Marking Time in the San Gabriel Mission Garden

Abstract

Each of the twenty‐one missions constructed from 1769 to 1823 by Franciscans and Native American “neophytes” along the California coast and inland valleys has some form of a “mission garden” as part of the contemporary landscape. These ornamental gardens, in contrast to the more utilitarian uses of the landscape during the colonial era, were first constructed in Santa Barbara in 1872 and continued to be built throughout the twentieth century in the central courtyards and forecourts of the missions. Using historical documentary and visual evidence, as well as analysis of the contemporary sites, this paper analyzes features such as sundials, inscriptions, memorials, and ruins (both real and fabricated) as physical, metaphorical, and metaphysical markers of time. In this construction of time, past, present, and future are implicated both in the gardens’ design elements and in their reception by those who produced and consume the landscape. Specifically, the gardens are cast as peaceful, beautiful oases in which visitors can “step back” to a simpler time. They commemorate the lives lived and lost in the missions, and they signal the biblical associations of the cloister gardens as Edenic sanctuaries and portents of a paradise yet to come. The time markers operate in a recursive way to locate the spaces in a broader historical narrative and to signify "heritage" in contemporary cultural practice. Even as the missions are promoted as iconic sites in the state's origin story, these time markers in the mission garden operate to mediate contradictory meanings of the sites' colonial heritage.