Lifestyle
Paul Gripp, one of the last great orchid explorers and hybridizers, dies at 93
After retirement, Paul Gripp still visited the nursery often, helping with weeding, as he’s doing here in this file photo, or just talking with customers.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Orchid expert Paul Francis Gripp, a renowned orchid breeder, author and speaker who traveled the world in search of unusual varieties for his nursery, Santa Barbara Orchid Estates, died in a Santa Barbara hospice center on Jan. 2 after a short illness. He was 93.
In a Facebook post on Jan. 4, Gripp’s sister, Toni Gripp Brink, said her brother died “after suffering a brain hemorrhage and loss of consciousness in his longtime Santa Barbara home. He was surrounded by his loving family, day and night, for about a week in a Santa Barbara hospice before he passed.”
Gripp was renowned in the orchid world for his expertise, talks and many prize-winning hybrids such as the Santa Barbara Sunset, a striking Laelia anceps and Laeliocattleya Ancibarina cross with rich salmon, peach and magenta hues that was bred to thrive outside in California’s warmer climes.
In a 2023 interview, Gripp’s daughter, Alice Gripp, who owns and operates the business also known as SBOE with her brother, Parry, said Santa Barbara Sunset is still one of the nursery’s top sellers.
Santa Barbara Sunset is one of the most popular orchids that Paul Gripp bred at his famed orchid nursery, Santa Barbara Orchid Estates a.k.a. SBOE.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Gripp was a popular speaker, author and avid storyteller who talked about his experiences searching for orchids in the Philippines, Myanmar (then known as Burma), India, the high Andes, Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil, New Guinea and other parts of the world, fostering exchanges with international growers and collecting what plants he could to propagate, breed and sell in his Santa Barbara nursery.
“Working in orchids has been like living in a dream,” Gripp said in a 2023 interview. “There’s thousands of different kinds, and I got to travel all over to find things people would want. But the first orchid I found? It was in Topanga Creek, Epipactis gigantea, our native orchid, and you can still find them growing in [California’s] streams and canyons today.”
Gripp was “one of the last orchid people who went looking for these plants in situ — where they occurred in nature,” said Lauris Rose, one of his former employees who is now president of the Santa Barbara International Orchid Show and owner of Cal-Orchid Inc., a neighboring nursery that she started with her late husband James Rose, another SBOE employee who died in January 2025.
These days, Rose said in an interview on Thursday, orchids are considered “something to enhance the beauty of your home,” but when she and her husband first began working with Gripp in the 1970s, “they were something that totally captivated your interest and instilled a wanderlust spirit that made you want to explore the species in the plant kingdom, as they grew in nature, not as produced in various colors from laboratories.”
She said Gripp’s charm and self-deprecating demeanor also helped fuel his success. “People flocked for the experience of walking around that nursery and learning things from him,” Rose said in a 2023 interview.
“Paul lectured all over the world, teaching people about different species of orchids in a very accessible way,” Rose said. “He didn’t act like a professor. He got up there with anecdotes like, ‘One time I climbed up this tree trying to reach a plant in another tree, and all these red ants infested my entire body, so I had to take off all my clothes and rub all these ants off my body.’ A lot of people’s lectures are boring as dirt, but Paul could command a room. He had charisma, and it was infectious.”
Gripp was born on Oct. 18, 1932, in Greater Los Angeles and grew up in Topanga Canyon. He went to Santa Monica College and then UCLA, where he earned a degree in horticulture, and worked as a gardener on weekends, primarily for Robert J. Chrisman, a wealthy Farmers Insurance executive and hobbyist orchid grower who lived in Playa del Rey.
After college, Gripp served a stint in the Navy after the Korean War, and when he got out, he called Chrisman, his old boss, who invited him to come to Santa Barbara and manage the orchid nursery he was starting there.
After retirement, Paul Gripp still visited the nursery often, helping with weeding, as he’s doing here in this file photo, or just talking with customers.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
The nursery opened in 1957, with Gripp as its manager, and 10 years later, after Chrisman died, he purchased SBOE from the Chrisman family.
