Planting for Posterity : Preservation: Native California plants, long gone elsewhere, thrive in Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, at the foot of the San Gabriels.

Environmentalists look upon the endangered California condor and spotted owl with anxious concern. But who worries about the vanishing San Diego Mesa mint and the rare San Clemente Island mallow?

The plant experts at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, nestled at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, do.

Ever since the garden was first established in an Orange County location more than 60 years ago, its mission has been to preserve and promote native California plants.

The garden, which relocated to Claremont in the 1950s, was the brainchild of Susanna Bixby Bryant, a wealthy Southern California landowner who, in the 1920s, was troubled by the destruction of the region’s natural landscape by development.

Even then, back in 1927, Rancho Santa Ana Director Thomas S. Elias said, Bryant “was concerned that native plants were disappearing.”

And, of course, her worst fears were realized, said Elias, who is quick to rattle off facts and statistics:

“California has more endangered species than any other state in the United States. I think we have roughly 25% of all endangered species.

“Major habitats are disappearing. Ninety-eight percent of all of our grasslands are gone.

“Eighty-nine percent of our riparian habitats along streams and rivers are lost.”

Unfortunately, Elias added, most people do not share his passion for plant preservation.

“It’s hard to sell a plant to the public as a sexy thing,” he said. “It doesn’t growl. It doesn’t walk around.”

Elias said saving animals without preserving the plants they depend on “is just money down the drain, unless you’re going to keep them all in a zoo.”

In a sense Rancho Santa Ana at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains is a zoo for endangered plants, with about 100 on the grounds.

But Rancho Santa Ana has other aspirations as well. It sends experts into the wild to work with the U.S. Forest Service to preserve plants in their natural setting and serves as a technical resource for other agencies and individuals concerned with environmental management.

The rancho’s herbarium is the 10th largest in the United States, with 1 million specimens of dried plants available to students and researchers. The collection documents the variety of plant life in California and, for comparison purposes, also contains plants that grow in similar climates elsewhere.

The garden features a 77,000-volume library, including many rare books, and is equipped with a molecular biology lab. The lab facility enables researchers to determine, through genetic fingerprinting, which plants are so special that they need to be saved and which are common enough that their loss would not matter much.

“There’s no other garden in California, or the western United States, that has that kind of capability,” Elias said.

Elias is a tall, bespectacled man of 49, who has written books on topics ranging from the trees of North America to conservation practices in the Soviet Union.

He has spent his entire career in botanical gardens, starting with the Missouri Botanic Garden at St. Louis University and then moving to the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard and the Mary Flagler Cary Arboretum of the New York Botanic Garden in Upstate New York before coming to Claremont.

Elias has definite ideas about what a botanical garden is and is not. First, he said, you should not confuse it with a park.

“A park is where you go for active recreation; a botanic garden is where you come to learn and appreciate plants,” he said.

At Rancho Santa Ana, that means visitors are advised: no food, no pets, no jogging.

The garden--which occupies 86 acres northeast of Foothill and Indian Hill boulevards--lies just north of the Claremont School of Theology, hidden from the view of motorists on the thoroughfares.

This is the garden’s second location. The first was on 200 acres along the Santa Ana River in northern Orange County. The garden moved to Claremont in 1951 to develop a graduate program in affiliation with Claremont Graduate School.

Bryant established a trust to support the garden before her death in 1946. The endowment, which has grown to nearly $23 million, provides three-fourths of the operating budget. The remainder comes from research contracts, grants and gifts.

Bryant’s family is still involved. Two grandchildren, Ernest A. Bryant III and Judith B. Friend, sit on the garden’s board of trustees.

With the endowment, a staff of nearly 50 and an operating budget of $2.2 million, the garden has thrived, but has remained largely unknown to the general public. Elias said the location, in the easternmost reaches of Los Angeles County, puts it beyond the notice of most of the county’s population.

When he came to the garden seven years ago, Elias said, he found acres of “old maturing trees and shrubs. It was very pleasant. It was a semiprivate park. But it really didn’t serve the public in terms of education and instruction.

“And it really wasn’t functioning as a botanical garden.”

So Elias set out to promote the garden as an educational attraction. This year, more than 11,000 students will take formal tours, tripling the attendance of a few years ago. Rancho Santa Ana is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily except major holidays. Admission is free.

Elias also oversaw the development of a new master plan. One segment, the California Cultivar Garden, billed as the world’s largest display of cultivated varieties of California plants, opened on two acres this spring.

About $2 million worth of other improvements are in the works, including new greenhouses and a seed storage facility.

Elias said he does not want Rancho Santa Ana to be like “every other botanical garden, where you come in, and we have our banana trees and our tree ferns and our bougainvillea and our hibiscus.

“You come into this garden and you don’t see any of that. But you can see a vast array of California native plants that you can’t see in any other garden.”

Rancho Santa Ana has 1,500 species on the grounds--everything from cactus to poppies, pines to palms.

By visiting the garden at different times of the year, home gardeners and professional landscapers can see how flowers, shrubs and trees look at various stages of their life. The intent, Elias said, is to promote the use of native plants to keep “California looking like California.”

“If we let our landscape go to the same type of plants you find in Texas and Florida and Spain, you have the ‘McDonald’s Effect,’ where everything looks alike,” he said. “But by using the native flora, we can not only have a landscape that is more environmentally attuned to the region, but we can preserve its nature and characteristics.”