I’ d never heard of Lotusland, the botanical garden in Montecito, Calif., that slice of paradise in lovely, balmy Santa Barbara. On Lotusland’s 37 acres are 23 themed gardens. Not Star Wars–, Harry Potter–, or Barbie-themed but the rarest cacti and succulents, cycads with Jurassic bloodlines, towering prehistoric fern trees, dragon trees, bromeliads among Spanish moss, and so much more. Lotusland is both a beautiful, heavenly place and, as are all the best botanical gardens, a serious, academic one. It’s an unforgettable experience. For Easter weekend, what better topic than a place about renewal and regeneration. It’s a place where the spiritual, art, plants, and science unite in harmony.

Regular readers know my taste is catholic. I’m not blinkered and have an expansive view of what art is. Botanical gardens are rarefied art, but they’re art as an entirety, and, by the by, isn’t Mother Nature the best artist? I’ve written about cemetery landscape architecture and gardens attached to house museums such as Olana, and earlier this week I wrote about Matthew Wong’s mystical landscape paintings, but I’ve never written about a museum of plants. Why not start with one of the best?

Lotusland is a nonprofit open to the public since 1993, so it’s new, but some of the plants are extinct in the wild, some would have been known to dinosaurs, and the botanical garden itself started in the 1940s. The garden is both the fantasy and the result of the hard, exacting work of Ganna Walska (1887–1984), once an ornament of Russia’s imperial court, an opera singer, perfumer, philanthropist, married to rich men, and, yes, that’s plural, a staple at séances, a whiz at the Ouija board, and a lifelong famous beauty with a flair for design. The garden officially calls it Ganna Walska Lotusland but I’ll call it Lotusland for the sake of economy.

Suffice to say she was a Renaissance woman and a millionaire who, like many Santa Barbarans, arrived there to escape. She bought the land, which was once a plant nursery, in 1941. Over decades, her love of fine gardening evolved into a mission to make a home for the rarest of rare plants. It took 50 years, but she did it. Today, there are 34,700 plants on the Lotusland campus, representing 3,700 species, about a quarter of which are threatened in their natural habitat.

I started my walk through the cactus garden, packed with totem-pole cacti, fat, squat cacti, and my favorite, the creeping devil cactus. It’s a Washington, D.C., genus. Only kidding! There, the creeping devils move on two legs, have cellphones, and work for the government. The creeping devil cactus in Montecito grows flat on the ground. Its roots are in its tail. It doesn’t hornswoggle the public. There are 300 cactus species at the garden. Black slate shards line the path, adding drama. Cacti soar and slither, but some grow in graceful, though prickly, arches.

The cactus garden is by the main house where Walska lived. Going through this particular garden, I knew how Dorothy felt when she told Toto they weren’t in Kansas anymore. All the gardens in Lotusland are gorgeous, but, and this is my taste, the Blue Garden was my favorite. It’s a period piece and one of Walska’s early projects. Color-themed gardens were in fashion in the 1950s, and while I like a wild, haphazard palette in gardens, blue’s my go-to color since it’s sincere and serene. In this garden, blue cedars, Chilean wine palms, agave, blue hesper palms, and chalk sticks tell us that green doesn’t have a monopoly in the plant world.

I arrived in Santa Barbara during mud season in Vermont, after months of a very brown, cold winter. Within minutes, I was photographing flowering weeds and sending pictures back to color-starved friends in ye olde Arlington. You’d think I’d never seen a flower before. At Lotusland, there are hundreds of flowers, and flowers for all seasons — honeysuckles from Africa’s eastern coast, strawberry begonias, which thrive on shady cliffs in China, and red aloe flowers from South Africa and Madagascar.

