back at the ranch

All day long this past work- and appointment-filled Wednesday I clung to the idea of fitting in a short visit to Rancho Los Alamitos. I’d heard there were some changes with the barns, and there was a new foal, all reasons enough to go. And in late February the noisette roses just might be in early bloom. Plus this was Wednesday, one of the weekdays they’d be open, unlike Monday or Tuesday. I stubbornly held the idea in the foreground of my much-distracted brain, while repeated interruptions and crises did their best to submerge it deep into the background throughout the day. But an hour before close at 5 p.m. I found myself triumphantly slipping a $5 bill into the donation box and sprinting off to find the cactus garden while there was still light. This roughly 8-acre remnant of the huge land grant given to a loyal Spanish soldier in 1784, the genesis story for my hometown, is just 4 miles from my house, but sometimes it feels like you have to move worlds to fit in a visit. But when you do go, what you park behind the gates that insulate the rancho from the press of suburbs, freeways, and CSULB/Long Beach State University is, pardon the cliche, not so much a car but a time machine.

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The 19th century adobe ranch house is thought to be the oldest domestic building still standing in Southern California. The twin Moreton Bay Figs have shaded the ranch since 1887.

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Staghorn ferns near the base of a palm, backlit scarlet bougainvillea in the distance

What always floors me about the rancho, gifted by its last owners, the Bixby family, to the city of Long Beach in the ’60s, is its humility. With all that oil money to spend in the ’20s (discovered a few years after a drought killed off the largest cattle ranch in the U.S. — long story), Florence Bixby (1898-1961) somehow resisted the fashion of turning the ranch into a depot for Old World antiquities. It is a place fiercely vernacular and true. She may have hired the best landscape architects in the ’20s and ’30s to shape the gardens, like the Olmsted Brothers and Florence Yoch, but the materials were homespun simple, local. Florence Bixby, always credited as the main design influence over the house and garden as they appear today, didn’t loot temples for marble or send out legions of plant hunters for the rarest of the rare, and yet Sunset includes it among 13 of the best public gardens in the U.S. And the rancho’s simplicity can’t be explained away with an argument that Florence was a simpleton who didn’t get out much. The painter Mary Cassatt visited for years, and the home was filled with art. (To put the rancho’s embrace of all things West in context, Cassatt’s brother, Alexander Cassatt, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, built New York’s magnificent but doomed Penn Station in 1910 based on the Roman baths of Caracalla. The outrage over Penn Station’s demolition in the mid ’60s pretty much launched the modern historical preservation movement, which was right around the time the rancho left private ownership and was gifted to the public.)

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The front lawn. The small gate on the left leads to a secret garden adjacent to the house’s interior courtyard. The noisettes weren’t in bloom yet, but the rambling banks rose was, seen just to the right of the clump of bird of paradise and elsewhere in the garden.

While other members of Florence’s tribe, the 1 percenters of her day, hid the working man origins of their wealth, Florence embraced them. This is the modest home of someone with a high sensitivity to the pitfalls of hubris, someone with a resolutely austere but gracious cast of mind. Above all, this is a home, not a showcase for wealth. Florence’s home. And you can still feel it in every footfall. And I so wish they’d occasionally list it for rent with airbnb. (just kidding, Florence!)

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The interior courtyard that horse-shoes behind the house.

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A wall and pool enclosing the courtyard.

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Two big evergreen vines, the Easter Lily vine, Beaumontia grandiflora, and the Cup of Gold vine, Solandra maxima, are trained along the low roofline. For the moment, the smaller white flowers of the beaumontia are being outmaneuvered by the flamboyance of the cup of gold vine in bloom.

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On the opposite side of the house is the Music Patio.

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Vintage pottery atop the walls of the Secret Garden.

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A white flash of the horse Bristol visible just behind the fence. The barn was moved, at great cost and effort, back to its original location. The now one-year-old foal Preston and its mother Valentina were moved out during renovations. Both are snug inside the barn again. Trees were thinned, leaving those the Bixby family planted, Schinus molle, California pepper trees, to remain.

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The last of the Shire horses, the breed that powered the ranches of the 19th century.

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Cypress Steps and patio

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The rose garden. (What else is there to say about a rose garden in winter, other than maybe “Nice box hedging”?)

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A portion of the garden designed by Frederick Law Olmsted.  (correction:  The Olmsted Brothers, sons of Frederick Law Olmsted — thanks, Cathy!)

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The geranium walk designed by Florence Yoch.

Yoch’s handiwork can at times seem so spare, so simple that viewers might wonder why clients didn’t think of certain devices themselves.”
(The New York Times)

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The Olmsted Brothers’ oleander walk connects the rose garden to the cypress steps. The oleanders succumbed to a pest and have since been replaced, possibly by mulberry, but I couldn’t find a reference.

