The living room is dominated by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that holds most of her husband's grandfather, Hubert Howe Bancroft's, 39-volume history of California and the West.
Bancroft's older daughter, said that she and her sister Kathy Bancroft Hidalgo, 59, are determined to keep the property in the family and have no intention of selling.
Bryan Jeeves insists his group was only a trustee holding shares for Bancroft's true owners.
Bancroft's creation was planted decades before either succulents or native low-water plants would become popular.
Bancroft's home office, whose shelves are filled with around 4, 500 volumes of books on plants.
Earlier this year Bancroft's directors in the Isle of Man quit, and the firm was moved to Cyprus.
Bancroft's succulent garden and is part of the 8-acre family compound, is well-tended, with mature plants and fruit-bearing trees.
Most of Hubert Bancroft's large collection of books and other materials were donated to the University of California, Berkeley in 1905.
Mr. Bancroft's cousin, Jane Cox MacElree, who also opposed the deal, faced a delicate situation because she was a trustee of some trusts whose beneficiaries favored the deal.
"People don't have as much sex as they used to, " Dr John Bancroft, the institute's director, told the Daily Mail.
It's a bad thing for Dow Jones and American journalism that the Bancroft Family could not resist Rupert Murdoch's generous offer.
Yet he told Forbes.com's Peter Kafka in January that the Bancroft family, which controls Dow Jones, was not prepared to sell.
Bancroft first began designing and planting her dry garden's desert landscape in 1972.
That depends on the more than 30 members of the Bancroft family, who own 30% of Dow Jones's shares and 62% of its voting rights.
And I hope the Bancroft family, which has been torn apart by Murdoch's poison pill offer, will enjoy family peace after so many years of patient and caring support for Dow Jones and its people.
He's covering the story of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which will be talking with the Bancroft family, the dominant owners of Dow Jones, which controls the Wall Street Journal.
"The future of warfare in Africa is going to be an odd mixture of odd tactics from the 1970s and new technology like drones, with less boots on the ground, " said Mr. Carstens, who serves as a country manager in Somalia for Bancroft Global Development, a private firm that helps train the nation's military forces.
Members of the Bancroft and Ottaway families, which between them own a majority of Dow Jones's voting stock, have come out against Mr Murdoch's offer.
The other defendants are three of the men's wives, Jacqueline Scourfield, 50, Alison Mills, 47, and Beverley Bancroft, 64.
Mr. Cox was the son of Jessie Bancroft Cox, the redoubtable family matriarch who died in 1982 on the 100th anniversary of Dow Jones's founding.
Born in 1908, Ruth Petersson Bancroft, the daughter of a UC Berkeley classics professor, would wander the open fields behind her family's Berkeley home to collect trilliums and other wildflowers.
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