Walk McMenemy Trail this month and you will notice new split-rail fencing where there used to be open chaparral. Look closer at the young conifers rising just inside that fence line, and you will recognize something that has no business growing in a Santa Barbara canyon on its own: coast redwoods, planted close enough to count the trunks from the trail. According to the county, the permit that would allow this planting is still under review. According to the ground, the planting already happened.
That gap between what has been approved and what has already been built is the actual story here, more than any single plant list or property line.
The Trail Everyone Uses to Get Somewhere Else
McMenemy Trail rarely gets mentioned on its own. It is the connector piece of Montecito's front-country hiking network, the link that takes San Ysidro Trail users over to Saddle Rock, down through Bud Girard Trail, or across toward Cold Springs. It starts about half a mile up San Ysidro Trail, threads mostly through chaparral, crosses San Ysidro Creek near a eucalyptus grove, and skirts land that sits directly alongside San Ysidro Ranch. It is a workhorse trail, not a destination, which is exactly why regular hikers know its texture so well. Anything that changes along its edge gets noticed fast by the people who walk it every week.
A Permit That Changed Its Own Name
The parcel in question belongs to San Ysidro BB Property LLC and an adjoining owner, Hill Road Ventures LLC, both controlled by Ty Warner, the hotelier behind San Ysidro Ranch. The land burned in the 2017 Thomas Fire. What followed was a habitat restoration and enhancement plan, revised in 2023, aimed at reducing fire load on the site. County records from that period note that the restoration team removed native vegetation from an environmentally sensitive habitat area in violation of its own permit.
Then, in June 2025, the property owner filed a minor revision to that same restoration permit. The new architectural drawings carry a different title: "Botanical Gardens Layout Plan." The plan calls for native and non-native plantings, shallow ponds, a pollinator garden, and seating areas, a considerable expansion beyond erosion control and native replanting.
Because the filing was classified as a minor revision rather than a new project, it did not require a public hearing to move forward. The Santa Barbara Independent reported on the discrepancy in April 2026, describing a fenced-in swath of land where a sign still read "erosion control and landscape restoration in progress" even as the underlying plans had already shifted toward something considerably larger.
The Hearing, and the Gap Between What Was Said and What Was Planted
The first public airing of the project came at a June 8, 2026 meeting of Santa Barbara County's Trails Advisory Committee. Mark Lloyd of L&P Consulting represented the ranch and described the disputed parcel as a "non-environmentally sensitive habitat replanting area." He told the committee the new plan, including its shallow wildlife ponds, was an improvement on the original concept and would "not impinge on McMenemy Trail." He added that the finished garden would be for hotel guests only, with no lighting, no weddings, and no concerts.
Those assurances answer a question Montecito trail historian Dave Everett had already raised publicly two months earlier.
"What's going to be the purpose of this garden? Is it going to be used for parties? Is it going to be used for weddings? Is it going to be used for music? And will that affect the canyon, which has always been so serene and so quiet?"
Everett has hiked McMenemy Trail for years and is writing a book on the history of Montecito's trail network, work that grew out of his role helping restore local trails after the Thomas Fire and the 2018 debris flow. At the June meeting, Lloyd told the committee the proposed redwoods were still in their nursery boxes, not yet planted. Everett's own observation, made while walking the trail before that meeting, was that redwood trees were already in the ground, the nearest one roughly ten feet from the trail's edge. A tree that size, once established, carries a root system that does not stay politely inside a property line.
Five Years of Quiet Work Before Anyone Held a Meeting
None of this arrived without warning to people paying close attention. A local Santa Barbara blog reported as early as April 2021 that reliable sources described Warner's plans for a botanical garden attached to the 41-room hotel. That is roughly five years between the earliest word of the project and the county's first formal public hearing on it in June 2026. In the interim, hikers documented the land being cleared down to its fire-surviving oaks, fenced along the trail, and eventually planted, well before the permit language caught up to what was visibly underway.
A handful of the plants named in the current proposal also sit on the Santa Barbara County Fire Department's undesirable plant list, given fire risk on a site that already burned once:
- Pine trees
- Deer grass
- Junipers
Whether those specific plantings survive the county's review is still an open question. The point for a hiker walking past this month is simpler: what's growing in the ground and what the paperwork describes have not been telling the same story for a while now.
What You'll See If You Hike It This Week
Nothing about the garden is finalized. The county Planning Department still lists the permit revision as in review, and Lloyd's commitments about no weddings, no concerts, and no lighting were made verbally to a trails committee, not yet written into an approved permit. If you walk McMenemy Trail from the San Ysidro trailhead this month, expect split-rail fencing running closer to the path than it used to, a run of young redwoods inside that fence, and the same creek crossing and eucalyptus grove that have marked this stretch for years. The trail itself has not moved. Whether the land beside it stays a quiet, guests-only garden or becomes something with more traffic and more noise is still being worked out between the county and a hotel that has, so far, let its planting get ahead of its permits at least once before.
For longtime Montecito hikers, that is worth knowing before your next loop out to Saddle Rock. For everyone else, it is a small, specific example of how much can change along a trail you thought you already knew by heart.
If you spend enough time in Montecito to notice a canyon changing shape before the county paperwork admits it, you already understand what makes this community worth paying attention to, block by block and trail by trail. Sandy Lipowski has spent her career tracking exactly that kind of neighborhood-level detail across Montecito and the South Coast. If you would like more of this ground-level read on the community, reach out anytime.
