Bryant Ranch

Bryant Ranch covers 207.4 acres in one piece and holds 408 addresses on 353 parcels, at a median lot of 0.248 acres. The zoning is unusually mixed for a single Yorba Linda zone: 51.7 acres Residential Urban, 46.4 acres Residential Suburban, 36.3 acres Residential Estate, 26.9 acres Planned Development, 12.8 acres Open Space Ranchette and 6.8 acres Public and Semi-Public. Twenty-two named streets run 4.48 miles inside the boundary and thirty-three of the centerline segments are private. Three parks sit inside it: Bryant Ranch Park on 9.1 acres at 24705 Paseo de Toronto, the Bryant Ranch Sports Fields on 8.8 acres next door, and Las Brisas Park on 0.6 acres at 24655 Via Vallarta.

The schools are inside the boundary too. The city's school site layer places the Bryant Ranch Elementary campus on 11.7 acres at 24695 Paseo de Toronto, and the attendance boundaries the city publishes put the whole 207.4 acres in that campus's area, along with the Travis Ranch middle school area and Yorba Linda High. Almost every street name here is Spanish: Camino Besar, Camino Claro, Camino Dorado, Camino Famosa, Camino Poniente, Camino Tecate, Las Patranas, Los Adornos, Los Estados, Los Monteros, Los Rios, Paseo de Toronto and eight Via names. The city flags 287 of the 408 addresses as high fire severity and 51 as carrying a fuel modification requirement, while the 2025 fire hazard severity layer rates 78.3 acres Very High. An Alquist-Priolo earthquake fault zone crosses 70.1 acres, and the flood layer keeps the whole polygon in zone X.

This is the Bryant ranch itself. In 1878 John Bixby bought nearly 6,000 acres at the eastern end of Yorba Linda from Bernardo Yorba's widow and called the holding Rancho Santa Ana. Bixby ran cattle and sheep on it, and after he died in 1891 his daughter Susanna Bixby Bryant took it over.

Susanna Bixby Bryant is the reason the ranch is remembered outside Orange County. She judged that California's six thousand or so native plant species were both undervalued and in danger, and in 1927 she planted a garden of them on the ranch, arranged by natural community rather than by border. In 1929 she hired the Olmsted Brothers, and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. drew a plan in 1930 for two hundred acres of plantings, pools and paths. After she died in 1946 the collection moved to Claremont, where it is the California Botanic Garden today. The Bixby home is now a museum kept by the Yorba Linda Historical Society.