Category Archives: places

framing the garden view

December 29, 2009 James 5 Comments

Here are just a few more photos left over from my post yesterday on the Huntington’s recently-opened Chinese Garden.

I mentioned how there were many layers to the spaces there. The following are some of the doors and windows in the garden that help to frame the views and contribute to the sense of layering.

Leaf-shaped window near the Studio of Pure Scents.

Stacked portals of the Terrace of the Jade Mirror.

These last two windows in the outside wall, the Wall of the Colorful Clouds, are interesting in that they’re not perfect squares. The top, left and right sides form part of a square, but their bottom sides parallel the contours of rolling ground where the wall is sited. Even though you’re looking at an element in the human-created hardscape, this technique acknowledges the earth where the wall stands.

Yet to come: posts on the Huntington’s Japanese Garden, Conservatory and Desert Garden.

gardening, landscape design, places

new huntington chinese garden

December 28, 2009 James 11 Comments

On the way up to Los Angeles we had a chance to make a quick stop at the Huntington Library, Art Collection and Botanical Gardens in San Marino. Their Chinese garden, Liu Fang Yuan, the Garden of Flowing Fragrance, opened to the public just last year. Fund-raising is ongoing for a second phase of construction, and the plants that are there are still on the young side. Still, it’s not too early to take a look at what’s being billed as the largest garden of its kind outside of China.

Two stone lions guard one of the alternate entrances into the garden.

Hand-carved stonework and elaborate hardscape details figure prominently in the garden’s design. It’s worth taking your time to appreciate the details close up.

This walkway resolves to the adjacent planting in swooping tiled edges.

Patterns made from pebbles fixed in cement take several forms. Here’s one design.

…And a detail of another designs…

…And an overview of yet another of the patterns using pebbles.

These hardscape details are dense and busy. Plantings are also fairly dense, with many kinds of plants used in a small space. Move a few feet in any direction and your view of the garden changes radically.

The overall effect is kaleidoscopic, and the garden encourages active engagement with the space.
Continue reading new huntington chinese garden →

landscape, places

a little palm springs hike

December 21, 2009 James 8 Comments

The holiday break begins with a quick trip to visit an old friend who’s vacationing in Palm Springs. I seem to bring warm weather with me: the days are in the upper 70s and the air is desert-dry. The local weather report whines about only “partially sunny” conditions, though the only clouds I see are thin white veils high in the atmosphere. Good hiking weather, I think. My friend is just a little equivocal but he finally caves. “OK, but nothing too strenuous.”

The North Lykken Trail is picked for its easy proximity to where we’re staying and its promise of nice aerial views of the Palm Springs and the rest of the Coachella Valley. The online writeup calls it “moderately strenuous,” as does Philip Ferranti’s 140 Great Hikes in and Near Palm Springs. It seems doable and fun, so off we go.

Blooming chuparosa (Justicia californica, this first image) is everywhere. And where there’s chuparosa, there are hummingbirds and buzzing clouds of bees feeding on its nectar.

Plants of brittlebush (Encelia farinosa) are everywhere too, but most are just leafing out from their long dry summertime coma. Soon they’ll be covered in bright yellow daisies. This plant usually calls dryer areas home but can be found all the way to the coast, and it’s used a lot in landscaping projects.

Here’s a barrel cactus (Ferocactus cylindraceus) with an awesome view of the city.

Maybe we’re distracted by the view or I’m too focused on the plantlife, but by about now we’re scrambling over piles of rocks, in and out of drainages, looking for the trail. If we were deep somewhere in the wilds without a map we might be getting concerned. But how can you say you’re lost when there’s a big city grid down below as a reference point? Okay, we’re not really lost, but some of this is on the strenuous side of “moderately strenous.” But not for too much longer. We find some other hikers off in the distance and get back on the trail.

With the trail securely underfoot it’s easier to take in the great rock formations and enjoy more of the views.

It’s a bit away from peak bloom but there are a few other things to see. This is one of the desert plants I’ve always found pretty interesting, whether it’s in bloom or not. Desert trumpet or pipeweed (Eriogonum inflatum) is an unmistakable buckwheat that usually has flowering stems with a fat trumpeting protuberance below the nodes of its bloom spikes. Often it’s a lot more pronounced than in these two photos.

Sometimes, though, you find a plant that produces stems that are wiry and delicate, with none of the bulging that you see here. Some botanist had some fun naming that one: Eriogonum inflatum var. deflatum.

