The first superintendent of the UCLA botanical garden was George C. Groenewegen. Born on March 3, 1876, George was a native of the Netherlands, where his father was nurseryman for the queen. George was apprenticed there in horticulture. He married in 1902 and moved to Arkansas in 1907, then to Texas, and eventually to Pasadena, California, where he arrived in 1915. He was hired as a plantsman by the University of California in 1926 and lived in Santa Monica while his family remained in Pasadena. The Groenewegens were friends with Dr. Lawrence Clark Powell, who in 1944 became the librarian at UCLA. Powell Library was named for him in 1966, when he was head of the library school. Larry Powell wrote an article entitled "Beans and Tomatoes," an account of the fresh vegetables produced by George Groenewegen.
A natural Dutch plantsman, George saw an open arroyo on the new Westwood campus of the University of California as a natural spot to develop an unofficial botanical garden. His assignment by the university to grow plants for the campus brought him into contact with friends and nurseries in the community, from which plant specimens as well as monies were donated for the new campus. When the botany faculty formally moved from the Vermont Avenue campus to the Westwood site in 1929, Professor Olenus L. Sponsler, head of the department, worked closely with George Groenewegen to plan and cofound the botanical garden [see "Our unofficial first director: Olenus L. Sponsler" in the MEMBG Newsletter 2(2), Spring 1999]. Groenewegen was the only employee of the botanical garden, responsible for all planting and maintenance. Water for the unofficial garden was "bootlegged" from various unattended water taps on the eastern side of campus.
George Groenewegen set up the basic zones that converted the stark landscape into a successful botanical garden. His 1937 layout for the botanical garden, which then contained 31 acres, emphasized trees and shade. On the slopes just north of the first entrance from Hilgard Avenue, which was closed in the 1980s, Groenewegen planted tree gymnosperms, including the large Podocarpus gracilior and bald cypresses of the genus Taxodium that still survive there. He also established the neighboring palm section. By 1938 George Groenewegen had assembled a collection of 1,200 genera of vascular plants. Our huge specimen of Torrey pine, Pinus torreyana, planted by Groenewegen in the 1930s, had become a sizable tree next to the early lathhouse by 1940.
Gladys von der Steenhoven, one of George Groenewegen's four children, remembers her father as a hard worker who expected hard and good work from his staff. Following WWII, many young men earned their way through UCLA via employment in one of the many governmental work programs, such as WPA, one of the "alphabetical soup programs." According to Gladys, George had a reputation as a hard taskmaster. Some labeled his assignments as "banished to Devil's Island." He himself was unafraid of hard, demanding labor, alone and in heat or cold, with little or no shade or shelter. What is now a cool, green garden was originally a barren, open arroyo.
C. A. Schroeder, Professor Emeritus of Botany