Hayes Perkins — The “Magic Carpet” Man

“For 14 years I toiled to make true a dream I have entertained since I was a small boy. I wished to have a beautiful garden beside the sea and … have made it come true.”

Letter to Miss. Swallop, October 28, 1959

From 1950 to 1990 the Eastman Kodak Company presented 60 by 18-foot back-lit transparency images in Grand Central Terminal, New York. Photographer Peter Gales took this photo in Perkins Park in 1961. Photo: Courtesy George Eastman Museum

Gardener and self-styled adventurer Hayes Perkins (1878–1964) transformed a poison oak-covered ocean bluff in Pacific Grove, California into a dazzling springtime carpet of fluorescent-purple blooms. Photographs in Life and National Geographic, as well as a giant Kodak mural in Grand Central Terminal, New York, enticed tourists from across the globe. One of the most loved and distinctive horticultural features of the Pacific Coast in the early 1960s, today Perkins’s garden is but a sad reflection of its former glory. And its creator is all but forgotten.

Hayes Perkins donated his set of Here and There to the Pacific Grove Public Library in 1962. Photo: David Laws

Perkins worked his way around the world, including nearly eight years in Africa and nine on publisher William Randolph Hearst’s California properties, before moving to Pacific Grove in 1938. He kept detailed diaries of his life and adventures from 1878 to 1936. A friend, Frank Preston…