June is peak harvest season for a grove of 1,500 plus orange trees just south of Ventura Boulevard. Yes, you read that correctly — there is a 14-acre orange grove in the Valley hills straddling the border of Tarzana and Woodland Hills. But these Valencia and Navel trees aren’t likely to see many more seasons.
They’re on what’s known as Bothwell Ranch, a property rich with history that was recently put up for sale with an eye on its development into 26 separate single-family homes in the upscale south Valley neighborhood.
As the last commercial orange grove in the San Fernando Valley by a long shot, the pending sale of Bothwell Ranch marks the virtual end of small-scale, for-profit agriculture in a region that was dominated by it less than a century ago.
The Bothwell Ranch is a tidily organized grid of lush orange trees – most Valencia, some Navel – separated by neat gravel paths. The orchard forms a lush, dark green canopy easily spotted on Google Maps at the corner of Oakdale Avenue and Collier Street just half a mile south of Ventura Boulevard.
When it first came into the hands of Lindley Bothwell, a man who would become a prominent agriculturist and famous USC cheerleading coach best known for inventing mid-game card stunts, the property was 43 acres large. According to an old Daily News article, Bothwell first purchased it in 1923.
His grandfather Dr. Walter Lindley was the first dean of the USC School of Medicine. He was also known for amassing one of the largest vintage automobile collections in the country, auctioned off in 2017 for over $13 million.
Lindley Bothwell died at age 84 in 1986, but his wife Ann Bothwell lived on a ranch home at the property’s center and kept the show running until her death in 2016. The couple is survived by their two children, four grandchildren and twelve great-grandchildren.
At an asking price of $13.9 million, the ranch was first put on the market in April by San Diego real estate firm Collier International in partnership with Coldwell Banker, billing the property as “an incredibly rare infill development opportunity.” As of publication, a deal hadn’t been struck.
Marketing materials include a site plan that would, by zoning right, split the 14 acres into 26 half-acre lots for development into single-family homes likely to eventually sell for between $2 and $4 million each. They say the ranch is in Woodland Hills, but it’s actually just within the official boundaries of neighboring Tarzana.
Bothwell family members declined to comment on the ranch and its history until a sale is completed.
The grove is a rare remnant of a long-gone agrarian way of life in the San Fernando Valley. Between the 1920s and World War II, agriculture played a dominant role in the region before post-war population growth and a development boom caused ranches like the Bothwell’s to disappear.
At one point, 75,000 acres of Valley land between towns and subdivisions was used for farming — the likes of tomato and lima bean fields, walnut and citrus orchards, and poultry farms, according to “The San Fernando Valley: America’s Suburb” by Kevin Roderick. That included some 750,000 citrus trees, especially around Northridge, Granada Hills and San Fernando.
By the 1990s, the Valley’s working citrus industry dwindled to just the Bothwell oranges south of Ventura Boulevard. According to old news reports, the fruit was most recently being sold to a Sunkist packing house in Oxnard for distribution.
“It’s certainly the end of an era,” said Roderick. “We were lucky to have it as a remaining relic all this time. But you know, LA kids these days don’t necessarily want to be citrus farmers.”
Other orange groves do still exist in the Valley, like an eight-acre grove at Cal State Northridge and one at Orcutt Ranch kept up by the Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Department. Neither are commercially farmed. Instead, the fruit is sometimes harvested by the public on a pick-your-own basis, or by nonprofit organizations.
Dr. Robert Gohstand, professor emeritus in geography at CSUN, was a leader in pushing the university bureaucracy to preserve some of its orange trees. Perhaps it’s farfetched, he said, but he dreams of a wealthy patron who would swoop in and safegaurd the space for public use.
“All I can express is regret that the old agricultural landscape has entirely disappeared,” he said. “Apart from food, it provided green space and living trees, made it more garden-like. One thing about the San Fernando Valley is that it doesn’t really have a lot of park space.”
The forthcoming sale of Bothwell Ranch also has some Tarzana and Woodland Hills neighbors fretting about what it could mean for the future of their communities, especially with a new street planned to run down the property’s center. Joe Palmer, who owns the home across the street from the grove on Collier Street, is one of those closely following the sale and stands ready to fight any wayfaring developer.
“If it’s all done correctly it should blend fairly well into the neighborhood,” he said, noting that the surrounding community is built on similarly sized lots. “What we’d be concerned about is if they put a ‘McMansion’ on there. I’d do everything in my power to stop that from happening.”
