Newspaperman E. Manchester Boddy purchased the land that is now Descanso Gardens in 1939 and developed it as a 165-acre private estate, hiring architect James E. Dolena soon afterward to design Boddy House, where the Boddy family lived until 1953. In that year, LA County acquired the estate and it became a public botanical garden. Boddy's passion for camellias, roses, and lilacs remains evident throughout the gardens. The camellia collection also reflects the impact of World War II, including plants Boddy bought from local nurserymen F.M. Uyematsu and F.W. Yoshimura when Japanese Americans were forced into government-run War Relocation Centers. From 1942 to 1945, ten remote centers imprisoned 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry who had been forcibly removed from the West Coast; two-thirds were U.S. citizens, and none were ever convicted of a war-related crime.
