The Man Who Named Orpet Park

Edward Owen Orpet was the Park Superintendent for the City of Santa Barbara from 1921-1930. The park that carries his name, located near the intersection of Alameda Padre Serra and Moreno Road, was founded in 1919 and christened Hillside Park. The park was renamed in 1963 to honor the man commonly known as the “plant missionary.”

E.O. Orpet was born in England in 1863. The son of a professional gardener, at age 12 he went off to agricultural college — not as a student but as a servant. Still, due to his father’s influence and his time at the college, he was apprenticed to a large estate as a gardener at age 14 and picked up a substantial amount of horticultural knowledge.

He held a number of gardening and horticultural jobs in his native land before moving to New Jersey, where he worked in a nursery propagating American plants for shipment to England. He then moved on to oversee 300 acres of gardens on a large Massachusetts estate. Here he developed an interest in orchids and created a sensation with his exhibit of hybrids at the Massachusetts Horticultural Show in 1900. Ten years later he was working on the estate of Cyrus McCormick’s Illinois estate.