Rancho Los Alamitos Historic
Ranch and Gardens

Rancho Los Alamitos was once home to the Bixby family, who came to California for the Gold Rush and stayed for the oil. As such, several famous landscape architects had a hand in the Rancho, including a Rose Garden and Italianate Cypress patio by the Olmsted Brothers (sons of famed Central Park designer Frederick Law Olmsted), and various flowering walks and cactus groves by the likes of Huntington Estate designer William Hertrich, and Florence Yoch, a Pasadena landscape architect who laid the groundwork for "Gone With the Wind's" Tara.

In 1986, the Rancho Los Alamitos Foundation -- headed by former California Historical Society associate director Pamela Seager -- partnered with the city of Long Beach and began meticulously restoring each of the garden areas according to historical photographs, treating this terrain as an intersection between culture and environment. Rancho preservationists have trained their sights on the entire landscape, Seager says, as a document detailing layers of cultural accumulation.

Considered the birthplace of SoCal's Tongva people -- "It's our Bethlehem, our Mecca," says local tribe member Craig Torres -- it retains a "shell midden," or massive dump of crushed seashells testifying to the culinary habits of ancient Americans, on its eastern edge. Overwritten but not erased by the 1927 Olmsted-designed Jacaranda Walk, this midden joins relics from missionary padres and their medicinal plants, lawn-loving New England transplants, and quaint horticultural attempts to blot out encroaching urbanization.

"Here you can compare and contrast 1,500 years of history simultaneously," Seager says.

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