Looking at views and plants is hard work, so we take a number of brief breaks, this one in Chino Canyon. (That’s me to the right, the slavedriver ready to move on to the next ridge.)

This is a hike that makes you hyper-aware of the edges where the desert ends and irrigated human habitation begins. Even though the plants used in this home’s landscaping may say “desert” to you, you can see that the real desert here isn’t one that stays palm-tree-green year-round.

Even a collection of dryland plants can require water to keep looking good when they’re planted closer together than you’d find them in nature. Also, some of these plants–particularly the palms–would be only found in more riparian desert habitats, not here where the homeowner wanted them. Check out the drip-irrigation octopus in the lower right corner.

But I suppose it’s hard to resist the temptation to landscape with the plant that’s in your city’s name. Now we’ll just have to work on the “springs” part to make sure all the palms have enough water to survive this challenging piece of desert.

So by now you’ve probably guessed that at least one of us survives the hike. We both do, actually, but are a little sore the next morning. That’s where the artificial springs–the burbling hot tub, in this case, in the semi-shade of the palm trees–comes in handy.

And then my liberal guilt kicks in. As a tourist am I perpetuating a double standard, expecting water and shade be provided me, when I might expect the people living here to make do with less? Okay, if I had to choose, I really could do without the hot tub. But the hike was great.

landscape, places

destroying smuggler’s gulch

December 4, 2009 James 10 Comments

I’m standing in the United States as I take this picture. The hills you see are less than a mile to the south but are mostly in Mexico, across the border. The low break in the hills carries the name Smuggler’s Gulch.

The mouth of said gulch has been part of one of the more controversial terraforming projects in progress as we speak, the demonstration of enhanced fencing techniques that is the US-Mexico border fence. Ironic/pathetic isn’t it, that not that many weeks ago the news was buzzing with the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, but here in many of our back yards new walls are going up? I’ll leave discussion of the ethics and human costs of the fence-building mindset to organizations like Amnesty International or even the Catholic Church, but the project’s costs to stuff like nature are pretty steep as well.

Left: This photo by April Reese from a January Land Letter shows much better than my photo just some of the earth moving that went into blocking off this canyon. [ Source ]

When people hear that the Department of Homeland Security is building a fence they might say, oh that’s nice, what harm can a little 15 foot tall fence do? Well, place your nice little 15 foot fence on top of 35,000 truckloads of fill dirt essentially forming an earthen dam designed to contain humans instead of water. Humans have more cognitive ability than water molecules, so what might contain water will just send the humans to the next available crossing point.

The rich coastal chaparral that was here has been bulldozed and buried. Hay wattles with some hydroseeded low-growing plants will be expect to take care of erosion control. Down-slope, the sensitive habitat of the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve waits to see what’s going to happen once the rains begin.

gardening, landscape, places

a visit to recon native plants

November 27, 2009 James 3 Comments

Weekend before last my native plant society organized a little propagation workshop that was hosted by Recon Native Plants. One of the sessions focused on growing plants from seed, another on propagating from cuttings. I’ve done a bit of both, though my success with seeds definitely outshines any luck with growing anything from cuttings. My main take-away for the cuttings session was to try to take the cuttings early in the morning, when the plants are least dried out. I’ll be giving that a try and sharing whatever successes or failures that that leads to.

My favorite part of the morning was a chance to tour the nursery and see a large wholesale operation dedicated to propagating California and Southwestern natives. In my little backyard-garden world I’m used to seeing a few plants in pots sitting around, waiting to be planted. To visit such a big facility is to see the world in a different way. Here’s an artfully arranged mountain of gallon pots filled with soil mix being planted with little artemesias. I’ll never complain again about having to pot up a half dozen transplants. Continue reading a visit to recon native plants →

gardening, landscape design, places

on the road: cornerstone sonoma (more)

August 24, 2009 James 15 Comments

These are the last of the photos I took at the gardens at CornerStone Sonoma. Looking through this second batch it seems that the gardens below rely heavily on hardscape details and less on plants. None of them are gardens without plants, but the green stuff definitely plays second fiddle to the more engineered parts of the gardens.

Yoji Sasaki’s The Garden of Visceral Serenity features this terrific walkway: a central, solid strip that alternates with horizontal stripes of varying widths.

