Louis Smaus (born 1885-died 1962) was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Slovakia. Smaus attended horticultural school near Hamburg, Germany where he began his career working as a landscape gardener at Paul Hauber Baumschulen. Smaus emigrated to the U.S. at age nineteen and found work, with a large firm in New York, as a landscape gardener of private and commercial grounds. He was in charge of the greenhouses for five years at Lyndhurst, the Jay Gould New York estate. He and Marie Muller, the Gould girls’ governess, were married there.

In 1910, Smaus moved to California where he then worked at Stanford University and had charge of the Lathrop grounds. Following this Smaus became an employee of A.B. Spreckels, sugar magnate, and maintained the Spreckels estate in Napa, CA for five years. In 1919, he was briefly involved with his brother-in-law’s poultry farm in Los Gatos which quickly grew to 6,000 birds.

In the early 1920s he joined the MacRorie-McLaren Company in San Mateo which did landscaping for major clients such as Mrs. Henry Allen and Andrew Welch and provided a majority of the trees and plants for the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition. Smaus went into business for himself as a Landscape Engineer, working on Milton Haas estate in Los Altos starting in 1931 while continuing to work on the Lachman estate among others, retiring in the early 1950’s. He lived in Burlingame where he had a garden and greenhouse filled with begonias hybridized by friend and fellow Czech Frank Reinelt.

Sources:

Sawyer, Eugene T. History of Santa Clara County California with Biographical Sketches of the Leading Men and Women of the County Who Have Been Identified with Its Growth and Development from the Early Days to the Present. Palo Alto, CA: Bay Microfilm. 1524-1525.