My favorite place to study
Spring break, day 5: Lotusland part 6
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.
Wise
Weekly Top 5
Thievery Corporation – Versions
The Beatles – The Beatles 1
Metric – Old World Underground, Where Are You Now
Ani DiFranco – Not a Pretty Girl
Graduation 2008
Spring break, day 5: Lotusland part 5
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.
Spring Break, day 5: Lotusland part 4
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.