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Ruth Bancroft and Her Garden: A Centennial Celebration

“Ruth has never been one to shy away from prickly plants,” remarked Brian Kemble, Director of Horticulture at the Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek, California, during a program that marked the inspired gardener’s 100th birthday. “Many’s the time I’ve seen her working with her agaves or her cacti with blood streaming down her arm, thinking nothing of it.”

Talk about wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve.

For the past 50 years Ruth Bancroft’s passion for plants has made her a leading light among garden luminaries in the San Francisco Bay Area. Twenty years ago she was the spark that inspired Frank Cabot to found the Garden Conservancy.

“I remember shivering with excitement as I walked through the four acres she had to play with once the remnants of the family orchard had been removed,” Mr. Cabot recently wrote of his first visit to Mrs. Bancroft’s dry garden in 1988. “It was a mind-blowing experience; a lesson in what a garden was all about— textures, shades of gray and green, shapes and combinations of forms, dramatic as well as soothing vistas —a diverting and harmonious whole!

“As we said goodbye, we learned of Ruth’s concerns about the garden’s future once she would no longer be in it from dawn to dusk. She worried that her children would have neither the passionate interest nor the wherewithal to maintain her creation and wondered what would become of it.

“We headed north towards Portland and I remarked to Anne [Cabot] and Caroline Burgess that there just had to be a way to preserve Ruth’s exceptional garden for posterity—how tragic it would be if her work of art were to disintegrate or be destroyed. Anne, who had recently joined the board of the Lower Hudson Valley Chapter of the Nature Conservancy, replied, “Well, why don’t you start a Garden Conservancy?”

The rest, as they say, is history.

So it was, in fact, a dual celebration—Ruth Bancroft’s centennial and 20 years since the Garden Conservancy took shape in Frank Cabot’s imagination—on July 17, when enthusiasts met in Walnut Creek for a two-day program, “An Age of Gardeners: Mrs. Bancroft and Her Horticultural Contemporaries.” The event was hosted by the Garden Conservancy and the Ruth Bancroft Garden, and cosponsored by Pacific Horticulture, with Mrs. Bancroft in attendance.

“Ruth was a willing collaborator and experimenter with us,” noted Antonia Adezio, Garden Conservancy president. “Through her generosity and vision, the Garden Conservancy is here today to hold the banner for the importance of gardens in American culture. This is a tremendous milestone—that we’re here today to celebrate that collaboration as a group, with Ruth here to preside.”

A distinguished parade of presenters then showed slides and spoke of the history, significance, culture, and personalities of Mrs. Bancroft and her gardening contemporaries They were gardeners who knew one another and shared plants and cultural information through the membership meetings and activities of the California Horticultural Society. Like gardeners everywhere, they supported and enriched one another’s passion for plants and design. Some even worked together, such as Mrs. Bancroft and Lester Hawkins in creating the Bancroft Garden. All have left a notable legacy of dramatic plants and design that have inspired American gardeners in the Bay area and beyond.

Richard Turner, editor of Pacific Horticulture and the first executive director of the Ruth Bancroft Garden, spoke about Mrs. Bancroft and her garden and reminded the audience that the dry garden for which she is so justly famous was not her first. “Ruth had about 20 years of gardening before she started on the dry garden,” he said. “She became fascinated with a lot of different plants over time.... Roses were also an interest and a portion of the garden was set aside for roses. She developed a fascination with various other plants and would find a place for them, around the house.

“And of course irises—when I visited in 1979 the irises were at their peak of bloom. I was blown away by the succulent garden, but I was also blown away by the iris border because I had collected iris in Michigan. A 200-foot long iris garden...carefully orchestrated in terms of color, carefully tended, a third of the garden divided every year just as Sydney B. Mitchell told us to do in Iris for Every Garden.”

Mr. Turner traced the origins of the dry garden to Mrs. Bancroft’s visit to a friend’s garage sale, where she took home a couple of pots of succulents for the windowsill. Over 36 years, those few small pots led to a four-acre garden and a series of shade houses and greenhouses filled with thousands of succulents.

“One of the things that I’ve always appreciated about Ruth is her intellectual curiosity,” Mr. Turner observed. “She came from an academic background in Berkeley, and her intellectual curiosity about plants has guided her development of all of her gardens. She’s fascinated by plants, by the diversity even within a single genus and species. By gathering plants of a single species wherever she could find them, from nurseries all across the country—mostly by mail order—she could then test which ones would work best in her situation in Walnut Creek. I think this is a model for all of us in creating gardens.”

At the conclusion of the day-long program, and preceding a guided tour of the Bancroft Garden, Richard Turner again took the microphone for a final observation. “I just want to remind everyone that Ruth Bancroft was 64 when she started the dry garden.” After a thoughtful pause, Garden Conservancy West Coast program coordinator Betsy Flack added, “Many of us are in that age range now. Look what we have ahead of us.”