Since all of Paris closes shop in August, I’ll be posting “by appointment” discoveries made during my summertime travels back home in the USA this month.  Hope you enjoy this special summer edition with content from New York, Los Angeles and Maine.

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Appointment: To follow a 2-hour guided tour of Lotusland, the  37-acre estate and private garden created by Madame Ganna Walska.
Where: Ninety miles north of Los Angeles in Montecito, an affluent suburb of Santa Barbara
When: July 2nd, 2009
Time 1:30pm

An international celebutante and irresistible beauty, Madame Ganna Walska loved plants. And opera. And seducing wealthy older men. (Don’t you love her already?) All accounts from her era speak of a captivating creature with a preternatural proclivity for exuberance and glamorous excess. No one batted an eyelash at the outrageous title of her memoire, Always Room At The Top, published in 1946 because, what the hell else would she call it?

From her humble beginnings in Poland until her death in 1984 at the age of ninety-seven, she married six men—including a Russian count, a renowned endocrinologist, a Rockefeller divorcée, the heir to the Smith Carpet Manufacturing company, the inventor of the Death Ray, and a Yogi mystic with a philosophy PhD—who through death or divorce passed much of their fortune along to her.

But it’s what “Madame” (née Hanna Puacz) did with her accumulated wealth that was the final glorious act in her masterpiece theatre of life. In 1941, at the urgings of her sixth and final husband (she gave up after that) she purchased a thirty-seven-acre estate ninety miles north of Los Angeles in the manicured town of Montecito.

Initially intended as a retreat for Tibetan Lamas and a place for her husband to practice his spiritual work, she christened it “Tibetland.” After their divorce, she changed the name to “Lotusland” in tribute to the rare Indian flowers in her lotus pond and her newfound independence. From that day forward her one and only love was her garden.

“She was a total diva and she was very smart. She created this place so that people would talk about her long after her death,” says our docent before heading out on a 2-hr tour through the private botanical garden she spent the last 40 years of her life designing with the brash, eccentric whimsy that she applied to every aspect of her life.

She famously sent her garden assistants out on tours of the neighborhood with strict instructions to purchase the largest and most magnificent plants they could find, regardless as to whether or not the specimens were up for sale. Armed with cash and Walska’s determination on their backs, they always came home with the goods.

Channeling her years on the stage and penchant for theatrics, she used plants for their form and structure to create dramatic botanical experiences.

The 3,000 rare and exotic species in Lotusland are organized into enchanting chapters.  Some are poetic, like the Blue Garden with its delicate mélange of blue-shaded species; some insouciant and bold, like the mass plantings of Giant Palms; some moody and biographic, like the Theatre Garden full of statues from Madame’s chateau in France that were smuggled to the USA during the war; and others gloriously excessive and wild, like the Succulent Garden with it’s Climbing Onion plants or the Cycad Garden, the second largest in the world and by far the estate’s most valuable.

It’s impossible to tour the gardens without feeling the idiosyncratic force of nature behind it, just as Madame had wished.

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Reservations: Visits are by appointment only. To make a tour reservation call 805-969-9990 or email reservation@lotusland.org.
Schedule: Tours are offered 10am and 1:30pm Wednesday through Saturday between mid-February and mid-November.
Admission: Adults 19 years of age and older, $35; children age five to 18, $10; children under five, free.

Like most, my truffle hunting knowledge is quite limited. In fact, it could easily be summed up in a single image: old men in wellies tugging hogs on ropes.

So when some visiting friends and I decided to take a trip down to the Périgord—a ravishing, rocky region about a six-hour drive from Paris, well-known for its truffles, foie gras and Medieval castles—we couldn’t think of a better activity than ratcheting up our “black diamond” IQ with two of the area’s connoisseurs.

A few hours of research and a couple of phone calls later we had a time and date set to meet two of this elusive edible’s leading experts: Edouard Aynaud and his truffle-sniffing associate, Titeuf the golden Labrador.

This truffle tag team resides in a tiny hamlet called Pechalifour. Nestled within a Tuscan-like landscape of rolling hills and sun-soaked pastures, the minuscule village consists of a handful of homes, each belonging to one of Aynaud’s family members (except one, which is owned by Rita, a very friendly American, we are told).

Within minutes of meeting Edouard, an energetic truffle activist with over 40 years experience, we are ushered into a truffle atelier filled with home-made extracts, powders, oils, and truffles the size of baseballs, freshly cleaned and ready to be shipped to a chef in Belgium. Before we know it our truffle education commences, and we’re thrust into a thicket of fascinating truffle trivia, including, but hardly limited to:

• The number of days that a freshly-picked truffle remains fresh? Answer: 10 days.
• How to keep truffles fresh for longer than that? Answer: Slice into thin strips, drizzle with olive oil, cover with plastic and freeze.
• Why Italians pick their prized Alba white truffles at night? Answer: So that their neighbor’s can’t see them.
• Foods that truffles pair best with? Answer: Neutral ones, like potatoes, rice, pasta, salad and bread.
• Why female pigs make great truffle hunters? Answer: Truffles smell like the sex pheromone of boar saliva, a scent they find irresistible.
• Why dogs make better truffle hunters? Answer: They learn easily, are clean, don’t try to eat the truffles (unlike pigs) and are easier to work with than sex-crazed sows.

This is the first phase of our two-hour tour, and our noggins and noses are loaded already. Once out on the property, we weave our way through truffle trees of all varieties.

Not all of them are giving up the gold, we’re told. Some are dormant for the season or are too young, some had record output decades ago and may not reproduce for at least another, some are part of a magnetic field experiment that Edouard says won’t bear fruit for three more years…

Truffles clearly require patience, something we’re loosing in proportion to our increasingly freezing toes (this was back in January, and damn was it cold!). Just as we start to wonder if we’ll ever see a black diamond in its natural habitat, we’re introduced to Titeuf, a fabulous truffle hunting mantra, “Elle est où Titeuf. Je ne la voie pas. Cherche Titeuf, cherche” (Where is it? I can’t see it? Search Titeuf, search.), and the intoxicating scent of truffles plucked straight out of the earth.

Here’s a clip of Titeuf in action:

Reserve your own private tour with the dynamic duo by clicking here. The site is in French but you should get the gist of it.

And, if you want to stick around for a lengthier visit, Edouard and his wife Carol have a wonderful guest house that they rent by the week, free truffle tour included!

For more Titeuf truffle hunting videos, visit my ParisBAO YouTube page.