On 6/14/2003, the Los Angeles Times (
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"A Catalina Oasis Offers the Mortal and the Vital
Rare plant life is nurtured alongside a memorial to the head of the Wrigley empire.
June 14, 2003|Nancy Wride | Times Staff Writer
Only buzzing crickets pierced the silence at the Wrigley Memorial and Botanical Garden.
Visible from its peak were the turquoise waters of Catalina Island's busiest harbor, where sold-out commuter boats deposited tourists and cabin cruisers zipped about.
Yet deep into Avalon Canyon, at this garden uphill from the town of Avalon, quiet reigned amid towering cactus and plants that grow naturally nowhere else on the planet.
William Wrigley Jr., head of the world's largest chewing gum manufacturer, bought Catalina in 1919, and loved to ride horses through Avalon Canyon, said Mark Hoefs, director of the garden, who has known the family for decades.
After Wrigley died in 1932, his wife, Ada, decided the canyon would be a lovely spot to have a mausoleum constructed as a final resting place for him and the family, a plan that would later change. The public garden that remains was first planted in 1935 with many of the desert plants found there today.
"It's beautiful. I would like to live here," Rosalba Jimenez of Downey said with a sigh, gazing out over the vine-draped memorial at stands of elephant foot and Catalina ironwood as her 7-year-old son, Steven, balanced on a stone wall.
The 43-year-old Mexico City native, who enjoyed the native plants of her own country, found the Wrigley garden a respite from the everyday stress of her trucking delivery business.
"This," she smiled, "is a place to go slow, relax."
A tram runs on the half hour from waterfront locales to the gate of the garden, which is open daily, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Walking the roughly two miles from downtown Avalon is an option for those able to tackle a moderate incline.
The hilly oasis boasts eight plants endemic to Santa Catalina Island, including what the garden brochure calls the rarest, the Catalina Mahogany, stating that "only seven of the small shrubs or trees occur naturally in a single canyon."
There is a large collection of cactus and succulents from various parts of the world, and scores of plants exclusive to the Channel Islands off the coast of California and Baja.
But a reward for hiking to the garden's summit is the striking Art Deco monument originally designed as a crypt for the chewing gum magnate.
The brochure doesn't mention that Wrigley's body was once entombed here, but it was, and then later moved, said Jeannine Pedersen, curator of collections at the Catalina Museum.
While Pedersen said exact details are not widely known, the assumption has always been that the son had the body moved amid World War II scares about attacks on the island, which was then occupied by the U.S. military.
Hoefs knows the lore and chuckles. "The biggest fiction on Catalina Island is that Wrigley was moved off during the war, and by his son," Hoefs said. "But his wife decided to move him to the family's mausoleum so the garden could be made public. And he was moved in 1947, after the war. I know, because I talked to the family about it and the people who moved it.'"