Topher Delaney has this striking installation made up of a very short menu of elements: a blue-and-dark-gray striped wall, birches, three balls made of rope, white shade cloth surrounding the space, a bordering hedge and white crushed stone beneath your feet.

The color palette is reduced down to white, gray, black, green and the insistent blue of the backdrop and–today, anyway–the sky.

Most people plant birches because the trees have striking white trunks. But with the ground and walls being white, the birch trunks almost disappear, leaving a sense of green sheltering foliage floating overhead.

At mid-morning, the shadows of the trees draw striking forms underfoot, and shadows of the plantings next door make soft patterns on the white shade screen.

I liked this detail at Walter Hood’s Eucalyptus Memory garden. Garden designers often use single chairs or long benches to suggest a point of repose in the landscape. Here, Hood has used two chairs next to each other in the foreground and three in the distance, next to a pond, instead of the more expected bench. I wonder, is the fact that you have a chair to yourself meant to reinforce your sense of interior contemplation, even when there’s someone sitting next to you?

The rest of Hood’s installation consists of very few materials. Most dominant are two tall mesh panels that frame a view to a distant pond. One side is empty, the other contains eucalyptus branches and leaves. After a few moments of looking at the garden, what hits you next–and hits you hard–is the smell of the drying eucalyptus in the one panel. This is a garden for more senses than just sight.

Another sense, that of sound, is reinforced in David McCrory’s and Roger Raiche’s Rise garden. A steel tube runs through it, the kind that you see used for drainage under a road. As you walk through it you feel a sense of shelter, and the sounds of the surrounding world change as they echo gently through the chamber.

Pamela Burton designed the last of the spaces that I wanted to share. Her Earth Walk burrows into the land, and requires that you descend into the garden to fully experience it.

The earthen color of the hay bales and the adobe mud walls reminded me of the desert.
Once you pass a big, solid of Mexican feather grass and approach the bottom, you’re surprised with a long rectangular pond with waterlilies and fish. It felt like an oasis.

By the time you drop the eight feet or so into the bottom of this installation you can’t see any of the gardens around it. What you experience is reduced down to the walls, the grasses, the sky above, and the water below.

My final reactions to visiting Cornerstone were similar to going to a little museum and seeing a collection of single works by a number of artists. There’s a little bit of tension, a bit of competition going on between the pieces. Some landscape architecture can work well this way, where the designer makes a statement and you can appreciate what’s being said. You then move on to the next piece and try to figure out what’s going on with it. But if you want a landscape architecture that’s deeply rooted in the surroundings and its history, you might leave here wanting more than many of the works deliver.

In the end, one thing Cornerstone did very well for me that a lot of other landscape architecture doesn’t comes from the intimate scale of most of its gardens. These are gardens the size of many residential lots. These are spaces that tell you that interesting landscape design doesn’t have to be scaled to massive public works or some gonzo pallazzo.

For more looks at Cornerstone Sonoma, check out Alice Joyce’s postings on her blog, Bay Area Tendrils Garden Travel.

gardening, landscape design, places

on the road: wine country gardens

August 15, 2009 James 3 Comments

The daylight was ending as we crossed the bridge into the wine country north of San Francisco.

Things were developing that gorgeous warm tint that you only see for a few minutes of the day. People had set aside the next day to visit some wineries, and this gorgeous evening was the best preparation you could ask for.

We stopped at three wineries, and you pick up pretty quickly that the vineyards are interested in promoting a lifestyle as part of the process of sending you home with a few bottles of wine. To set the mood, each location we visited played its own riff on the basic formula that wineries follow: a tasting bar, personable servers, a gift shop, and–most interesting for me–some sort of garden setting around the facility.

Stop #1 was the largest, most industrial place that we were to visit that day, Rodney Strong Vineyards. You could stroll around an elevated perch and take a look at the oak casks and the stainless tanks holding their next bottlings.

Set in the middle of your basic picturesque Sonoma County vineyards, their take seemed to be fairly minimalist, that the grapes around the winery were garden enough. But they did have some attractive planter boxes lining the steps ascending to the tasting room.

Being high summer, their plantings featured brilliant zinnias, marigolds and calibrachoa in what I’d call a real-world planting, selections that anyone could find at their local garden center, nothing too fussy or scary or exotic.

The message they wanted to convey through their setting: We want to make your visit pleasurable, but we’re primarily about the wine. Our wines might be a better value because we don’t splurge on the unnecessary theatrics.

