Botanic Garden Strengthens Roots in Face of Closure

Everyone agrees it’s an unusual place. But is a garden on the Palos Verdes Peninsula home to 2,000 endangered species?

That is the fear of nervous horticulture lovers who worry that state budget problems could turn the fragile South Coast Botanic Garden into a trash heap. Of course, that’s where the showplace garden’s roots are. In garbage. Three and a half million tons of it.

The 43-year-old garden at 26300 Crenshaw Blvd. contains what is one of Southern California’s finest collection of plants native to Australia, the Mediterranean and South Africa. It could be the region’s most fragile garden, too.

Its lush vegetation sits just 3 feet above a mountain of trash and debris created over years of dumping of household refuse by Los Angeles County sanitation officials.

Methane created by rotting trash must continually be vented from beneath the garden. Shifting terrain sometimes snaps irrigation lines and forms fissures that can crack open flowerbeds. Underground heat produced by decomposing rubbish can literally cook root systems and kill plants and shrubs.

So it’s a continuous challenge for 10 full-time gardeners and groundskeepers and 150 volunteers not only to keep the place green but also to keep it an attraction that draws more than 130,000 people a year.

No wonder there was shock along the flower-lined footpaths last month when the county warned that the garden was a potential target for closure July 1 because of budget problems created by the repeal of the state’s vehicle registration tax increase.

A garden built atop a garbage pile is not something that can simply be padlocked shut and ignored until times get better, plant lovers say.

“This place is a living museum. These aren’t just artifacts that you can put in a closet and take out later,” said Norma Cantafio, executive director of the South Coast Botanic Garden Foundation.

That anything at all is living at the former landfill is amazing.

The hillside site on unincorporated county territory between Rolling Hills Estates and Torrance was a dirt quarry for decades.

Starting in 1929 the site was operated as a commercial open-pit diatomite mine. Formed from the fossilized remains of prehistoric seawater algae called diatoms, the fine-grained, porous material has many industrial uses. More than a million tons of the site’s diatomaceous earth was dug up and removed for use in filtration systems, medicines and beverages and for insulating and strengthening building materials.

When the mining ended, the county purchased the quarry and turned it into a landfill. When the hole was nearly full, a Los Angeles-area garden club leader, Frances Young, suggested that it be turned into a garden.

The county approved creation of the botanic garden in 1959. After the trash was contoured and covered with three feet of topsoil, large-scale cultivation began in 1961. More than 40,000 shrubs and trees donated by individuals, private nurseries and the county arboretum were planted.

Since then, the collection has grown to more than 200,000 plants. Garden operators say about 140 families, 700 genera and 2,000 species are represented.

The garden superintendent, Tony Gonzalez, remembers his shock when he first set foot on the landfill in 1967. Gonzalez, who has worked as a county parks gardener for nearly 40 years, will retire March 19.

“It kind of devastated me to think they were thinking about closing this place. A lot of me is in here,” he said.

In the beginning, Gonzalez was not certain that the garden would grow. “The diatomaceous earth was sucking out all the nutrients. We had to literally cultivate the soil with horse manure and shavings from wood chippers. It was challenging.”

The trash beneath the thin layer of topsoil posed an even tougher problem.

“At one time the soil was getting cooked. It would be about 350 degrees -- you couldn’t even put your hand on the ground. Sometimes the ground would subside and sinkholes would cause a lot of damage.”

Gases would seep from fissures “and the chlorophyll would be sucked right out of plants’ leaves,” Gonzalez said. “You’d dig a hole to plant something and pull out old newspapers from the 1950s. Once I dug up a rusty set of box springs from an old bed.”

Officials installed vents and a recycling system to capture methane. A wilderness habitat was built at the back of the site, a man-made lake and stream were added near the middle and a visitors center was built on the site’s lone section of solid ground, near the front.

Over the years, the botanic garden’s reputation has grown. Reclamation experts from around the world now visit to see how a landfill can be converted into greenery.

These days, the county spends more than $1 million yearly on the garden. About $112,000 a year in revenue is raised from admission charges, $6 for adults and $4 for students and seniors, and from filming fees, said Don Allen, assistant director of the county Parks Department.

The botanic garden foundation, meantime, has increased from 600 member families to 2,300. It now operates on a $220,000 annual budget from membership fees, plant sales and special events it helps stage.

Foundation members traded their rakes and hoes for pencils and pens when the garden sprouted on the county’s potential closure list Jan. 30. They blitzed county supervisors with letters, begging that the garden be preserved.

“This is an enormous mistake,” wrote one volunteer, Ray Klund of Long Beach, citing the garden’s 900-plant rose collection, its popular children’s garden and its special “Garden of the Senses,” which is designed for blind visitors.

Board of Supervisors Chairman Don Knabe, whose 4th District includes the Palos Verdes Peninsula, said he had been “blindsided” by the uproar that followed public disclosure of the shutdown list. It was meant to be only a worst-case option for future consideration, he said.

This week, Knabe suggested that the South Coast garden would escape a total shutdown. Thanks, in part, to the passage last week of Propositions 57 and 58, he pegged the garden’s chances of emerging unscathed from upcoming county budget cuts at better than 80%.

“It would be tragic to close it. I’d look at every option before closure,” he said Tuesday. “Obviously it would be a huge fight with me. They have a large, active foundation. It’s almost a miracle, what they’ve done with the garden down there with what they had to work with -- the landfill, the poor soil.”

And they know how to sow the seeds of political discontent, too.