Vince Compagnone

Katheryn Hunter has been an ardent whistler since childhood and can imitate about fifty of her feathered friends trill for trill. She has recorded bird songs for Walt Disney and Cecil B. De Mille.

Off Catalina Boulevard, up Rosecroft Lane, behind a red fieldstone wall bordered by tall trees, Katheryn Hunter nurtures an enormous family. Despite her eighty-three years. Hunter is up with the sun, for there are many children at her nursery — thousands of them. Working “eight days a week,” the petite woman has all she can do to keep her blooming charges green and healthy. Some need repotting; some need to be pruned; all require varying degrees of water, fertilizer, sunlight, and protection from ravenous visitors. Snails, aphids, red spider mites, and thrips — none of these creatures is welcome at the Rosecroft Begonia Gardens. Hunter treats them all the same — with a healthy dose of the appropriate pesticide.

Hunter: "Growing something that you’ve never grown before in your life — that you’ve never seen in your life — is stepping forward high, wide, and handsome."

Vince Compagnone

Reporters and other visitors of the two-legged variety might fare better. It all depends on one’s intentions and Katheryn Hunter's mood of the moment. Of course, the serious shopper — one on the lookout for a hard-to-find item — is on pretty safe ground, and there are items aplenty to choose from. But idle browsers, especially those with clumsy feet and/or sticky fingers, had better practice their art somewhere else. That, or be prepared for a sharp reprimand, an outspoken reminder: “This is my place, you know!”

"There was a man swinging in that beautiful fern. I couldn’t imagine anyone being so damn stupid!”

Vince Compagnone

Katheryn Hunter is not a rude person — just busy. All things considered, she has more than enough reason to feel a bit protective. For more than thirty years this farm-grown native of Kansas has dedicated herself to the Rosecroft Begonia Gardens. Once dry and neglected, the land has been converted into one and a half acres of cool, jasmine-scented Eden, rife with colors and packed with foliage from around the world. Here the feisty matriarch has raised tens of thousands of begonias from seed, not to mention thousands of fuchsias, hundreds of ferns, and countless other plants.

Beneath a wide-brimmed straw hat. Hunter is a woman of bird-like stature, with a repertoire of chirps and warbles to match. She has been an ardent whistler since childhood and can imitate about fifty of her feathered friends trill for trill. In the past she has recorded bird songs for Walt Disney and Cecil B. De Mille, given concerts all over the United States, and — in the early Fifties — even had her own San Diego radio program called “Pucker Up.” Though it’s been a good ten years since Hunter did any professional whistling, she’ll stop everything, including interviews, to answer a call from on high. Smiling, pale blue eyes dance behind thick bifocals as she scans the branches for her latest winged visitor. “There it is,” she says, pointing across the garden. The bird lets go with a high-pitched undulating song. The sound from Hunter’s pursed lips is very nearly identical, which inspires a brief exchange. The conversation continues when the bird departs.

“We were always gardeners,” she said. “My mother would build a garden and I’d have my own little garden under a peach tree. Later, we had a ranch with acres and acres of peach trees and raspberries. God, I was so sick of raspberries! But I remember when I left for college I missed them.”

In the early 1920s Hunter earned a degree in horticulture from the University of California at Berkeley. There, too, she refined her whistling talents with a group of fellow students. She and her husband Donald later managed orchards along the Snake River in Idaho, but were never very successful at it. Subsequently, the Hunters moved to San Diego. During World War II Katheryn spent three years working double shifts for the geared-up defense industry here. By the time it was over, she was very eager to start gardening again.

One postwar afternoon Hunter decided to take a drive in the family car, a pleasure she’d denied herself during the war. On the way out the door she joked with her husband about buying a farm. “Don't you dare,” he said. “I’m tired of farming.”

“Well, I got in the car,’’ she remembers, “and the first thing I thought of was to come out and see the gardens; I had not been one of those who came here frequently and had only seen it once before.”

The original Rosecroft Begonia Gardens were founded in 1900 by an Englishman named Robinson. Little more than a nursery to begin with, the place went rapidly downhill with his passing and the property changed hands many times thereafter. By the time Katheryn Hunter saw it, the place was, as she puts it, “lost to the world.” Besides the fieldstone walls, a stable, and a few small buildings, there was nothing left. Nothing, that is, but potential. To the would-be gardener’s appraising eye, it was perfect, beautiful.

“I just walked in here that day and took possession,” said Hunter. “As soon as I found out what they’d take for it, I rushed home to Mr. Hunter. I was very excited. ‘I’ve got the money. I’ve got the money,' I said. ‘Go get in the car. I’m going to take you out to buy something!’ ‘What have you got?’ he kept asking. ‘What have you got?’ When I drove out this way he knew what I had. He knew.”

After converting the old stable into a suitable home, Hunter, with help from her family, went to work on the overgrown garden. Though she had no experience growing small plants, the erstwhile sod buster managed to reclaim many abandoned flowers from the weeds and brush. To these survivors she added more than 1000 tubers of her own, and a healthy crop of multi-colored begonias was abloom the first spring. Hunter later felt confident enough to grow begonias from seed, an exacting, even aggravating task. Begonia seeds are almost microscopic in size; the contents of a package, worth about 420 plants, would fit comfortably in Tom Thumb's watch pocket, with room to spare for the timepiece.

“Everything we did seemed to come out just right,” she said of those initial efforts at planting. “We were our own boss and didn't ask anybody else out here. It was just my husband and me, and of course the children. If it hadn't been for the kids we wouldn’t have made it. Growing something that you’ve never grown before in your life — that you’ve never seen in your life — is stepping forward high, wide, and handsome, as the saying goes.”