In 1986, Gripp and his then-wife, Anne Gripp, divorced. In the settlement, Gripp got their cliff-side Santa Barbara home with its breathtaking views of the Pacific Ocean, and his former wife got the nursery. When Anne Gripp died, her children Parry and Alice inherited the nursery and took over its operation in 1994, Alice Gripp said in 2023.
Gripp officially retired from the nursery, but he was a frequent helper several times a week, weeding, dividing plants, answering customer questions and regaling them with his orchid-hunting stories.
“Paul loves plants, but what he loves most in life is teaching other people about orchids,” Alice Gripp said in 2023. “He chats with them, and I try to take their money.”
Gripp wasn’t a huge fan of the ubiquitous moth orchids (Phalaenopsis) sold en masse in most grocery store floral departments, but he was philosophical about their popularity.
They’re good for indoor plants, he said in 2023, but don’t expect them to live very long. “A house is a house, not a jungle,” he said, “so there’s a 99% chance they’re going to die. But they’re pretty cheap [to buy], so it works out pretty good.”
“He used to say, ‘I’m an orchid man. I love every orchid equally,’ and he does,” his daughter said in 2023. “I don’t know if he would run into a burning building to save a Phalaenopsis from Trader Joe’s, but he told me once, ‘I’ve never thrown out a plant.’ And that’s probably true. When he was running things, the aisles were so crammed people were always knocking plants off the benches because they couldn’t walk through.”
Gripp is survived by his children and his second wife, Janet Gripp, as well as his sister Toni Gripp Brink. In a post on the nursery’s website on Jan. 5, the Gripp family asked for privacy.
“We are still very much grieving Paul’s sudden passing,” the message read. “If you would like to share your memories of Paul, please send them by mail or email for us to read in the days to come. We will welcome your remembrances and gather these into a scrapbook to keep at SBOE. We appreciate your understanding of our need for peaceful reflection at this time. In the coming weeks, we will announce our plans for honoring and remembering Paul with our orchid friends.”
Lifestyle
Jewelry Among the Exhibits at a Daniel Brush Retrospective
Nearly four years after his death, a retrospective of the multidisciplinary work by the self-taught American artist Daniel Brush — encompassing sculpture, paintings and jewelry in materials as diverse as steel, Bakelite and gold — is scheduled to open June 8 at the Paris location of L’Ecole, School of Jewelry Arts.
“Daniel Brush: The Art of Line and Light” will be the fifth time that L’Ecole has exhibited the artist’s work. But its president, Lise Macdonald, said she believed Mr. Brush’s legacy warranted repeated consideration: “He is a very niche artist, but he is excellent — really one of the greatest artists of the 20th and 21st century.”
The diversity of his creations has been part of his appeal, she said. “We don’t really consider him as purely a jeweler but more a protean artist where jewelry was part of his approach.”
L’Ecole Paris, which operates in an 18th-century mansion in the Ninth Arrondissement and is supported by Van Cleef & Arpels, has prepared programming to complement the show, from conversations with experts on Mr. Brush’s work (to be held on site and streamed online) to jewelry-making workshops for children. Details of the free exhibition and the events are on the school’s website; the show is scheduled to end Oct. 4.
The exhibition is to include more than 75 pieces, which span much of Mr. Brush’s five-decade career. They have been selected by Olivia Brush, his wife and collaborator, and by Vivienne Becker, a jewelry historian and author who said she first met the couple more than 30 years ago. Some exhibits, they said, have never been seen by the public before.
Ms. Becker, who wrote the 2019 monograph “Daniel Brush: Jewels Sculpture,” said the artist had possessed vast knowledge of the history of jewelry and shared her belief that jewels “answer a very important, very basic human impulse to adorn — that it’s essential to customs, beliefs, and ceremonies around the world.” She also has written a book documenting the L’Ecole exhibition — and with the same title — that examines the artist’s preoccupation with the themes of light and line.
“He loved the idea of making a real, intransigent, opaque metal into something that was almost translucent, or transparent,” said Ms. Becker, citing as an example a trio of bangles made in 2009 to 2010 that are called the “Rings of Infinity.” The lines that he engraved on the aluminum pieces functioned, she explained, to “elevate the jewel from a trinket to a great, great work of art.”
