Beautiful Gardens at Sunnylands

Gorgeous reflecting pool at Sunnylands Garden

We finally made it to the Sunnylands Center and Gardens, and glad we did. It was the winter home of Walter and his second wife Lenore Annenberg who bought more than 900 acres at Rancho Mirage and started developing it in 1963. 

The home includes a golf course and the gardens have 13 lakes, 6,000 trees, and 180 acres of turf -- in a desert.

Carefully arranged cacti and succulents

At Sunnylands he entertained royalty, celebrities and presidents. The garden which was opened to the public in 2012, features carefully planted cacti and succulents which match the arid environment. When we arrived around lunchtime today, dancers from the Nickerson Rossi Dance Company performed contemporary dances within the grassy areas of the gardens. 

In the gardens is a labyrinth made from low hedges and there's a replica of a bench gifted to Chinese leader Xi Jinping from then US President Barack Obama.

They two met in June 2013 in Sunnylands and there's a picture of the two of them, Obama with his easy smile on the left, and Xi kind of looking awkwardly at him on the right. The redwood bench says: "Presented to His Excellency Xi Jinping President of the People's Republic of China By Barack Obama President of the United States, Sunnylands Annenberg Estate, June 7-8, 2013.

The garden was opened in 2012 to the public

Near the bench is a reflecting pool and my cousin who is an architect marvelled at how beautifully constructed it was. He explained that to make it so that the water looked completely still, the whole thing had to be completely level and flat. Also it is designed such that viewers can't even see the water falling down the sides -- you can only hear the sound of the water running.

Annenberg came from money -- his father Moses was a newspaper publisher, who published the Daily Racing Form and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

When Moses Annenberg died, Walter took over the family business and bought other print media along with radio and TV stations. He made his money from publishing TV Guide which he started in 1952, and made some US$600,000 to US$1 million a week.

He also started Seventeen magazine, a publication for teenager girls.

Replica bench for Xi from Obama

In 1988 Annenberg sold his print publications to Rupert Murdoch for a record US$3 billion -- soon afterwards print would disappear with the advent of the internet...

Apparently getting tickets to visit the Sunnylands House are hard to get -- will try to do that next year.