gravity’s rainbow

My favorite part of the garden by far was the cycad garden. Ganna Walska put this garden in later in her life. She sold a significant amount of her jewelry to be able to afford the cycads.

This particular cycad is a male of the species Encephalartos woodsii. This is an incredibly rare species and is actually evolutionarily extinct: there are no remaining females.

The last garden we visited was the tropical garden. They’ve done an incredible job creating and maintaining this microclimate. The temperature drops and the humidity rises just a few feet from the cycad garden.

You can see all of my posts about spring break here or just the Lotusland posts here.

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The succulent garden felt strange to me because of the deciduous trees nearby.

One of the oddest gardens was the blue garden. Ganna Walska planted as many foliage plants with blueish foliage as she could find in this garden.

There was an incredible planting of cacti and euphorbs near the main house. This is a spectacular specimen. To the knowledge of the garden, this is the only existing specimen left in the world of this cultivar.

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The topiary garden was fun, but pretty standard.

The main lawn had some very bizarre contrasts - like these huge agaves against a manicured lawn.

Thankfully, we headed back into the shade at this point. I was working on a terrific sunburn. In the shade palm garden, a lot of the plants were fruiting. I haven’t seen many palms and I’ve certainly never seen one fruiting, so I was really excited about this.

The lower bromeliad garden really showed off the epiphytic nature of these guys. Most plantings I’ve seen have them stuck in the ground.

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We walked through the orchards to the gardens surrounding the house.

Then we walked down a path lined with olive trees to a hidden cactus garden.

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The gardeners recently put in this small garden designed to attract beneficial insects so they could cut down on the insecticides they used to deal with pests. The really interesting part of this picture, though, is the tree in the center: a dawn redwood.

The dawn redwood is a very interesting tree with a very interesting story. This is a critically endangered species and is the only species in its genus (Metasequoia). It’s deciduous, too. This is weird. Imagine a pine tree losing its needles every year. This tree was discovered by botanists in the 40s. As a fossil in Japan. A few years later a grove of unidentified trees was found in China. And they turned out to match the fossil. Craziness.

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The water garden used to be a swimming pool. Ganna Walksa, the creator of the garden, kept a narrow lane as a pool and filled the rest with water lilies. We weren’t there at the right time to see them blooming, but it was still a very calm part of the garden.

Near the house, there was a mass planting of Dracena. These are monocots - so more closely related to grass than most trees. They produce no real wood, but still get very large. I love the dichotomous branching.

The fern garden was possibly my favorite part of the garden, so I had a really hard time choosing just one picture to put here. This fiddlehead was just incredible. It was bigger than fist.

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The Japanese garden had a muddy pond, some very well pruned trees and beautiful maples, but I was mostly excited about the camellias. I love these plants, and I haven’t seen one in bloom since I left North Carolina.

The aloe garden was the first truly botanically exciting part of the garden for me.  I had never seen so many different kinds and had no idea of the variety in size and form.  We were also fortunate to arrive when a lot of the aloes were just finishing blooming.  I’d never seen any type of aloe in bloom before, so it was interesting to get a look at its flowers.

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The last morning of our trip, we went to Lotusland. Lotusland is an absolutely incredible garden. Ganna Walska, a mediocre opera singer and incredibly beautiful woman, built it with the money of the men who loved her. This isn’t just a garden. It’s art. We only got to spend a few hours there. I could have spent a few weeks. The entire garden is arranged into a series of smaller gardens, often hidden by large mass plantings, so walking into each one is a surprise.

She chose plants from almost everywhere in the world and she chose some of the most interesting she could find. She loved the bizarre and oddly textured. We all got in trouble for stepping off of the paths.

We took hundreds of pictures here, so I’m going to post only about a few gardens at a time.

The visitor’s center, where the tour starts, is surrounded by an Australian garden with some pretty bizarre plants. I was very impressed with the flower spikes of this grass.

The main road through the garden has the largest mass succulent planting I’ve ever seen.

Tomorrow, the Japanese Garden!  All the posts about spring break are found here.

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