Across the parking lot was destination #2, J Vineyards. The approach to the front door passes casual-looking plantings of grasses, sedges and flax.

In Designing with Plants by Piet Oudolff and Noel Kingsbury, the authors caution against mixing plantings of different grasses. But here the technique of mixing different plants with strong linear forms succeeds beautifully. (Definitely a case in point that design guidelines are meant to be broken.)

To get in the tasting room you cross a little bridge over a pond teeming with water plants. The hardscape is cut through with strong linear elements, but the plants seem to defy the geometry, with clumps of one kind of plant cascading from one level to the next, not accentuating the structure like boxwoods planting along a driveway. Winetasting–with optional finger foods–can happen indoors, or on the patio overlooking the garden.

The message they wanted to convey through their setting: We’re not the least expensive winery out there, but what’s wrong with an occasional splurge every now and then?.

Oversized pots with spiky plants were a common feature. This blue potted succulent was set next to a rough woven vine fence in downtown Healdsburg, where we stopped for lunch. I’m sure their gardener pruned the pointy lower leaves off the plant to avoid injury to the masses passing through, but I personally hate to see gorgeous symmetrical plants disfigured this way.

Our last winery stop, Mazzocco Vineyards, also featured a spiky plant–a flax–planted in a big pot–this one a model with beautifully dripping glaze.

The smallest of the three stops that day, the winery featured low-growing drought-tolerant plants and some annuals set in a small theater set that evoked a casual resort set in the middle of oaked foothills. A berm along the adjacent roadway created a sense of shelter and avoided the road noises that would have spoiled the mood.

The setting was simple and casual, nothing so spectacular that you had to stop to look at it, but a pleasant place to relax and spend part of an afternoon.

The message they wanted to convey through their setting: We’re all about rustic elegance. Our wines are direct and connected to the land. (Their offerings happened to offer a large number of vineyard-designated bottlings of zinfandel, many with its own strong character.)

My favorites that day?
Wines: Mazzocco. (I didn’t sample at the first stop.)
Gardens: J.

But they’d all be worth a visit. (And my thanks to our designated driver that day!)

gardening, places

on the road: luther burbank’s farm

August 14, 2009 James 4 Comments

History is a fragile thing, something that I was reminded of on my recent visit to Sonoma County.

Pioneering plantsman Luther Burbank moved to this area in the mid-1880s, making his home in Santa Rosa, and establishing a plant breeding and trial location nearby on Gold Ridge, in present-day Sebastapol. Over his career, which included over 40 years of work at this location, he developed and introduced hundreds of varieties of food crops and ornamental plants–including the still-popular Shasta daisy, and was pretty much the Thomas Edison of the plant world.

You can visit his main residence in Santa Rosa, but it was the Gold Ridge Experiment Farm where the work of coming up with the new varieties took place. Our host in Sebastapol basically said that there wasn’t much to see of the farm anymore. But I was curious to stand in the middle of horticultural and agricultural history, so John and Jenny and I took a short trip to the site.

A small brown sign in downtown Sebastapol points to the farm, .7 miles away, and a second small brown sign down the road points left towards the location. The first thing that you see when you turn left, instead of some pastoral trial farm scene overflowing with historical flowers, is the bigger sign announcing the Burbank Heights & Orchards, an anonymous cluster of gray clapboard-sided apartment houses. A bit of trailblazing over the winding lane through the apartments eventually leads to a little yellow cottage in a clearing, along with a matching out-building and a greenhouse that must be as small as the bathrooms in the surrounding apartments.

If it weren’t for the greenhouse it’d be hard to know that this was the destination. But this was it. What’s left of major botanical history. (You can see the apartments in the background.)

The cottage dates to 1906, when the San Francisco earthquake scrapped the original structure. There’s an adjacent little cottage garden, with some examples of Shasta daisies and other plants with ties to Burbank and this location.

The hybrid penstemons here are modern varieties, but there’s an interesting unknown tall nightshade with purple flowers that was found growing on the site in 1980. Aside from the Shasta daisies, the plants of major historical interest here aren’t the horticultural pretties as much as the trees and shrubs nearby: Walnuts, berries, plums, cherries, hawthorns, roses, among many.

Some of the plants aren’t Burbank hybrids at all, but are stock that was used in his vegetable husbandry. Burbank’s work was all about improving on nature, not appreciating nature as it exists, so what nature you see in the form of the original species–including the Catalina Cherries native to California–were collected here for their potential value to what could be made with them.

