the plant collection should be the primary focus,” said the worker, who asked to remain anonymous. “I’m not sure that is going to be the case.”
The budget now under review by the County Board of Supervisors would reduce funding for the gardens by $250,000, to $3.3 million, and cut staff from 85 employees to 75.
Paid attendance at the four gardens has declined from 458,000 in the 1986-87 fiscal year to a projected 360,000 for the year that will end June 30. Gate receipts are projected at $230,000 less in the coming year than they were just a year ago.
And at the arboretum in Arcadia, water conservation measures mandated by the city have placed limits on watering the grounds and forced the shutdown of several fountains.
The situation has not been helped in the last 14 months by the absence of a permanent director. The county’s search to replace Francis Ching, the longtime director who retired April 1, 1990, stalled when the two top choices--Larry G. Pardue, executive director of the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens on Sarasota Bay in Florida, and Thomas Buchter, deputy director of the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library of Delaware--rejected the post.
Buchter said in an interview last week that he felt excessive pressure from the supervisors and county administrators to turn the gardens into moneymakers immediately, to help the financially strapped county.
County Chief Administrative Officer Richard B. Dixon denies that Smith will be pressured to turn the arboretums into big moneymakers. But he acknowledged that county funding for the gardens is not likely to keep up with inflation. “Therefore, if we are going to maintain or improve the gardens,” Dixon said, “there is going to have to be an infusion of non-county revenues.”
