WALNUT CREEK — Ruth Bancroft, a renowned expert on drought-tolerant plants and founder of the Ruth Bancroft Garden, died at her Walnut Creek home Nov. 26. She was 109.

Bancroft was born in Massachusetts and grew up in Berkeley. Although she studied architecture at UC Berkeley, the 1929 stock market crash derailed her career plans. Instead, Bancroft earned a home arts degree and later taught high school. In 1939, she married Philip Bancroft Jr., whose family owned a 400-acre walnut and pear farm in Walnut Creek, according to a news release.

Bancroft had a keen intellect and an insatiable curiosity about plants and nature. She collected and categorized seashells and planted flower gardens around the home she shared with her husband and three children on the Bancroft property.

In 1950, Bancroft bought her first succulent and eventually she collected greenhouses full of the hardy plants. After selling plots of land to residential developers, in 1971 the Bancroft family cut down their last walnut orchard and Philip Bancroft Jr. gave his wife the 3.5 acres to plant her succulents.

Working with Lester Hawkins, co-founder of Western Hills nursery in Occidental, Bancroft designed the garden’s intricate layout to display the beauty and diversity of succulents, cactuses and other drought-tolerant plants.

Sally Ingraham, who lived next door to the Bancroft family farm in the 1960s, described Bancroft as a kind, thoughtful woman who was highly respected by the community.

“She was dedicated to that garden and with her talent and her ability it became something that was worth saving and quite unique,” said Ingraham, 90, a founding member of the Ruth Bancroft Garden.

“People come from all over the United States and even the world to see it because it’s so beautiful and so well-designed.”

Bancroft worked in the garden everyday until she was 97 years old, although she did take time off every once in a while to attend the opera, according to Gretchen Bartzen, director of fundraising and development and former executive director of the Ruth Bancroft Garden.

Bancroft often toiled in the sweltering Walnut Creek heat, without taking many breaks, Bartzen said, but she would have a beer with a visitor and talk about plants.

“Ruth had a great eye for garden design, the art of arranging plants to create unique compositions,” close friend and garden curator Brian Kemble said in a statement. “But beyond this, she was awed by the plants themselves, thinking of each kind as a near-magical product of the creative expression of Mother Nature … There was a joy in the way she related to plants which will always stay with me.”

With the help of New York-based The Garden Conservancy, the Bancroft family formed the nonprofit Ruth Bancroft Garden on Bancroft Road which is protected by a conservation easement. It opened to the public in the early 1990s. In August, the garden broke ground on a visitor and education center with space for events and classes as well as offices for staff.

Walnut Creek Councilwoman Cindy Silva described Bancroft’s garden as both artistic and educational.

“It’s just beautiful to look at, but her biggest gift, I think, to the community in developing and nurturing that garden is it taught us to respect the environment we live in and that beauty can come in even the driest of climates,” Silva said.

For Bancroft, gardening was a form of self-expression and relaxation, said Bartzen, adding that visitors encounter a world of beauty where they also can truly be themselves.

“I think there’s something important and organically necessary about a public garden and people want that, they don’t want that to go away, it’s a treasure,” she said. “This little woman did this huge thing all by herself.”

Bancroft is survived by her children Peter Bancroft, Nina Dickerson and Kathy Hidalgo and four grandchildren. The Bancroft family and the Ruth Bancroft Garden plan to hold a memorial for Ruth Bancroft in the garden in the spring.