I’m told that everything can grow in Santa Barbara, to which I snort and ask whether sugar maples can grow there. “Well, no,” garden gurus admit. Dragon trees at Lotusland, with low-lying, nearly black boughs, create a thicket worthy of Lord of the Rings and do produce blood-red sap but, I asked, “Is it good for boiling?” The answer was another sheepish “no.” On this score as well as on cows and snow, Vermont rules. But for exotic, lush beauty, I’ll take Lotusland any day. FedEx delivers maple syrup.

And sugar maples are not only ubiquitous in Vermont. They don’t require much tender, loving care. A garden in Vermont takes work, but plants in the Green Mountains are in a live-or-die climate. Lotusland is a place for conservation and preservation, as is every art museum. Its Cycad Garden is an example. Cycads are cone-bearing plants dating to the days of the dinosaurs and the most threatened plant group in the world because of over-collecting and agricultural clearing. Lotusland has 450 specimens, half the known species, and their cones, stems, and leaves look as if they played among the dinosaurs 300 or so million years ago.

Not too long ago Lotusland’s cycads were hit with an oak-root fungus that mobilized the troops and put 80 plants into a quickly formed cycad hospital on site. After the fungus was removed, gardeners and botanists developed an intricate network of subterranean and surface drains and rebuilt beds with a sandy, fast-draining soil. During the emergency, Lotusland did some work on the pathways through the garden, widening them here and there for wheelchair access. A harrowing experience, to be sure, but the specialists at Lotusland are curators, and curators are far more than decorators. They’re charged with keeping their plants in good shape. Many of the specimens at Lotusland can be classed as the plant world’s equivalent of the best Raphaels or Rembrandts or Delacroixs.

For those who like things manicured, there’s a rose garden. An olive allée is graceful as well as sculptural. A cypress allée would have inflicted on Monet a bad case of envy. All the gardens share one feature. No matter how sculpted and pampered, the plants take their orders from the sun, the rain, and the earth. In these parlous times, that’s a comfort.

I loved the Australian Garden, the whimsical Fern Garden, and the Insectary Garden, which attracts predator bugs to eat pests and robust pollinators. Lotusland is an organic garden and the first major botanical garden to operate without chemical pesticides. Compost tea is the Dom Pérignon of plant beverages, except it’s healthy. Fish fertilizer is the meat and potatoes of the place. Sustainability is sacred at the garden. Southern California has tropical as well as desert climates. Water, of course, is a big issue. It’s shepherded and reused. A biofiltration system removes pollutants in parts of the garden, but fundraising is ongoing to expand it.

Each garden has a single outdoor interpretation kiosk with good illustrations of notable plans, such as the Swiss-cheese plant in the tropical garden. It’s from Mexico and Central America. It’s a vine with holes in the leaves that allow rain to drip down to the roots. Mother Nature is no dummy. An illustration of a succulent is accompanied by text explaining how it protects itself from thirsty predators, natural water hoarder that it is. Poisoned sap and spines signal a no-go zone. Plants are as adept at camouflage as animals and a well-dressed Navy Seal are. Everything in the kiosks is clear and appealing. We’re not clubbed to death with information.

Ganna Walska, called Madame Walska, was a force of nature and, like the best collectors, started as an amateur but, with an inquiring mind and lots of determination, became her own curator. A Masterpiece Theater series could be made about her life. A two- or three- or four-hour movie wouldn’t be enough to convey her journey from Brest-Litovsk to, as she wrote in her autobiography, a star turn as a beauty in the tsar’s court, a stint as a perfumer in Paris, six husbands, an opera career, and, in 1940, to California, “where the air is magnetized . . . and the soul must speak,” and then to Montecito, “where people are more interested in your being than your pocket.”

Walska loved a lot. Of her six husbands, the first was a Russian baron and a skunk she married in her teens. She left him, the marriage was annulled, and, a few years later, she learned he had died, killed in the First World War. The second, Joseph Fraenkel, was a rich neurologist and endocrinologist with a practice in Vienna and New York. He was Gustav Mahler’s doctor. After Mahler died in 1911, Fraenkel wooed his widow, Alma, proposed marriage, which she declined, and then wed Walska on the rebound in 1916. He died in 1920.