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The tennis court. No pool, but a tennis court. I know I’m overly reading into the landscape as psychological profile, but doesn’t that spell “Protestant work ethic” in bold letters?

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An entry to the tennis court.

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The grape arbor runs the length of the tennis court and leads at one end to the cactus garden and the geranium and oleander walks at the other.

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The flagstone path leads, if I’m oriented correctly, to the south lawn and the giant Moreton bay figs.

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In the Cactus Garden, looking at the fencing of the tennis court.

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William Hertrich, the first curator of the Huntington Desert Garden, worked with Florence on the Cactus Garden.

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The new educational center, finished last spring, has images of the plants of the rancho on its walls, including Agave franzosinii.

I’ll leave you in the cactus garden to find your way back to where you parked your time machine.

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More photos and information on current events can be found on the Rancho’s Facebook page and in this article by Suzanne Muchnic for The Los Angeles Times.

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Posted in agaves, woody lilies, design, garden ornament, garden travel, garden visit, pots and containers, succulents | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Modernism Week in Palm Springs

It’s Modernism Week in Palm Springs, so what architectural gem did I visit? A Wexler steel house? Maybe a Neutra?
Nope, but I did visit a cactarium, the world’s first.

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The cactarium belongs to the Moorten Botanical Garden, a small, idiosyncratic, family-run botanical garden right off the main drag in Palm Springs. If you veer left and take East Palm Canyon Drive, you run into a strip of hipster hotels like Ace Hotel. But if you keep right on South Palm Canyon Drive, you’ll find Moorten’s and sights like these.

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The legendary Hollywood-Palm Springs connection insinuates itself even into a small botanical garden. Its founder, Chester “Cactus Slim” Moorten, was one of the original Keystone Cops.

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Leaving the small, quonset hut-like cactarium for the main garden, San Jacinto Mountains in the background.

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The enthusiastic, mad love for desert plants permeates every inch of this little garden.

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Palm Springs in February is a glorious place to be. Temps reached just 87 degrees. The air was fresh and sweet, a marked change from our “hard” port air. If we go back before summer, we’ll take in Sunnylands too. Modernism Week extends to February 23, 2014, and there are still tickets available to some events. We lucked into last-minute tickets to a lecture by landscape designer Maureen Gilmer, entitled “The Neglected Palette.” (Some of what she discussed included her take on old-school, hand-drawn designs versus auto-CAD, which can be read in an article she wrote here.) Ms. Gilmer is the author of “Palm Springs-Style Gardening,” and you can see what inspires her from her Pinterest board here.

Posted in agaves, woody lilies, design, garden travel, garden visit, succulents | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Bloom Day February 2014

I wonder if I’d get tired of a garden with nothing but chartreuse flowers for months on end. I suppose it’s possible.

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Helleborus argutifolius. Tough and beautiful, doesn’t complain, doesn’t expect any special treatment. All stellar attributes. Incredibly promiscuous in the seeding-around department, but nobody’s perfect.

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Euphorbia rigida is also full of similarly positive attributes but only lightly reseeds.

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This euphorbia is an absolute terror as far as reseeding, but again it’s hard to say no to chartreuse. (Hard to say no to euphorbias in general.) It’s either E. niciciana (Euphorbia seguieriana ssp.niciciana) or E. nicaeensis. I remember buying it years ago as E. niciciana, but I could be mistaken. I know I’ll regret not weeding out these few plants, but they make even February seem lush.

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Echeveria agavoides is possibly even more charming in bloom, if that’s possible

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Poppy time. The first blooms of Papaver rupifragum

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A gazania just starting to close up shop as the sun was setting.

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Gaillardia ‘Oranges & Lemons’ in need of a cutback for spring.

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In the front garden, new blooms on the enormous patch of dyckia. The lack of rain has impacted the snail population to the garden’s advantage this winter. Snails love dyckia spears like I love asparagus spears.

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I’m including the Brachysema praemorsum ‘Bronze Butterfly’ because technically it is blooming, but the red claw-like blooms are both virtually invisible as well as insignificant.

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This salvia looks very promising, a cross of Salvia pulchella with Salvia involucrata. My source, Annie’s Annuals, thanks Strybing Arboretum for this purportedly compact salvia.

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The Phlomis lanata I planted in fall are beginning to bloom. Very excited to see how this fairly compact phlomis with the common name of Pygmy Jerusalem Sage fits into the scheme of things.

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Lavandula multifida has been in steady, nonstop bloom since its fall planting.

Snow, mud, or otherwise, we all want to know how February is treating you. As always, Carol at May Dreams Gardens collects our stories.

