Ostrich Rock, Monterey, California
To look at the orange, lemon, walnut and olive groves out here you would think failure in crops an impossibility. Put any kind of a little shoot in the ground and you can almost stand beside it and wait for it to be grown. But perhaps the land’s perfection is a proof of skilled industry after all. At least one of the greatest of the orange-growers in the State told us: “Come out and run a ranch for fifteen seasons and you will find fifteen reasons why you can fail.”
Ordinarily, though, in the conversation of people here, the personal equation is left out. Californians seldom if ever accentuate their own share in the success of anything.
Everywhere else the enthusiastic inhabitants speak of their state and of their city as a man speaks of his success in business, or a woman speaks of her new home—not only with pride in the thing accomplished but with a satisfaction that comes from their personal effort toward its accomplishment.
The Chicagoans, I remember, for instance, in their pride in the Wheaton Country Club, seemed to feel that their planting and building and making a beauty spot out of a sand heap was the most admirable thing about it.
The only parallel to the attitude of the Californians that I can think of is that of the Italians. Living in their land is merely a great privilege that God has given them, and the beauty of it is a thing that has always been—a thing with which mere man has had little to do.
The picture that the visitor remembers first, last and best in Santa Barbara is of a succession of low mountain ledges capped with white, pink, gray or terra-cotta villas, surrounded by tropical gardens and overlooking a sapphire-colored ocean gleaming in perpetual sunlight. Nothing in all of Italy, not on the road from Sorrento to Amalfi, not even at Taormina in Sicily, is there any scene of land and water more beautiful. Of the villas, most are impressive, a few are admirable, and one, in particular, is like a fifteenth-century Italian gem of the first water transplanted by magic, gardens and all, from the heart of Italy. No other place has quite the atmosphere of this one—that sense of nobleness that we have been taught to believe is made only by centuries of mellowing on an already perfect foundation. It is not an imitation. Everything in it is real and everything is old except the garden, which looks the oldest of all. Perhaps, though, in a land where green things crowd an average year’s growth into every week, it is small wonder that an effect of centuries can be acquired in a decade.
I don’t know whether we missed them, but among all the glorious gardens of lawns and hedges and trees, we saw scarcely any flower gardens; and the few we saw screamed in hideous discords of magenta, scarlet and purple. As in Pasadena, the riot of sun and color seems to make people blind to color discord. An exception, however—the only one we saw—was in the gardens of the Mirasol, which reminds me, by the way, that the Mirasol Hotel is a sort of post-impressionist ne plus ultra, in hotel-keeping.
To begin with, its groups of little white bungalows neatly set within its white picket-fenced inclosure, is more like a toy village than any possible suggestion of hotel. Each little bungalow is low and white, with boxes of flowers under every window and a general smothered-in-vines appearance. So much for the outside. Inside each holds several bedrooms, one or two bathrooms, and perhaps a private sitting-room, all of them super-modern in their furnishings, and each room looking out upon a vista of garden that matches its own color scheme. A rose-chintz sitting-room, for instance, looks out on a rose garden; a lavender bedroom opens on a garden in which there are none but lavender flowers, and a yellow one looks into a vista of yellow. All of the decoration is rather over-stenciled and striped, but the bedroom bungalows are really enchanting. The public rooms, dining-room, public sitting-room and tearoom, are in a bigger house, the orange and blue interior of which suggests nothing so much as the setting of a Bakst ballet. The walls, curtains, table cloths, decorations, chairs, napkins and the waitresses’ aprons are all apricot orange, and the stenciling and stripes and floor and waitresses’ dresses are blue. There is a tearoom in which gorgeous cockatoos—live ones!—live in blaze of orange surroundings. The details are all carefully done, most of them are effective, and certainly unusual. For our own parts we thought the bedrooms lovely; the highly polished indigo floor paint an inspiration, and the orange-colored table linens amusing; but when it came to filigreed silver breast-pins glued into the drawing-room mantel, it was the one touch too much!