In an article, “Luther Burbank : A Victim of Hero Worship,” Walter L. Howard writes that “[t]he science of breeding grew and advanced rapidly during the first two decades of the new century, and though it may not be generally recognized, the movement is traceable to Burbank as a potent activator. Professor H. J. Webber, a pioneer plant-breeder and geneticist and a contemporary of Burbank, has declared that through the influence of Burbank the science of plant breeding was advanced by at least twenty years and for this accomplishment alone, he deserved a sizable monument to his memory.” (Quoted at the Gold Ridge website.)

Today, Luther Burbank isn’t completely forgotten. There’s the little remaining farmstead, and the Burbank home in Santa Rosa. Burbank’s Shasta daisy is the official flower of Sebastapol. And there’s even a stretch of Highway 12 between Santa Rosa and Sebastapol that’s designated the Luther Burbank Memorial Highway. But Sonoma County, a region that’s living large as one of the hotspots of California wine country, seems a little distracted by other things than to pay large amounts of attention to a figure whose career saw the rise but not the fall of Prohibition in the United States.

So, should you plan a trip to God Ridge Experiment Farm? As a destination unto itself, probably not, unless you live nearby. But if you’re here for a visit to the Sonoma and Napa Valley wineries, sure, take the little side trip. It might be a little sad, but you’ll be glad you went.

gardening, places

on the road: visiting california carnivores

August 11, 2009 James 6 Comments

On our recent trip we had only one nursery on the list of must-visit locations: California Carnivores in Sebastapol.

Specializing in carnivorous plants from around the world, proprietor Peter D’Amato has assembled a collection of species and hybrids that run the gamut from venus flytraps and American pitcher plants to really cool sundews and bladderworts.

One of the first plants that you encounter is this massed group of the hybrid, Sarracenia x Dana’s Delight. It’s a fairly common plant, but gather together several dozen pots of it in a massed display and there’s nothing common about it. The pitchers color up to a most amazing purplish red when grown in strong sunlight.

Here’s another pitcher plant that had some gorgeous coloration. I forgot to note the name–sorry–but I think it might be a form or hybrid of S. flava.

If there’s a pitcher plant that I covet it’s this one, the California and Oregon cobra lily, Darlingtonia californica. I’ve killed one already, and won’t attempt another until I’m more confident that I can offer it what it needs to survive.

To grow so many different kinds of plants requires a lot of space. Here’s a shot of the propagation ponds.

I left the premises with three plants, a couple more than I really have room for in my bog. I posted yesterday about the amazing fly-catching capabilities of the sundew I bought (Drosera filiformis ssp. filiformis ‘Florida giant’). Another plant was a division of an albino hybrid, Super Green Giant.

The third purchase was this beautifully colored version of the yellow pitcher, Sarracenia flava. Here it is from the front…

…and here it is from behind.

…and for contrast, here’s a form of this species with minimal coloration, ‘Maxima.’ I love its yellow-green coloration.

The basic element of a pitcher plant is a highly developed leaf structure that contains a reservoir of fluid that insects fall into. The bug eventually drowns, and the the digested insect turns into food for the plant.

The more I look at pitcher plants, the more I appreciate the differences between them. It’s like musical variations on a theme, where you start with something simple and recognizable, and then go off into all sorts of amazing directions.

Jenny was out to this coast for a family visit, and was along for this plant trip. Her purchases were two: a small but very pretty and cute bladderwort, Utricularia livida, and a distinctive little venus flytrap, Dionaea muscipula.

The husband’s reaction when we got back to the hotel went something like, “You bought a venus flytrap? To take all the way back to South Carolina? Where venus flytraps come from?” But Jenny is a a curious plant person herself, and the flytrap she picked was a nicely grown specimen that had striking red coloration unlike the typical versions of the species. Like pitcher plants, flytraps can have their own sets of cool variations on the basic theme.

gardening, landscape design, places

gardens from lands with little water

July 26, 2009 James 9 Comments

My thanks to James Golden of View from Federal Twist for bringing to my attention a book that he thought would speak to this Californian’s attempts to garden in a land with little water. Penelope Hobhouse’s The Gardens of Persia traces the development of gardens in the rainfall-challenged area, beginning with the the earliest known garden for which we have an archaeological record, Cyrus the Great’s gardens at Pasargadae, which date to the 6th century, BCE.