Posted in Bloom Day, succulents | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

mon petit chou



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Members of the cabbage family were especially alluring at my community garden yesterday. No wonder “my little cabbage” is a French expression of affection.

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This dry, sunny winter seems to agree with them.

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Such a good-looking family. Exquisite chartreuse florets of the Romanesco broccoli.

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All photos taken of neighboring gardens. My little patch this winter is sans petit chou.
I’m still traumatized by a run-in with the cabbage moth years ago, but seeing all these so beautifully (and organically) grown gives me courage.

Posted in edibles | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

echeverias in a vase

Valentine’s Day quiz:

A small vase holds the short stem of a ruffly rosette that’s not a flower. What can it be?
a) some kind of kale
b) I don’t know, but whatever it is it’s monstrous and obscene
c) an overgrown, long-necked echeveria


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Not much of a quiz, because of course it’s an echeveria with about half of its stem trimmed off. They do grow leggy in these parts. I’ll probably root these in sand in a few days, but for now am enjoying how these little vases are managing to support such top-heavy bouquets. The vase itself is what’s really quiz-worthy. In fact, they’re not vases at all, but actually something brought out in the ’70s called the “Uncandle.” The Pyrex name on the glass was the tipoff that this barbell-shaped glassware had some mysterious, heat-tolerant purpose in a past life. I was given a couple as a holiday present (thank you, Dustin!) and was told they were for forcing small bulbs. I later found a few more at a local thrift shop.

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It could have used a wash, but I was out the door. So smudgy fingerprints and all, this Valentine’s Day’s bouquet comes in a retro blast from the ’70s…the Uncandle.

Posted in cut flowers, succulents | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Patrick Blanc in “Contemporary Designers’ Own Gardens”

I’ve been scanning this book by Barbara Baker since December and haven’t come near to finishing it. There are two reasons to stop reading a book; either because you find it uninteresting or because you find it too interesting. Too stimulating. Special in the sense that it must be saved up for just the right moment to absorb in unmolested and concentrated appreciation. Since those are rare moments, it’s no surprise that I’m surrounded by piles of half-read books saved up as a future treat, like this one. Ms. Baker’s book opens with a portrait of Patrick Blanc, who I knew next to nothing about other than he is French, has green hair, and pretty much pioneered vertical gardens, those soil-less, engineering marvels that conceal their artificial, life-sustaining infrastructure behind a seductive tapestry of plants. With my laissez-faire approach to gardens, it’s not something I’ve been tempted to try at home, and if it wasn’t for Ms. Baker’s excellent book I would have missed out on knowing more about this botanist provacateur’s goal to take plants out of the “garden” proper and grow them where we really live, work, and play. This quote from his partner Pascal goes a long way toward filling in a portrait of this enigmatic artist:

Yet Patrick likes jungles and cities, but not gardens! His argument is this: ‘If you live in a city, you have to decide to take time, or lose time, in order to go into a garden. When you have a vertical garden, you make no decision; it is on your way, on the pavement or by the subway. It is more similar to walking in mountains or jungle and being presented with plants clinging to a cliff by a waterfall, and it is spectacular. In a horizontal garden, the guy who makes it decides where you go. He decides the paths, and where you have to sit. A vertical garden is more like a picture where it is your own eye which decides whether you are more interested in a triangular leaf or a frond.”


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Blanc’s three abiding passions have been water, fish, and plants. For a man who clearly tolerates as little separation as possible from the natural world, an aquarium must be the “floor” to his office. Photo found here.

http://www.dwell.com/outdoor/slideshow/7-great-green-walls#http://www.dwell.com/outdoor/slideshow/7-great-green-walls photo indoor-gardens-paris-france-blanc-patrick-dimanche-house-wall-aerial.jpg

Work by Blanc for friends in Paris.
The 20-by-23-foot interior wall is a canvas of the living with some 150 tropical, low-light species assembled in harmony. It begins as a field of texture 
near the ground, then runs through violet and amber arcs of flowers and other ruddy blooms, broadening out near the ceiling into trees that overhang the room like a sheltering forest.” – from Dwell

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I’d never thought of vertical gardens before as an impulse to deconstruct gardens as separate and discrete places we visit, enter, leave behind, then long to enter again. That’s so 20th century. Blanc craves an immediate, immersive experience beyond such spacial constraints and temporal boundaries. More than the vertical gardens themselves, which are tricky to build and maintain, it is Blanc’s insistence that plants become integrated into the dailiness of our lives that I find so inspiring. In such ecologically challenging times, why not deploy them everywhere we can, even on buildings and walls, like urgent messages in foliar graffiti? Why not aid and abet their escape from gardens and let them loose to curtain the streets and alleys of our cities, where they’re needed most?

