Lompoc Valley Botanic and Horticultural Society

A Little History

From an old pamphlet of the Society:

 

“In the main, two people are responsible for the Lompoc Botanic Garden: Henry Bauerschmidt and Warren Arnold. The late Henry Bauerschmidt, at the time a landscape architect for the Santa Barbara County Parks, recognized the worth of the Burton Mesa and conceived the Botanic Garden here in its present location. He spurred the county to purchase the land, at that time a part of the federal Correctional Institution, from the Federal Government. Once obtained, he began the long, painstaking task of drawing up plans for the garden. Where he left off, Warren Arnold, a science teacher at Cabrillo Senior High School, took over. With members of his high school’s science club, he kept up the trails and the signs that Bauerschmidt had initiated.

 

With the formation of the Lompoc Valley Botanic and Horticultural Society in 1977, increasing attention is being paid to this local natural resource. As development proceeds on much of the Burton Mesa, preservation of this small part of the native plant community takes on ever-increasing interest and urgency.

 

It is, as few other places in the Lompoc Valley are, a direct link with our past: the importance of these native plants goes beyond their natural beauty, for they are today much as our Chumash predecessors saw them centuries ago. The live oak and the manzanita were mainstays of the Indian diet, providing them with an ease of living not known among other Indians of the Pacific Coast. Many other plants of the community were important for their medicinal properties and, perhaps most significantly, we are still learning of the important uses of this plant community to the Chumash.”

 

Then the pamphlet goes into more detail regarding the "chaparral community, chaparral adaptations, fire in the chaparral" and a bit more history of our Society.

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