creature comforts

AT THE AGE OF 8, JEANIE VAUGHAN FELL IN LOVE with turtles. One after another, she bought a slew of red-eared sliders, the common dime-store critters that, in the 1940s and ‘50s, came in plastic bowls decked with palm trees and died quickly of mysterious causes.

Today, despite her early disappointments, Vaughan is still besotted. She presides over a small metropolis of shell-backed friends--both tortoises, which live on land, and turtles, which are aquatic creatures. Now, instead of plastic bowls, they have the run of her two-acre Santa Barbara garden, called, appropriately, “Turtle Dreams.” In lavish outdoor habitats, planted with shade trees and edible grasses and equipped with comfy, heated cottages, desert tortoises loll in the sun and Florida softshell turtles paddle around a pond. “They’re wonderful beings,” Vaughan says, “and are becoming more and more endangered around the world. In Native American and Asian cultures, they’re symbols of spirituality and longevity.” For her, though, the appeal is less precise: “It’s something in the heart, I guess.”

While Vaughan has followed her heart for years, keeping pet turtles wherever she’s lived around the country, it wasn’t until she moved west with her husband, Dennis, in 1994 that the idea of a turtle garden took hold. Having inherited her mother’s Santa Barbara house, Vaughan suddenly had the right amenities--plenty of outdoor space and a climate mild enough to suit animals used to living in basements under heat lamps. But as Vaughan contemplated the possibilities, her husband weighed in with a request: avoid chain link and cinder block. “He wanted a pretty garden,” Vaughan recalls, “one that didn’t look like a scruffy zoo.”

Accordingly, the Vaughans hired landscape architect Heide Baldwin to transform their existing California native garden into a series of habitats neatly bordered by stone walls and edged with sweeps of lawn, paths and flower beds. All plants either had to be nontoxic or feature edible leaves or blooms that Vaughan could use to make nutritious “turtle salad.” For aquatic species, Baldwin constructed a pond with a waterfall and installed a wire fence to keep out raccoons and other predators. For tortoises from sub-Saharan Africa, South America, Europe and the California desert, she created roomy enclosures planted with daylilies, blue-eyed grass and succulents. Native poppies--remnants of her mother’s garden--sprout within and around the rock walls on the property, while more succulents and grasses surround the house, connecting human and turtle worlds.

While these plantings make Dennis happy, Jeanie is more pleased by the ready supply of fig and grape leaves as well as rose, hibiscus and pelargonium petals that keep her dear ones healthy. “These are so much better for them than lettuce,” she explains. “Even the weeds are good, and nothing has been sprayed with pesticides.”

Though she doesn’t keep an exact count, Vaughan, an active member of the California Turtle and Tortoise Club, estimates that more than 300 pets regularly dine off the garden’s bounties. And the numbers are growing. “People constantly give me turtles,” she admits. “ ‘Jeanie, I’ve got something for you,’ they say. ‘Here’s one more for your collection.’ ”