[ Lost in the Landscape ]

the huntington desert garden

The late-December light was fad­ing when I headed to the wild and won­der­ful plants that make up the Huntington’s Desert Gar­den. The gar­den dates back many decades and fea­tures some immense spec­i­mens the likes of which you’ll almost never see. But what I love most about the gar­den is that it incor­po­rates these great plants into land­scapes that both honor the plants and use them in strik­ing combinations.

Many aloes were bloom­ing with their dra­matic spikes of hot, bright col­ors. The the­atri­cal light­ing helped to make some of the scenes even more dramatic.

(Be sure to click onthe third image to enlarge it. In its unearthly weird­ness, it’s got to be one of my favorite gar­den pho­tos I’ve ever taken.)

One zone of the gar­den focuses on plants you’d find in Cal­i­for­nia. Here a cre­osote bush serves as a screen for a radi­ant gray-white agave.

And this scene employs the coastal and Chan­nel Island buck­wheat, Saint Catherine’s lace (Eri­o­gonum gigan­teum)–a plant that tech­ni­cally doesn’t come from a desert–with other dry­land plants. The gray-green foliage on all of them helps to unify this diverse planting.

The Hunt­ing­ton is in a warm sub­trop­i­cal area just east of Los Ange­les. That doesn’t mean that it’s warm enough for all of these plants. Patio heaters of the kind that you see out­doors at restau­rants keep plants warm at night in one area of the gar­den. (These are the frigid depths of Decem­ber, after all.)

Now, as much as I was try­ing to focus on the over­all land­scape, I have to share a few pho­tos of indi­vid­ual species that caught my eye.

Look­ing up at a very large Yucca fil­if­era from Mexico…

(There’s an extremely sim­i­lar shot of the exact same plant on the Germanatrix’s post on her visit to this same gar­den at the end of Novem­ber. Check it out: here.)

Two tall palms with immense tree aloes, Aloe bar­berae. At the Hunt­ing­ton the species is iden­ti­fied as A. baine­sii, but the tax­on­o­mists have had a change of heart. I have two of these in my lit­tle front yard, the tallest of them still under twenty feet but still impres­sive at that size. The writeup on this plant says it can hit fifty feet or more. The Hunt­ing­ton spec­i­mens are just about there, I’d guess.

A dynamic and lyri­cal tan­gle of leaves on sev­eral plants of the var­ie­gated form of Agave amer­i­cana… (Homage to some­body… later Willem de Koon­ing? Franz Kline?) Agaves with their per­fect rosettes seem to appeal to the part of our brains that appre­ci­ate sym­me­try and order. This plant­ing sub­verted the expected into a beau­ti­ful mess.

A tall, dense stand of Cleis­to­cac­tus straus­sii…

As we left the Hunt­ing­ton the light that had made the Desert Gar­den extra-interesting was col­or­ing up the flanks of Mount Wil­son and the the rest of the San Gabriels.

Not far away from the Hunt­ing­ton is Pasadena, the site of the annual New Year’s Rose Parade, which should be get­ting under way not long after this post hits the web. (Okay, it’s sort of a lame way to try to segue this post to the topic of New Year’s Day, but–hey!–I had to give it a try.)

Happy New Year’s to all of you, and best wishes for a healthy and pros­per­ous year filled with amaz­ing botan­i­cal highlights.

January 01 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: agaves • aloes • cacti • desert plants • Huntington Library Art Collections and Botanical Gardens • plant combinations • succulents | 11 Comments »

balboa park’s desert garden

Jan­u­ary can be an amaz­ing month for suc­cu­lents and other desert plants. Many aloes and agaves explode into bloom, and plants with ephemeral foliage are green with leaves in ways you don’t often see them.

San Diego’s Bal­boa Park houses one of the prime local col­lec­tion of cacti, suc­cu­lents and other desert dwellers from around the world. The Desert Gar­den, the larger of its two suc­cu­lent gar­dens, was estab­lished in 1976, but many of the plants are senior cit­i­zens much older than the age of the garden.

Aloes star in its Jan­u­ary land­scape, with red and orange torches of flow­ers that dou­ble as hum­ming­bird magnets.

And shown here, lurk­ing in the shad­ows, is one of the local hum­ming­birds, stak­ing its territory.

