From whatever side one approaches Santa Anita in May, he will drive through a wild garden,—asters, yellow and white; scarlet pentstemons, blue larkspur, monk's-hood; lupines, white and blue; gorgeous golden eschscholtzia, alder, wild lilac, white sage,—all in riotous flowering.
Entering the ranch by one of the north gates, he will look southward down gentle slopes of orchards and vineyards far across the valley, the tints growing softer and softer, and blending more and more with each mile, till all melt into a blue or purple haze. Driving from orchard to orchard, down half-mile avenues through orchards skirting seemingly endless stretches of vineyard, he begins to realize what comes of planting trees and vines by hundreds and tens of hundreds of acres, and the Equalization Board Statistics no longer appear to him even large. It does not seem wonderful that Los Angeles County should be reported as having sixty-two hundred acres in vines, when here on one man's ranch are five hundred acres. The last Equalization Board Report said the county had 256,135 orange and 41,250 lemon trees. It would hardly have surprised him to be told that there were as many as that in the Santa Anita groves alone. The effect on the eye of such huge tracts, planted with a single sort of tree, is to increase enormously the apparent size of the tract; the mind stumbles on the very threshold of the attempt to reckon its distances and numbers, and they become vaster and vaster as they grow vague.
The orange orchard is not the unqualifiedly beautiful spectacle one dreams it will be; nor, in fact, is it so beautiful as it ought to be, with its evergreen shining foliage, snowy blossoms, and golden fruit hanging together and lavishly all the year round. I fancy that if travellers told truth, ninety-nine out of a hundred would confess to a grievous disappointment at their first sight of the orange at home. In South California the trees labor under the great disadvantage of being surrounded by bare brown earth. How much this dulls their effect one realizes on finding now and then a neglected grove where grass has been allowed to grow under the trees, to their ruin as fruit-bearers, but incomparably heightening their beauty. Another fatal defect in the orange-tree is its contour. It is too round, too stout for its height; almost as bad a thing in a tree as in a human being. The uniformity of this contour of the trees, combined with the regularity of their setting in evenly spaced rows, gives large orange groves a certain tiresome quality, which one recognizes with a guilty sense of being shamefully ungrateful for so much splendor of sheen and color. The exact spherical shape of the fruit possibly helps on this tiresomeness. One wonders if oblong bunches of long-pointed and curving fruit, banana-like, set irregularly among the glossy green leaves, would not look better; which wonder adds to ingratitude an impertinence, of which one suddenly repents on seeing such a tree as I saw in a Los Angeles garden in the winter of 1882,—a tree not over thirty feet high, with twenty-five hundred golden oranges hanging on it, among leaves so glossy they glittered in the sun with the glitter of burnished metal. Never the Hesperides saw a more resplendent sight.
But the orange looks its best plucked and massed; it lends itself then to every sort and extent of decoration. At a citrus fair in the Riverside colony in March, 1882, in a building one hundred and fifty feet long by sixty wide, built of redwood planks, were five long tables loaded with oranges and lemons; rows, plates, pyramids, baskets; the bright redwood walls hung with great boughs, full as when broken from the tree; and each plate and pyramid decorated with the shining green leaves. The whole place was fairly ablaze, and made one think of the Arabian Nights' Tales. The acme of success in orange culture in California is said to have been attained in this Riverside colony, though it is only six years old, and does not yet number two thousand souls. There are in its orchards 209,000 orange-trees, of which 28,000 are in bearing, 20,000 lemon trees, and 8,000 limes.
The profits of orange culture are slow to begin, but, having once begun, mount up fast. Orange orchards at San Gabriel have in many instances netted $500 an acre annually. The following estimate, the result of sixteen years' experience, is probably a fair one of the outlay and income of a small orange grove:—
| 10 acres of land, at $75 per acre | $750.00 |
| 1000 trees, at $75 per hundred | 750.00 |
| Ploughing and harrowing, $2.50 per acre | 25.00 |
| Digging holes, planting, 10 cents each | 100.00 |
| Irrigating and planting | 10.00 |
| Cultivation after irrigation | 4.50 |
| 3 subsequent irrigations during the year | 30.00 |
| 3 subsequent cultivations the first year | 13.50 |
| Total cost, first year | $1,683.00 |
This estimate of cost of land is based on the price of the best lands in the San Gabriel valley. Fair lands can be bought in other sections at lower prices.
| Second year.—An annual ploughing in January | $25.00 |
| Four irrigations during year | 40.00 |
| Six cultivations during year | 27.00 |
| Third year | 125.00 |
| Fourth year | 150.00 |
| Fifth year | 200.00 |
| Interest on investment | 1,000.00 |
| Total | $3,250.00 |
If first-class, healthy, thrifty budded trees are planted, they will begin to fruit the second year. The third year, a few boxes may be marketed. The fourth year, there will be an average yield of at least 75 oranges to the tree, which will equal:
| 75,000, at $10 per thousand net | $750.00 |
| The fifth year, 250 per tree, 250,000, at $10 per thousand | 2,500.00 |
| Total | $3,250.00 |