County Gardens Chief Hopes His Ideas Bloom : Administration: New director is thinking green--botanically and financially--despite budget cuts and drought.
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, who assumed the $90,000-a-year post as arboreta director at the beginning of June. “Occasionally, you need to create a sense of urgency.”
That will be among the primary challenges for Smith as he tries to rejuvenate the sagging attendance and sometimes wilting staff morale that have plagued 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, school children 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. “We will still have the technical and scientific aspects of the gardens,” Smith said, “but there is nothing wrong with having people enjoy them too.”
His plans range from the mundane to the ambitious, including:
* Installing more benches and trash cans and providing more information about trees and plants. “Not just the Latin name,” says Smith, “but whether it is used to make medicines or other products, or has some special history.”
* 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?”
* Requiring employees to wear uniforms, so visitors know where to go for information.
* Joining forces with a university botany or horticulture department to take advantage of under-utilized facilities at the arboretum.
* 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.” The ads wouldn’t hurt attendance, either, he says.
* Building new displays, perhaps a floral map of California or a series of plantings around sundials, with readings of times around the world.
Smith, a tanned and energetic man of 58, has also made a point of bucking up spirits at the gardens. On his brisk, and frequent, jaunts through the grounds, he plucks trash from the ground, shouts praise to employees and chats warmly with visitors.
“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. “He is really building morale, as far as I can see, and that is really important.”
John Copeland, supervisor of the 6 1/2-acre Virginia Robinson gardens in Beverly Hills, said Smith has made a favorable impression.
“He is interested in providing a first-class kind of experience for all visitors,” Copeland said. “And he wants to have a facility that is top notch, that is clean and where the staff is very friendly and helpful.”
But there are skeptics. One arboreta employee questioned why the county hired a director with an entertainment background, but 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.”
Smith pledged in an interview that he would not over-commercialize the gardens. Although enthusiastically recalling his 40 years at Cypress Gardens--where he worked his way up from tour boat operator to president--he cautioned repeatedly: “That approach obviously wouldn’t work here.”
But, clearly, the county is looking for some change in direction for the Arboreta and Botanic Gardens.
There have been several proposals in recent years to move some operations of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History to the grounds of the various gardens. And last year the Board of Supervisors authorized study of a proposal for the museum to take control of the gardens altogether.
That move was quashed by members of the influential garden foundations, who felt that the gardens would have been overlooked in an association with the giant museum.
But the gardens still face problems.
The budget now under review by the Board of Supervisors would reduce the budget 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 a total of 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, who declined the county’s offer this spring, 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.
“Instead of hearing, ‘We’ve got something great here, and we just don’t know how to manage it and move it forward,’ they seemed to take the attitude they had something they wanted taken off their hands,” Buchter said in a telephone interview.
County Chief Administrative Officer Richard B. Dixon denies that Smith will be pressured to turn the arboreta 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.”
Smith said he has no problem with a philosophy that emphasizes the bottom line.
“I put that pressure on myself,” Smith said. “I think we can do it. . . . If we haven’t made improvements in appearance and attendance by, maybe, next year, we will have failed.”
The new priorities became immediately apparent to garden employees who had been accustomed to filing weekly attendance reports. Smith wants the numbers every day, and says with a laugh: “They’re lucky I don’t want them every hour.”
The Los Angeles County Department of Arboreta and Botanic Gardens, founded in 1953, manages four public gardens from its headquarters at the Los Angeles State and County Arboretum in Arcadia. Garden: South Coast Botanic Garden, Palos Verdes Peninsula Acres: 87 Plant Species: 2,000 Features: 60 rose varieties; Hundreds of cacti; Built on landfill Attendance 86-87: 50,000 Attendance 89-90: 38,000 Garden: Virginia Robinson Gardens, Beverly Hills Acres: 6.2 Plant Species: 700 Features: Palm grove; Coral trees; Reservations required Attendance 86-87: 2,243 Attendance 89-90: 2,375 Garden: Descanso Gardens, La Canada Flintridge Acres: 65 Plant Species: n/a Features: 30-acre camellia forest; 5-acre garden; California native plants Attendance 86-87: 164,000 Attendance 89-90: 142,000