That earliest garden featured a rectangular space divided symmetrically into smaller rectangles by two water courses that intersected at a 90 degree angle. It’s a basic formula that would develop through the centuries into the Islamic, Mughal and Moorish gardens which, in turn, went on to influence garden-making in Europe and beyond.

Cyrus’s garden used water in a way that treated it as a precious resource in a desert land but also showed off the fact that water was available to the owner of the garden, reinforcing the prestige and power of the ruler. Subsequent gardens in Persia continued to strike this balance. They used water in careful, strategic ways, treating it as the rare resource it was, often in narrow channels where evaporation would have been minized under the desert sun. At the same time they highlighted the power of the owner of the garden, and perhaps helped to conflate water’s life-giving powers with legitimacy of the ruler.

Here in San Diego, you can see an interpretation of a Persian-influenced Moorish garden in Balboa Park’s Alcazar Garden. Purportedly “patterned after the gardens of Alcazar Castle in Seville, Spain,” the garden is a 1935 design by local architect Richard Requa, built for the 1935-36 California Pacific International Exposition.

View Larger Map

Although I’ve never been to the Alcázar in Seville, a quick trip to the satellite overview of the original Alcázar gardens on Google Maps reveals the California garden to be a fairly loose interpretation of what you’ll find in Spain. But it retains strong overtones of traditional Persian gardens in its strong symmetry and thrifty use of water. (Garden sightseeing via Google Maps works really well for overviews of large gardens with strong structure. Take a look at Versailles or Isola Bella.)

In the Balboa Park garden each of the intersections of the main central axis and two perpendicular axes is celebrated by a small tiled fountain, six to eight feet across. Neither fountain throws water more than a few inches away from the fountainhead.

With San Diego’s current water restrictions, homeowners can’t have any sort of fountain that shoots water into the air. So even fountains that are as measured in their use of water as these are wouldn’t be permitted. But evaporation and water waste on this style of fountain is so different from what you’d have with civic fountains that are more like unplugged fire hydrants. (Think of the fountains in Las Vegas at Bellagio.) These little Moorish fountains celebrate water, they don’t waste it.

The garden features borders of clipped boxwood that outline the rectangles of the garden beds. Seasonal plantings rotate in an out of these bordered areas. Lavender, cosmos, and Shasta daisies were filling in the central rectangles on this July afternoon, with rudbeckia, penstemon, iresene, cannas, sunflowers and other warm-weather plants on the margins.

Are these plantings historically accurate? With the exception of the lavender, not at all. But chances are that if the Persian rulers were around today, they would used whatever materials were available to them, especially if they were plants that spoke to power and conquest over distant lands. Plants from all over the globe and modern hybrids would only serve to reinforce the viewer’s sense of the ruler’s power.

Penelope Hobhouse makes a similar observation about choice of plant materials in the Persian-influenced gardens at the Generalife in Grenada: “Archaeologists discovered that the garden must originally have been planted with low-growing flowers requiring little soil, although there were some deeper pits obviously made for shrubs, such as myrtle, and orange trees which had been described as growing there in the 16th century. After the excavations the soil was returned to the Acequia Court, and today modern annuals with no historical authenticity give a colorful display.”

If you were wanting to make a historically-correct Persian garden Hobhouse’s text list many other options throughout, including various roses, tulips, and several trees including white poplar, plane trees, plums, apricots, and apples.

Another resource for historical plants would be Ali Akbar Husain’s Scent in the Islamic Garden: A Study of Deccani Urdu Literary Sources, a study that I knew nothing about until I happened to see it sitting on the shelf next to the Hobhouse book in the library. This fairly academic but quite readable book concentrates on Mhugal gardens and provides a long appendix of specifically fragrant plants mentioned in garden texts. Although the focus is on texts from India, plants of of European origin make up a big part of the list.

Many of the selections don’t come as any surprise: several rose species, narcissus, violets, lavender, jasmine, mint, crinum, crocus, lilies, iris. But a couple would be surprising selections for gardens today: one of the stinking corpse flower species (Amorphophallus camanulatus) and cannabis (yes, that cannabis).

[ Lost in the Landscape ]

Category Archives: places

framing the garden view

new huntington chinese garden

a little palm springs hike

destroying smuggler’s gulch

a visit to recon native plants

on the road: cornerstone sonoma (more)

on the road: wine country gardens

on the road: luther burbank’s farm

on the road: visiting california carnivores

gardens from lands with little water

an artist loosed in a garden