Ranch Dressing

The Susanna Bixby Bryant Ranch House and Botanic Garden opened this year, bringing local history alive with its specimen gardens and bedrooms devoted to different eras.

AFTERNOON, 1

According to director-curator Jo Lyons, Susanna Bixby Bryant had “tired of white gloves and tea parties in Pasadena” and built the modest structure known as the Susanna Bixby Bryant Ranch House while waiting for her mansion to be completed on a bluff above. Bixby Bryant often stayed at the ranch house, arriving from Pasadena in her chauffeur-driven Pierce Arrow.

Ranch superintendent Ernest Johnson, and then Ernest Bryant III, later occupied the house. “There are a lot of Ernests in this story,” Lyons noted. The latter Ernest, Bixby Bryant’s grandson, recently told Lyons that he had intended “to be the last cattle baron in Orange County.” Alas, the Irvine Co. has that distinction, and he now lives on a ranch in Santa Barbara.

The larger area now known as Bryant Ranch once made up part of Bernardo Yorba’s Rancho Canon de Santa Ana. In the late 19th century, John Bixby of Rancho Los Alamitos acquired 5,000 acres of the Yorba ranch and renamed it Rancho Santa Ana.

Bixby used it for cattle until 1912, when his daughter, Susanna, who had married Ernest Bryant, began to actively manage the ranch and plant citrus orchards.

Susanna Bixby Bryant acquired sole ownership of Rancho Santa Ana in 1915; by 1927 she’d established the 200-acre Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden for research, study and appreciation of native California flora.

Bixby Bryant died in 1946, but her nationally renowned garden remained on the ranch until 1951, when Claremont College gained possession of the collection.

The college recently returned 100 specimen plants to the ranch. A self-guided quarter-mile tour will soon lead from the gardens and along historic Pomegranate Road, which was once lined by 300 pomegranate trees.

In various rooms of the ranch house you’ll now find vintage furniture, none of it Bixby Bryant’s, and relics including the lower jaw of a mastodon, an Indian grinding stone found in 1913 and a hair wreath made by the Yorba family.

Photographs of Bixby Bryant’s impressive 6,000-square-foot dream mansion hang on one wall. It featured a Mission-style bell tower and six bedrooms, each with fireplace.

The home was built in the 1920s but, according to docents, was demolished in 1952 by her son Ernest Bryant II because the plumbing went out.

The wrecking ball reportedly bounced off the structure’s 4-foot adobe walls, but dynamite and bulldozers ultimately did the trick.

MEALTIME, 2

Hard to know why the Fantasy Cafe, an order-at-the-counter eatery in a Ralph’s shopping center, was so-named. But it does offer a tremendous selection of American and Mexican dishes at inexpensive prices, and if it’s a hot summer day, their chocolate shake could be a fantasy come true.

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1) Susanna Bixby Bryant Ranch House and Botanic Garden

Susanna Bryant Drive near Pomegranate Road, (714) 694-0235.

10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday and noon-4 p.m. Sunday, and by appointment.

2) Fantasy Cafe

23761 La Palma Ave., (714) 692-5005.

6 a.m.-10 p.m. Monday-Saturday and 7 a.m.-10 p.m. Sunday.

Parking: Free lots at each location.

Buses: OCTA Bus No. 38A (Anaheim Hills-Cerritos) runs along La Palma Avenue as far as Weir Canyon Road, about two miles short of Itinerary locations.