Other artists profiled in the book include familiar names like Fernando Caruncho, Isabelle Greene, Dan Pearson, Tom Stuart-Smith, but it’s also been a source of introduction to many previously unknown to me. And for a garden book, it has a refreshing reliance on in-depth interviews and text as well as excellent photos.

Posted in artists, books, design | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

aloe, unidentified

I foolishly took down a listing on the blog of “Recently Purchased Plants,” because its length was getting embarrassing. Now I find I’ve simply traded one annoying sensation for another, and that is chagrin at not knowing the name of this beautiful, color-changing aloe.


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a very early morning on January 25, still greeny-yellow

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on February 7, in full peachy regalia

All along I thought this is where I planted Aloe capitata var. gneissicola, which blooms in distinctive hanging clusters, not spires.
If rummaging through the stash of old plant tags this weekend brings up a likely name, I’ll be sure to update.

Posted in succulents | Tagged | 3 Comments

riad means garden

It’s February, so thoughts naturally turn to travel, escape, adventure. But I’m not going anywhere at the moment, so I look harder, stare longer, at local scenes, hoping to squeeze something new and startling out of familiar sights. But walking or biking around town, craving some inspiration from a jewel-box of a front garden, is more often an exercise in frustration than inspiration. In low-rainfall climates like mine, where gardens are in use year-round, they are frequently concealed behind walls, hedges, fences. This is an ancient impulse, in thrall to instincts dating back to the first riad. (See The New York Times images of some of the riads of Taroudant.) Here at home we’ve gotten into the habit of referring to our house and garden as “the compound.” Not in a crazy sect sense, but in the sense of sanctuary. Like the ancient riads of Morocco. The word itself is Arabian for garden. So to everyone whose high walls prevent my enjoyment of your luscious gardens as I pass by, I get it. I really do. And I should, because I’m working on my own riad too.


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Dar al Hossoun, Taroudant, Morocco

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Simon Watson for The New York Times

Posted in climate, design, Occasional Daily Photo | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

shelves again

It’s true, I’m fixated on shelves. I love how they can lend a veneer of intention to one’s magpie tendencies.
With the spring plant sales not far off, I’m getting ready to make some new shelving to hang on the east fence.

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possible raw materials for future shelves

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past shelf experiments

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More past experiments, these with the wire racks under consideration for the current project. But I don’t want to take up much ground space this time.

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A recent experiment. Any plants on these hanging shelves will always need drainage trays to protect the wood.
And I’ve always been unreliable where drainage trays are concerned, so back again to the wire racks.
The plumbing pipe rack that we used to display stuff at the flea market is what put this useful hardware on my radar in the first place.
So I’m leaning toward plumbing hardware as the framework for wire racks.

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photo found at awelltraveledwoman

And I’m finding inspiring examples of it everywhere.

http://www.designsponge.com/2014/01/before-after-a-stunning-transformation-for-an-upstate-new-york-inn.html#more-191745 photo tophat-8.jpg

photo found at designsponge

http://www.desiretoinspire.net/blog/2013/8/7/double-dipping.html photo 4-flstudiopepe.jpg

desiretoinspire

I’m very drawn to these free-standing screens/shelves in that precise shade of green.

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And I could be easily talked into anything with wheels (lost the tumblr link).

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Not DIY but very clean, with a small footprint. weekday carnival via sfgirlbybay

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A rebar grid for pots has lots of potential. Photo found at desire to inspire

Yes, indeed, spring is going to need more shelves.

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Hardenbergia violaceae, the Happy Wanderer


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This smallish evergreen vine, also known as the Happy Wanderer, is in bloom around town, always a surprising sight for February. It’s a tough little number in the pea family from eastern Australia that lays low all year, unnoticed, in hard-scrabble conditions in chain-link-fenced yards, then bursts into improbably purple bloom late winter. I feel sadistically compelled to share a musical association that comes to mind when this cheerful vine is in bloom, a tune I sang with earnest enthusiasm in grade school called, what else, the Happy Wanderer. I’d always assumed that one of the teachers at my school wrote it herself, jotting it down about five minutes before music class on the desk blotter, but I see now that it’s been a favorite of Boy Scouts everywhere, not to mention a beloved folk song of Germany.

Sample lyrics:

Oh, may I go a-wandering
Until the day I die!
Oh, may I always laugh and sing,
Beneath God’s clear blue sky!

I think there may have been some yodeling involved too. For the melody styled by the accordion, have a listen here.

(You’re welcome.)


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A nice little vine that, in my mind, will forever be intertwined with yodeling.

The Muppets covered it here.


Australian Native Plants Nursery, long at the top of my list for a day trip, provides pertinent stats on this vine here.

Posted in plant nurseries, Plant Portraits | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment