Over 11 years and 570 episodes, John Rabe and Team Off-Ramp scoured SoCal for the people, places, and ideas whose stories needed to be told, and the show became a love-letter to Los Angeles. Now, John is sharing selections from the Off-Ramp vault to help you explore this imperfect paradise.
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Madame Ganna Walska was a Polish-born socialite, married six times. She was an aspiring opera vocalist who despite years of voice lessons simply couldn't sing-- her story inspired Orsen Welle's to write Citizen Kane's second wife. In 1941 she bought a huge estate in Montecito (just outside of Santa Barbara) and called it Lotusland. It's one of the most impressive botanical gardens in the country. Madame Walska died in 1984 but her estate has thrived with myriad lotus flowers, topiary bushes and cycad plants--those are stout seed plants that kind of look like short palm trees. Cyndi Bemel walked through the gardens with Lotusland curator Virginia Hayes. Click through for a photographic tour of the gorgeous property!