The story begins with a land deal and a football stadium. Anson Gale Stiles, one of the original trustees of the University of California, purchased land on Piedmont Avenue east of campus in the late 1860s. His daughter Harriet inherited the property, and two of her sons -- Anson Stiles Blake and Edwin Tyler Blake -- built homes and gardens on the family land. By the early 1920s, the university wanted the Piedmont property for California Memorial Stadium. Harriet sold, divided the proceeds among her four children, and the family scattered. Two children who lived outside the Bay Area sold their shares to developers. But Anson and Edwin stayed, relocating to adjacent parcels in the Kensington hills where Anita and Mabel -- sisters married to and living with the Blake brothers respectively -- began the painstaking work of recreating their Piedmont gardens at a higher elevation, with steeper terrain and a view of the bay stretching to the Golden Gate.

Mabel Symmes was not just Anita Blake's sister; she was a trained landscape architect who designed the entire estate. The house she helped plan, completed in 1924 and known as La Casa Adelante, was a 27-room Spanish-style mansion designed by architect Walter Danforth Bliss. Around it, Symmes laid out a formal garden with a reflecting pool and grotto to the east, a symmetric rose garden surrounding a square pond to the south, and a Mediterranean garden of drought-tolerant plants arranged in diamond-shaped beds on the steep western slope. Switchback paths descended through the Mediterranean plantings to a lookout over the bay. The southwestern corner held an Australian Hollow, its high water table sustaining plants from the southern hemisphere. Mabel lived with Anson and Anita until all three died within a few years of each other in the early 1960s. The Blakes had deeded the grounds to the University of California in 1957, and the school took full control after Anita and Mabel's deaths in 1962.

In 1967, incoming UC president Charles Hitch chose Blake House as his official residence, beginning a four-decade tradition. The mansion was refurbished with $459,000 in private donations, and landscape director Geraldine Knight Scott redesigned the grounds to balance presidential security with public garden access. Five UC presidents lived here through 2008, each contending with a building that the chair of the UC Regents eventually described as having 'great bones, but it is a money pit.' When Janet Napolitano became UC president in 2013, she rented a house in Oakland instead. Blake House was by then called 'stately, but run-down,' with renovation estimates reaching six million dollars. In 2021, the university purchased the Julia Morgan-designed Seldon Williams House in Berkeley as a replacement residence, and announced that Blake House had been 'uninhabitable for more than a decade' due to deferred maintenance, seismic risks, and landslide hazards.

What saved Blake Garden from the mansion's fate was its second life as a teaching facility. Russell Beatty, who succeeded Scott as director in 1967, reimagined the grounds as an outdoor laboratory for UC Berkeley's landscape architecture students. A Children's Adventure Garden opened in 1970, where kids tended plants under student supervision for three years. The Cut-Flower Garden, created in 1973, delivered a daily bouquet to Blake House. In 2010, students and volunteers restored the Australian Hollow into a native wetland that now shelters Pacific chorus frogs and migrating birds. A thornless blackberry brush tunnel marks the area. The original rose garden has become the Square Garden, its water lily pond retained but its beds replanted with drought-tolerant perennials -- a quiet acknowledgment that California's relationship with water has changed since the Blakes first laid out their garden.

The Hayward Fault runs through Kensington parallel to Arlington Avenue, and it crosses directly through Blake Garden's upper grounds. The site sits in an area geologists consider 'highly susceptible to movement' in a future major earthquake. This geological reality contributed to the decision to abandon Blake House and is part of what makes the garden so compelling as a teaching site: students studying landscape architecture here must contend not just with aesthetics and ecology but with the restless earth beneath their work. Since 2009, Blake Garden has been open to the public on weekdays, free of charge. Visitors walk paths that Mabel Symmes designed a century ago, past plants descended from the Piedmont Avenue originals, above a fault that could reshape the hillside at any moment. The garden persists -- transplanted, transformed, and stubbornly alive.