A series of engraved steel panels titled “Thinking About Monet” used the interplay of line and light to achieve a different effect, she said. Mr. Brush made individual strokes in tight formation on the panels, producing gently rippling surfaces whose color changes with shifting light conditions.
The effect “is really hard to understand. I couldn’t,” Ms. Becker said. “So many people ask, ‘Are they tinted? Are they colored?’ It’s absolutely nothing. It’s just the breaking of the light.”
Though Mr. Brush was a widely acknowledged master of skills such as granulation, the application of tiny gold balls to a metal surface, both Ms. Brush and Ms. Becker said the exhibition’s goal was not to highlight his virtuosity — nor, Ms. Becker said, was that ever a concern of Mr. Brush’s. “He didn’t want to talk about the technique at all,” she said. “Technique has to just be a means to an end. He just wanted people to be amazed, to have a sense of wonder again.”
The works selected for the L’Ecole exhibition reflect his range, which veered from diamond-set Bakelite brooches inspired by animal crackers to a steel and gold orb meant to be an object of contemplation. “He didn’t want to have boundaries,” Ms. Brush said. “He wanted to do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it.”
The couple met as students at what is now called Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and her 1967 wedding ring was the first jewel that Mr. Brush made.
All of Mr. Brush’s works were one-of-a-kind creations, completed from start to finish by him in the New York City loft that served as a workshop as well as a family home. Photographs of the space, which contained a library with titles on the eclectic subjects that preoccupied him — Chinese history, Byzantine art, Impressionist painting — and the antique machinery that inspired him and that he used to make his tools, are featured in the exhibition and reproduced in Ms. Becker’s book.
Ms. Brush is a fiber artist in her own right, but Mr. Brush also frequently credited her as an equal participant on pieces bearing his name. “I did not physically make the work,” she explained, “but the work would not have evolved or happened the way it did if it were not for the way we lived our lives,” she said.
Lifestyle
Thanks to ‘Mormon Wives,’ Dirty Soda Is a National Obsession
The first time Pop’s Social, a catering company in South Orange, N.J., that specializes in dirty soda, served an alcoholic drink at an event, something strange happened.
At the event in December, its nonalcoholic offering, a spiced pear-cider seltzer with vanilla and peach syrups, cream, lemon and cold foam, was a hit. The Prosecco-spiked version? Not so much.
“People were more interested in the mocktail than the cocktail,” Ali Greenberg, an owner of the business, said in an interview.
Dirty soda — a customizable blend of soda, flavored syrup, creamer and sometimes fruit, served over pebble ice — has been crossing into the mainstream for years, especially after the cast of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” the hit reality show that premiered in 2024, frequented Swig, the Utah chain that started it all.
But its reach has gone far beyond the Mormon corridor, and its rise in popularity has dovetailed with an overall decline in U.S. alcohol consumption. “There’s not a lot of Mormon people in our neighborhood,” said Greenberg. “But there are a lot of people who are sober-curious or not drinking.”
The reality show, which follows a group of Mormon influencers in Utah, helped popularize dirty soda beyond the Mountain States and inspired a wave of TikTok videos on the subject. Swig rapidly expanded — growing from 33 locations in Utah and Arizona in 2021 to now more than 150 locations in 16 states — along with other Utah chains, and spawned copycats nationwide.
Dirty soda has joined other Mormon cultural exports, like tradwife influencers, a “Real Housewives” franchise in Salt Lake City and Taylor Frankie Paul, the Bachelorette who wasn’t, that have captivated America.
With the recent rollouts of dirty soda at McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A and Dunkin’ — behold the Dunkin’ Dirty Soda: Pepsi, coffee milk and cold foam — and the appearance on grocery shelves of Dirty Mountain Dew and a coconut-lime Coffee Mate creamer for homemade dirty sodas, we may have reached peak dirty.
The idea for dirty soda came out of a desire for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has millions of followers in Utah and surrounding states, to have more options for social drinking, as the church prohibits the consumption of alcohol, hot coffee and hot caffeinated tea.
When Swig introduced dirty soda in 2010, it filled a need, providing a pick-me-up for car-pooling moms and an after-school treat for their kids. It was quickly adopted by many in the community.
