History
The Garden began in the early 1950s as a private collection within Bancroft Farm, a 400-acre (1.6 km2) property bought by publisher Hubert Howe Bancroft (grandfather of Ruth's husband Phillip) in the 1880s as an orchard for pears and walnuts. In the 1950s, Ruth Bancroft brought home a single succulent, an Aeonium grown by Ms. Glenn Davidson. By 1972, the collection had outgrown its location and was moved to its current site, then an orchard of dying walnut trees.
In 1989, it became the first garden in the United States to be preserved by The Garden Conservancy, and has been open to the public since 1992.Today the Garden is an outstanding landscape of xerophytes (dry-growing plants).
Read more about this topic: Ruth Bancroft Garden
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“What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,—for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment’s comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)