One of the many obstacles to be overcome in those first years at the Rosecroft Gardens was a shortage of gardening supplies. For some time after World War II clay pots were almost impossible to come by in San Diego; only established nurseries could get them. Hunter, with characteristic persistence, took another tack.

“It was quite a pleasure,’’ she smiled, “to find an old enamel dishpan, something that had color in it. I just haunted the thrift stores and such, looking for them. It was kinda fun to see those begonias growing in old stew pots, and a little sad to see the pots thrown out on the junk pile. But people would buy them anyway — for the plants.”

Hunter never completely recovered from the days when she had to search for discarded pots and pans. The experience instilled in her a love for “old things’’ (be they useful or not) that is immediately evident throughout the Rosecroft Begonia Gardens. Rusty horseshoes adorn the aged wooden beams'of the foyer-type gateway. In some places the gateway’s nails have rusted out, but its roof is held up by entrenched, gnarled vines. They loop, this way and that, like petrified snakes. Colorful old bottles and bits of glass hang among the ferns and are strung between the trunks of palm trees. There are wagon wheels in the flower beds and cannibalized chunks of derelict farm machinery at every turn. In front of the shed Robinson built, there is a tattered bellows, the type blacksmiths used more than a century ago. It isn’t going anywhere — the omnipresent jasmine vines have faithfully secured it to the property. Assorted driftwood inspirations catch the eye, and a small, shattered birdcage hangs, empty and useless, from a nearby post. All about the shack, numerous pieces of sun-bleached, rickety furniture blend into the background like dead leaves. One gets the impression that the garden, with its searching tendrils and creepers, happily digests whatever Katheryn Hunter feeds it.

Around the comer, through a bright red Oriental gateway to the cactus garden, resting among the thick-leaved succulents and barbed thorns, is a machine so strange in appearance that one can only guess its intended function.

“No, it’s not a cotton gin,” said Hunter. “It was used for making broom heads. I think.

They found it in Coronado; my son-in-law knew I'd love it the minute he laid eyes on it. When he offered to buy it, the fellow just gave it to him. He knew i’d take anything that’s the least bit old, and that’s about 300 years old.” The above-mentioned collection of “old things’’ imparts a tasteful, somewhat “funky” air to the gardens. The eclectic display of “found art” — organic sculpture, if you will — seems as natural as the bees in the fuchsias. Hunter, in molding the Point Loma property to her dreams, has come to cherish every crusty knickknack therein. The bulk of her time, however, is devoted to the animate residents of the place.

Besides this year’s cash crop of 4000 begonias (small by Hunter’s standards), there are azaleas, fuchsias, bromeliads, ferns, and customers to contend with. What’s more, some of the plants have been here as long or longer than Katheryn Hunter herself. There are squirrel’s foot ferns, for instance, that have thrived more than twenty years in her care; they grasp their hanging pots by the weird, hairy roots that inspired their name.

There is a pine tree in one corner of the garden that preserves historic memories; it was grown from a seed given to old Mr. Robinson by Teddy Roosevelt. Now it towers forty feet or more above the shaded walkways. Nearby, a very rare cork oak tree, with white, spongy-looking bark and meandering limbs, lends a Tolkienish fantasyland quality to the surroundings. Easily the most beautiful plant in the entire garden, the cork oak arose, like some botanical phoenix, from a rootless stump twenty-eight years ago. Hunter imported the freshly butchered stump from a construction site. “It just grew and grew and grew,” she chortles happily. “We call it our ‘family tree.”’

Within sight of the “family tree” is the white tower of the remodeled stable; a tenacious bougainvillea has spent decades climbing one side, and among its golden blossoms flit manic, iridescent hummingbirds. Their shrill cries mingle with the gentle splashings of a homemade rock fountain, designed and constructed by the Hunter family.

Maintaining this habitat is not a small task, but a seven-day-a-week, year-round job that requires technical expertise and sound judgment in many areas. The watering duties ^lone would drown the average Sunday gardener in an ocean of complexities. Naturally, Hunter is greatly displeased by those who take unwarranted liberties with the fruits of her labors.

“... Like that man who swung on my fern,” she said with genuine horror. “About two Sundays ago I was going out to the garden by the big fern and when I got to the corner I heard a voice say, ‘Oh, look mom, look!’ Well, I looked, and my God, there was a man swinging in that beautiful fern. He’d taken hold of a bunch of fernery and was swinging with it. I tell you, I was really bruised; I just couldn’t imagine anyone being so damn stupid!”

Stupid indeed. Criminal, even. The big fern in question is approximately eight feet high and close to that in diameter. A Cibotium schiedei, it is the largest of its kind in the United States. Hunter coaxed it from a dry, forlorn “nest” when she took over at the gardens. It is her masterpiece.

“I don’t care much,” she continued, “for this tribe coming in here and saying, ‘Oh, I’m just looking around.’ I sometimes ask, ‘Oh, really. Well, what do you see?’ I think it’s time people began to think about what they’re seeing here. If they can’t keep their fingers to themselves, they can just stay out!”

As if on cue, a group of potential customers approaches and the conversation is interrupted. Katheryn Hunter smiles. “Did you want something, folks? Can I help you?”

Their response is typical enough to make one cringe. “Oh, no,” they say. “We're just looking around.”

“Juuuuuust looking,” Hunter mocks with undisguised sarcasm. “Now that’s a familiar song; somebody ought to write a story on that."