Among the big, mature spec­i­mens are sev­eral dragon trees, Dra­caena draco. In this first photo, on the near trunk, you can see a red­dish patch where the plant’s red sap has dried. When cut, these plants ooze a fluid that in some Euro­pean leg­ends was pur­ported to be dragon’s blood, hence the plant’s name (draco = dragon).

This is a pub­lic gar­den, and so it’s sub­ject to fund­ing glitches and bat­tles over civic pri­or­i­ties. I’d con­sider the gar­den to be in great con­di­tion con­sid­er­ing those limitations.

One thing I would have loved to have seen, though, would be more plant labels. I encoun­tered so many inter­est­ing species, but very few of them had name tags. I have this thing about need­ing to know the name of a plant–Call me com­pul­sive. But the lack of labels drove me crazy. I real­ize, how­ever, that tags don’t come cheap. And in a wide-open pub­lic gar­den, labels can walk away with pieces of suc­cu­lents in the hands of evil plant addicts.

One of the plants that was labeled was this Natal Bot­tle­brush, Greyia suther­landii. A bit scrappy-looking as a plant, but what great flowers!

Also labeled was the Mada­gas­car ocotillo, Allu­au­dia pro­cera. I loved the spi­ral pat­tern­ing of its spines.

Another prob­lem with this being a pub­lic gar­den is that there are quite a few spec­i­mens where people’s temp­ta­tions to carve their ini­tials in the plant life got the bet­ter of them. This euphor­bia was scarred many times over. But that wasn’t going to stop it from blooming.

After vis­it­ing the gar­den I was sur­prised by how many shots I’d racked up in the cam­era. And for some rea­son, the major­ity of them were ver­ti­cals. Is there some­thing about succulents–particularly the upright-growing kinds that mimic the way a human stands–that scream out for pho­tograph­ing them in an upright orientation?

Some yuc­cas, I think, with spent bloom stems.

Boo­jum trees, Fouquieria colum­naris, native to Baja Cal­i­for­nia. This plant is in the same genus as the Cal­i­for­nia desert’s spec­tac­u­lar ocotillo, which inter­est­ingly isn’t related to the Madas­car ocotillo, above.

Aloes and kalan­choes in bloom.

The main gar­den is a flat, easy stroll over wide decom­posed gran­ite path­ways. As part of a recent expan­sion, the gar­den now also includes this switch­back down into Florida Canyon, also part of Bal­boa Park. The plants along the descent are still young, but should look spec­tac­u­lar in a decade or so.

Not every­one in the world loves cac­tus and suc­cu­lents. They might point to the defen­sive spines many of the plants have, and they might say the sculp­tural shapes of the plants don’t look soft and cozy like leafy shrubs or fra­grant roses. Next to the Desert Gar­den is Bal­boa Park’s rose gar­den. Dur­ing spring­time, thirty sec­onds of walk­ing would take you from the world of cac­tus and suc­cu­lents to a gar­den manic with flow­ers and heavy with the aroma of roses. But on this bright Jan­u­ary day, the adja­cent roses were pruned down to naked stems and pierc­ing thorns. It was the cac­tus and suc­cu­lents that looked warm and welcoming.

The Desert Gar­den is located across Park Boule­vard from the Nat­ural His­tory Museum on Bal­boa Park’s museum row. The gar­den has no walls, no entry fee, and is open 24/7, 365 days of the year.

If the 2.5 acres of the Desert Gar­den isn’t enough of a cac­tus and suc­cu­lent fix, cross Park Boule­vard and take a stroll over to the Bal­boa Park Club, maybe ten min­utes on foot, and take in the parks orig­i­nal 1935 cac­tus gar­den, which, accord­ing to the park’s web­site, was estab­lished “under the direc­tion of [San Diego gar­den­ing leg­end] Kate Ses­sions for the 1935 Cal­i­for­nia Pacific Inter­na­tional Expo­si­tion.” There you’ll find “some of the largest cac­tus and suc­cu­lent spec­i­mens in the Park,” along with a nice col­lec­tion of proteas.

January 11 2009 | Categories: gardening • photography • places • plant profiles | Tags: Balboa Park • Balboa Park Desert Garden • cacti • desert plants • drought-tolerant landscaping • in bloom • succulents | 3 Comments »