The Controversial Camellias of Descanso Gardens

A few years ago, I wrote about the beautiful story of how Descanso Gardens acquired its world-famous camellia collection. The flowers came to the gardens when it was the estate of Manchester Boddy, a self-made millionaire with a soft spot for horticulture and Japanese culture. The popular legend I wrote about is that in 1942 when two local Japanese American owned nurseries were being liquidated prior to their owners being shipped off to internment camps Boddy stepped in and bought their stocks of hundreds of thousands of camellias at a fair market price. The legend states that Boddy could have bought the plants for pennies on the dollar but instead, because of his respect for the Japanese American growers, he paid whatever they asked. Boddy was cast as a hero, and that story was touted in displays by today’s Descanso Gardens.

But recently that story has been cast into doubt. In 2020, Wendy Cheng, associate professor of American studies at Claremont’s Scripps College, published a scholarly paper that told a different story. The paper, titled “Landscapes of beauty and plunder: Japanese American flower growers and an elite public garden in Los Angeles,” asserts that Boddy did not pay a fair price and took advantage of the Japanese American nurserymen’s situation.

Professor Cheng states about Boddy: “He was a man of his time and he was genuinely a friend to the Japanese American community, as many people have said; however, he was also a businessman and what he paid the families was still a fraction of the value they would have gotten if they had not been forced to sell due to internment.”

Professor Cheng also asserts in the abstract of her paper: “In this article, I examine Boddy’s transactions as an instance of racial plunder: a morally and affectively inflected act of theft structured by racism.” Wow, harsh!

Descanso Gardens has reacted to Professor Cheng’s research by removing references to “the legend” of generosity. They have changed the narrative about Boddy to say that the nurserymen “sold their camellia plants … to Boddy before being sent to detention camps. These people’s terrible loss, reflecting years of labor, was Rancho del Descanso’s immediate gain.” The story is no longer that Boddy generously paid a fair market value.

But is that really the case? At least one person disputes Professor Cheng’s assertion that the camellia collection is “racial plunder.” Tom Gilfoy, a former Descanso Gardens trustee, wrote in a letter defending Boddy’s purchase that it was indeed a fair price.

“Boddy bought 300,000 camellias for $50,000, or just under 17 cents per plant. That doesn’t sound like very much, but there’s no evidence to suggest that’s an unfair price. The only other relevant sale reported in the research was a sale of a dozen camellias for $3, or 25 cents each. That sale makes the 17 cents per camellia Mr. Boddy paid seem, if anything, overly generous because Boddy purchased 300,000, not a dozen. Cheng completely ignores the effect quantity has on her fair price.”

Gilfoy writes: “According to Cheng’s research it was the nursery owner who set the price for the sale. It was not based on some kind of a low-ball offer by Boddy. Cheng’s article quotes Howard Asper, who was with Mr. Boddy when the deal was made, as follows: ‘Mr. Boddy asked the price for the lot and immediately decided to buy. Without any bargaining or hesitation, he wrote a check for the entire amount asked.’”

He concludes: “I’m not saying that from the standpoint of the overall picture the interned Japanese American nurserymen were treated fairly … But Mr. Boddy had no obligation, moral or otherwise, to sit down with the nurserymen and try to calculate what their nursery stock would have been worth if Pearl Harbor hadn’t been bombed. He paid what was asked by the nurserymen when others would not do so and, in my opinion, that price was fair in the context of the market as it then existed.”

Based on what Tom Gilfoy has written, it sounds to me like Descanso Gardens was too quick to discard the legend of the generosity of Manchester Boddy.