Months after Fraenkel died, Walska married the Yonkers carpet tycoon, yachtsman, and Shakespeare-folio collector Alexander Smith Cochran. They split even before the honeymoon trousseau could be unpacked. A 1922 divorce settlement gave her $3 million. Next came Harold Fowler McCormick, the International Harvester Company heir who had divorced John D. Rockefeller’s daughter, Edith, months before his marriage to Walska. Fraenkel and Cochran had both supported Walska’s career as a stage singer, but McCormick — notoriously — bankrolled her time as an opera soprano, a line of work for which Walska had not-exactly-great talent. Orson Welles claimed that McCormick and Walska inspired parts of Citizen Kane. They divorced in 1931, in part because Walska wouldn’t move from Paris to Chicago to live with him.

Husband No. 5, Harry Grindell Matthews, was an English scientist who claimed to have invented in the 1920s what was called a death ray that could sweep entire armies into oblivion. Wouldn’t we all like to have one? They were married in 1938. Time reported that she went on their honeymoon alone since Grindell Matthews was on the verge of inventing an aerial torpedo and too busy. He died in Wales in 1941, by which time Walska had fled Paris for New York, one step ahead of the Nazis. Her final husband, Theos Bernard, was a practitioner of hatha yoga. They married in 1942 and split in 1946. Muscled and limber, he was a fine specimen and an amateur scholar of Tibetan Buddhism. Bernard and Walska initially envisioned the Montecito estate as a retreat for Tibetan monks but, war being war, the monks never arrived. Once he was out the door, she wisely decided that one is the happiest number.

Walska started with plans for an elegant formal garden like the one she developed in the 1930s for her country estate near Paris. Starting in the late ’40s, with her yogi out of the shrubbery, and into the ’50s, her dreams became both more ambitious and more botanical. I’d never thought about a thing called plant-collecting, but it exists, and, yes, as with extreme coin and stamp collectors, every day tends to be a solar eclipse. That is, crazy time. Walska was passionate but precise and, over time, committed to using her wealth to build a world-class garden of exotics, marvels, and standouts. Today, these are expensive. We’re not in tulip-mania times, but, given Lotusland’s commitment to developing its collection, adding new plants isn’t cheap.

In the 1970s, wishing to fund her garden of rare cycads, Walska sold a chunk of her collection of Cartier jewels, among them a 95-carat diamond briolette and a hefty Mogul-carved emerald. She got the cacti for her cactus garden as a bequest in 1966 from a San Diego horticulturalist who admired what she was doing at Lotusland, still a private home. The plants weren’t actually moved and installed there until 1999. In creating her theme gardens, Walska worked with gardeners and botanists who had specialized knowledge, but divorce settlements don’t last forever. She pumped a boatload of money into her gardens. Living in Montecito ain’t cheap, and she lasted until 1984, when she was well into her 90s. What to do with the place after she died?

It took a few years and some maneuvering through Santa Barbara’s land-use permit system, which is high-octane NIMBY. The garden finally opened to the public in 1993. In a deal struck with the county, visitorship is capped at 20,000 annually so as not to rile the neighbors. The education of the public, of course, takes precedence over the obsessions of estate owners living behind high walls, many of whom live in Montecito only part of the year. Still, 20,000 is the number. Lotusland is able to invite local schoolchildren and has very good educational programs.

The garden is doing a 30th-anniversary, $30 million capital and endowment campaign, which started last year. Its budget is around $5.5 million, and the place is serious about fundraising. Its board is very strong, but the garden needs the security of a bigger endowment and has plans for improvements related to access, sustainability, and upkeep. Alas, the duke and duchess of Sussex, who live in Montecito, are fake philanthropists, and the only gardening Meghan does is digging for gold. Still, the place has a good donor base. Locals and visitors can’t help loving it. It’s an aesthetic and ecological treasure.