Echo Park Lake

This guide to Echo Park Lake in Los Angeles opens in 2005 with a horticulturist named Randy McDonald, who hacksawed a single lotus shoot from the lake's flowers and smuggled it home to nurse in secret. It follows how word of his thriving cutting reached the city, what the lake's sacred lotus bed had meant here since the nineteen twenties, and the strange bargain the city struck with the very man who took the flower in the first place. Look for the pads unrolling closest to the eastern shore, where the bed grows thickest.