Ysabel Wright

After the war, the Wright family relocated to Santa Barbara, California around 1919. They bought a house on a 27-acre (11 ha) site at Montecito and renamed the estate "Quien Sabe?".^{[citation needed]} They commissioned Colonial Revival architect George Washington Smith to design a grand new house, based on a manor house John Wright remembered from a trip to Spain. Ultimately, only Smith's service block design was ever built.^{[citation needed]}

To surround the house, Ysabel had landscape architect Peter Riedel design a garden of many terraces, each dedicated to the plants of a particular type or region.^[12][13] There was an olive grove and a citrus orchard, herbaceous gardens with blue and red themes, an Australian garden and a South African garden, all watched over by a staff of eight gardeners.^[13] Most notable among the many gardens was the cactus and succulent garden, which grew to include many rare species.^[13]

Although they had a large house and a new garden to organize, the Wrights also found time for extensive foreign travel from 1920 onwards, often driven by John's work with education of deaf children. They traveled to South America aboard the SS Vestris, to India (with their children) and to Japan where John advocated for Japan's first oral school for the deaf.^[2]

It appears that the new garden and her international travel stimulated Ysabel's interest in botany. Back at Quien Sabe? she continued to develop the garden but started to correspond with botanists specializing in cacti.

The Quien Sabe? cactus collection became internationally known and was photographed for the 1936 Country Life Book of Gardens.^[12][14]

As well as collecting cacti, Ysabel also took an interest in California's native flora. In July 1929, she took a trip to Mono and Tuolumne counties in the Sierra Nevada and collected more than 160 plant specimens, most of which are now held in the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden herbarium, recorded under her married name, Mrs. J. D. Wright.^[15]

In the late 1930s, with John Wright growing elderly, the couple spent more of their time in New York, near the Wright Oral School. On July 15, 1940, the Wright's daughter, Anna, married Thomas Drumheller, son of a sheep-farming family from Walla Walla, Washington, in New York City.

From 1937 to 1942, Ysabel and John rented Quien Sabe? to Donald Culross Peattie and his wife Louise.^[16][17] At the garden's height, Ysabel Wright had employed eight gardeners to maintain the grounds; by the time the Peatties moved in, only Japanese-born Hideko was left.^[16]

During this time the Wrights also subdivided the estate, selling off portions on which new houses were built.^[16]

A few years later, realizing that she was unlikely to return to live at Quien Sabe?, Ysabel donated her rarest cacti to Ganna Walska's Lotusland and the Huntington Botanical Gardens in 1941 and 1942.^[12]

The cactus species Turbinicarpus ysabelae is named in her honor.^[18][19] In 1925, the herpetologist Edward Harrison Taylor names two reptile species for members of the Wright family: Sphenomorphus wrighti for J.D. Wright and Brachymeles wrighti for Ysabel's son, John Suarez Wright.^[20]

The standard author abbreviation Y.Wright is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.^[21]