100 Years of Championing Conservation and Seeding the Power of Native Plants

In 1926, philanthropist Anna Dorinda Blaksley Bliss bought 13 acres of Mission Canyon as a memorial for her father, Henry Blaksley, and endowed a botanic garden devoted entirely to native plants. Shortly after, early visionary gardeners and founders carried redwood seedlings down into that same canyon in coffee cans and planted them in the dirt. Those coffee-can redwoods now stand 167 feet tall.

A century later, Santa Barbara Botanic Garden is a 78-acre living laboratory holding more than a thousand species of rare and indigenous plants, arranged not as specimens but as 11 living ecosystems. “It’s like a walk through California in an afternoon,” says Jaime Eschette, the Garden’s Gerry Rubin Director of Marketing and Communications. Alongside the majestic redwood grove, there is desert, meadow, and canyon: the design itself teaches the lesson at the heart of the mission, that native plants and habitats work together to support “the health and well-being of people and the planet.”

“The Garden has always been a special place of beauty and inspiration,” says Eschette. “It also has a leading role in driving conservation forward across California, ensuring a future where people and the planet win.” 

Toward that end, the Garden’s conservation infrastructure is formidable. Beneath the Pritzlaff Conservation Center, a fire-protected vault safeguards more than four million seeds from 424 at-risk California plant species. The herbarium holds 230,000 specimens dating to the mid-1800s. Nine PhDs and a conservation team of nearly 30, including a newly hired fire scientist, work from genes to ecosystems. 

A Place of Unbridled Joy

The Garden is also, simply, a place of joy. Some 110,000 visitors a year walk its six miles of trails, cool off under a redwood canopy, and turn their excited kids loose in the Backcountry, four and a half acres of climbing, digging, bug-hunting, unstructured childhood, complete with rotating locally-made playhouses. There are also classes, a native plant nursery, and a gallery now hosting a centennial exhibit, and it’s little wonder the state named the Garden a California Nonprofit of the Year.

Now comes the second century. This fall, the Garden launches the public phase of its $30 million Centennial Campaign. Already about 60 percent raised, it stands on three pillars: an even more welcoming Garden, with an improved entrance, more accessibility, and a café; Connecting Communities, which brings the Garden into neighborhoods and open spaces from Elings Park to Cuyama, an online nursery, and advocacy that is already writing native plants into city policy; and a $10 million endowment to carry the mission forward into the next 100 years.

There is a famous quote often credited to Audrey Hepburn: “To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.” This is the moment for you to believe in the next hundred years.