“In other cultures, parents go, they pick up their coffee in the morning, and for me and for a lot of my other friends’ parents, it was, ‘Let’s go pick up our dirty soda,’” Whitney Leavitt, a breakout star of “Mormon Wives,” said in an interview.
Leavitt was surprised when her dirty soda order became a recurring question from reporters in recent years. “They were so excited to hear all of the different syrups and creamers that we add to our drinks to make whatever your go-to dirty soda is,” Leavitt said. (Hers is sparkling water with sugar-free pineapple, sugar-free peach and sugar-free vanilla syrups, raspberry purée, a squeeze of lime, and fresh mint if she’s “feeling really fancy.”)
In April, Leavitt became the chief creative and brand officer at Cool Sips, a beverage chain based in New York that sells dirty sodas.
“Mormon Wives” inspired Kaitlyn Sturm, a 26-year-old mother of three from Jackson, Miss., to post recipes for dirty sodas on her TikTok. The one she makes the most contains Coke or Dr Pepper, homemade cherry syrup, a glug of coconut creamer and a packet of True Lime crystallized lime powder, which she combines in a pasta-sauce jar filled with pebble ice. “It kind of has become like a ritual, where I make one for my husband as well, and we have it most evenings,” Sturm said in an interview.
The trend has also hit fast-food menus. The new “crafted soda” menu at McDonald’s is riddled with dirty soda DNA. The Dirty Dr Pepper, with vanilla flavoring and a cold-foam topper, is the chain’s version of what has shaped up to be the universal dirty soda flavor. Since 2024, Sonic, beloved for its porous, soda-absorbing pebble ice, has offered “dirty” drinks — your choice of soda plus coconut syrup, sweet cream and lime.
These drinks might feel new, but there are antecedents in the Italian sodas of the ’90s (fizzy water and a pump of Torani syrup); the Shirley Temple (ginger ale or lemon-lime soda with grenadine and maraschino cherries); and the egg cream, a tonic of seltzer, chocolate syrup and milk. And what is a dirty Dr Pepper with cold foam if not a descendant of the root beer float? “It’s just a soda fountain from 125 years ago,” Kara Nielsen, a food and beverage trend forecaster, said in an interview.
Though Leavitt moved to New York City with her family in December, her dirty soda ritual has remained consistent, with one key difference. “In Utah, we don’t get to walk to dirty soda shops,” Leavitt said. “We have to drive there.”
Lifestyle
Chaos Gardening: A Laid-Back Way to Garden
Annuals include flowers like marigolds and nasturtiums. They grow fast but won’t come back the next spring (though they will drop seeds and possibly propagate). Perennials like lavender and sage will return year after year, but they may take longer to grow. Wildflower and pollinator packets often contain both annual and perennial seeds but are frowned upon by some serious gardeners, because the selection can be haphazard and ill-suited to the area.
It’s a good idea to exercise a little situational awareness. How much rain can you expect? How much sunlight? Dig the earth and feel it between your fingers — is it sandy? Loamy? These are things to keep in mind as you prepare for your journey into horticultural chaos.
“You want to prepare your soil, your site, at least a little bit,” said Deryn Davidson, a sustainable landscape expert at Colorado State University Extension in Longmont, Colo. “Try to get rid of weeds. Make sure the soil is ready to receive seeds.”
Davidson, who has written about chaos gardening, strongly advised covering the seeds with a layer of soil, lest they become bird food. As for watering, that depends on where you live, she added. On the whole, though, the formula is straightforward: “Soil, sun and water is what these seeds need,” Davidson said.
Not everyone is a fan of the trend, or at least the way it has been portrayed on social media. “Nature is not chaos — nature is pattern,” said Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and the author of “Braiding Sweetgrass,” which recommends imbuing modern life with Indigenous wisdom.
“It seems unrealistic,” Kimmerer said of the chaos gardening videos she has watched. The feeling of effortlessness they convey — a common social media effect, almost always the result of deft editing — seems to elide the work that goes into a garden, whether chaotic or not, she suggested.
“I want my garden to be natural and biodiverse,” she said. “That’s a good impulse. I don’t think this technique is going to get you there, but that’s an important impulse.”
Boitnott, the maker of the viral video, offered a simple reason for why chaos gardening has become popular: “It just makes you happy.”
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