The Wrigley Memorial & Botanic Garden

A garden and a memorial to the man who shaped the island

High at the head of Avalon Canyon on Santa Catalina Island, about a 45-minute walk uphill from the Avalon ferry terminal, a 1930s memorial stands in a 38-acre garden of plants that grow nowhere else on Earth. Its story begins with chewing gum. William Wrigley Jr., founder of the Wrigley Company and owner of the Chicago Cubs, bought a controlling interest in Catalina in 1919, and he loved to ride horses through this canyon. When he died on 26 January 1932, aged 70, his widow Ada decided it would be a lovely spot for a mausoleum.

The memorial went up in 1933 and 1934, designed by the Chicago firm of Bennett, Parsons and Frost with one guiding rule: build as much of it as possible from Catalina itself. The walls are reinforced concrete, with crushed island stone embedded in them and sandblasted to bring it out. The blue flagstone of the ramps and terraces was quarried at Little Harbor on the windward coast, and the red roof tiles and bright glazed tiles came from the Catalina Pottery Co., which worked on the island from 1927 to 1937. Copper doors carry ravens in bas-relief, and the observation platform at the top looks down the canyon and across the San Pedro Channel to the mainland.

Wrigley lay here only for a time. Island lore long held that his son had the body moved off Catalina during the scares of the Second World War, when the U.S. military occupied the island. The garden's longtime director, Mark Hoefs, called that the biggest fiction on Catalina: Ada had him moved to the family mausoleum in 1947, after the war, so the garden could be made public. He now rests at Forest Lawn in Glendale, and his original burial marker still sits under the arch inside the memorial.

Ada began the garden in 1935 with her own collection of desert plants, and it grew for decades with flora from around the world, including a large collection of cacti and succulents. In 1969 a foundation shifted its focus to the plants endemic to California's Channel Islands, above all those found only on Catalina, some of them rare and endangered. Among them are St. Catherine's lace, which turns from white flower clusters to russet seedheads through the spring, and the Catalina ironwood, a prehistoric survivor whose fossils show it once grew on the mainland from California to Nevada. The Catalina Island Conservancy has run the garden since 1996, with plant signs in English, Spanish and Gabrieleno-Tongva.