I look out at the tousled birds at the feeder and frozen snow covering the ground. It’s a good time to take a look back at the 95° week I spent in southern California last June attending the American Public Gardens Association’s 2008 general conference.

Treasure of Sierra San Gabriel Mountains hiking tour, Monday, June 23.

This morning we head eastward from Pasadena on the Foothill Freeway. Beside us are mountains we will be heading into for a short botanical hike.  It’s blindingly sunny. The coach exits the freeway and climbs a long, winding road stopping at a sign pointing west that announces “Mt. Baldy Ranch – Cow Canyon Saddle – Elevation 4527.” Despite the sun, it’s comfortable up here, not quite a mile high. Whitish rocky mountains (so white it looks like dry snow in my photos) are dotted with coniferous trees, greener on the north faces.  What looked to me like pure limestone I later learn is marble.

Hugh spikes of Chaparral yucca (Yucca whipplei) flowers—reaching over eight feet tall—are a highlight on the sunny slopes.  Looking down toward the south we see a coarse ravine, a carved channel from the outflow of the falls we are slowly approaching.  Scrubby, hazy hills descend farther to the south and west, back toward the megalopolis of LA.  As we walk westward, we see the conifers are Cupressus and Pinus ponderosa and Pinus jeffreyi.  Also, there’s young Calocedrus decurrens  – a California Incense-cedar right where it hails from!  Our guide, Bart O’Brien of Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, points out evidence to the east of the recent year’s wildfire (a lot less green and seeming like a landslide waiting to happen when  it rains). We reach the falls. Next to the water—but on perfectly dry rock—are blooming Aquilegia formosa and grassy Muhlenbergia californica. Back along the road, beautiful tall spikes of the lavender-tubed  Penstemon spectabilis catch our eyes, At the bottom of a slope, the upright-facing  yellow-pantalooned Dicentra chrysantha with fuzzy grey stems and leaves dance above some brush in the morning shade. Tight clumps of tiny Heuchera rubescens with 3-inch whitish flower spikes grow out of rock cut along the road.  Sprouting here and there out of massive rock are individual plants of colorful Mimulus aurantiacus (this is a subshrub that thrives in dry sites – not to be confused with those hybrid annuals that demand moist soils and might last about two weeks before melting in the humidity of summer back home). 

Huntingdon Library and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, Tuesday afternoon:

The latest addition to this spectacular complex of gardens nestled on rolling hills south of Pasadena is their brand-spanking-new Chinese “Garden of Flowing Fragrance (Lui Fang Yuan),” a recreation of the Ming Dynasty Administrator’s Garden. As you enter through the gate you think no expense has been spared (although it was emphasized by our guides that this huge project “was completed on time and under budget”).  No detail was missed:  Marketing and fundraising campaigns were conducted in Chinese as well as English. When funds reached their goal, artisans from China traveled to Pasadena to build it, teaming up with Americans who did not share their language and tradition of building gardens “with a painter’s eye”, and couldn’t read their Mandarin Chinese written, metric plans. Interpreters were employed to team with the artisans.  (This included those translating into Spanish for a good share of the workers involved.)  Built with structural steel to make the bridges and pavilions and walls last one hundred years, another challenge was “masking” these U.S. structural integrity standards with wood, masonry, tile and stone. The amazing result is in the cut stone and tile details – as well as in the beautiful views across water to bridges, rocks and land that you might recognize as traditionally Chinese.  (I marvel at such a project being conducted and funded in this moment.).

Continuing through the various gardens I notice that the ubiquitous San Gabriel Mountains make a hazy backdrop.  My affection for trees draws me to huge, beauteously barked Eucalyptus trunks.  Not far from those, a fellow attendee points out the Phytolacca dioica (ombu) tree, a strange work of nature with its many small trunks emerging from a swollen base.  (This fat-bottom feature is considered a water storage adaptation, since this tree-like herbaceous perennial  is native to the dry grassland pampas of South America). It comes to mind that it is botanically the same genera as pokeweed, the eastern U.S. native weed that the birds continue to plant under the telephone wires in my yard (and is supposedly edible when its young shoots emerge, but becomes deadly as they expand into an herbaceous reddish-purple-stemmed “tree”).  

Stunned by the strange beauty, I stumble into the Rose Garden, celebrating its 100th anniversary and in bloom despite weekend temperatures that hovered near 100° F; and not a speck of foliar disease in sight. It’s a stone’s throw from Pasadena’s Rose Bowl Parade route.  Along the paths stand the tall, straight, smooth whitish-gray trunks of Ficus columnaris; at first, when I saw these trees on walks around Pasadena, I thought  they were Magnolia grandiflora; so what do I know?  Not too far away there is an Itea yunnanensis with its long tails of flowers, not yet in bloom, at the tips (and it’s a Heronswood plant, something I do recognize!).  Near the Library, I note another very unfamiliar scene – beautiful pink tubular flowers blooming on a wide spreading tree labeled Brachychiton discolor (Queensland lacebark).  Must be one of those ubiquitous Australian natives that finds it comfy here.

But I soon come upon the bulk of the crowd, congregating at the Huntington’s renowned  Desert Garden – one of the oldest and largest collections of cacti and succulents in the world.  Catching quite a few of my fellow APGA members’ attention is a sprawling cactus labeled “Creeping devil,” something that looks sort of  like spiky, scary sausages lying on the ground.  Inviting seating for the masochists among us are the five hundred golden barrel cacti, Echinocactus grusonii  (should that be “gruesome-ii”?).  Seriously, I find it reassuring that here is at least one garden that can be considered “sustainable” and isn’t stretching the limits of local water resources.

Dinner at Descanso Gardens, Tuesday evening:

Garden history often provides an education that is broader than you might at first assume.  I love the name of the local jurisdiction in which this garden is set (La Canada Flintridge, home of NASA’s  Jet Propulsion Lab), as well as the meaning of the original name (“Rancho del Descanso” or “Ranch of Rest”) bestowed on it by the former estate’s founder, E. Manchester Boddy, publisher of the Los Angeles Daily News (a tabloid-style paper that ceased publication by the early 1960s).  The estate’s 150 acres had never been developed until Boddy acquired the land in 1937.  Not just a newspaper baron, Boddy was an amateur horticulturist with an interest in plants of Asian origin. In 1942 Mr. Boddy purchased from Japanese American nurserymen a striking total of 100,000 camellia shrubs (just before the nursery owners and their families were interned by the U.S. government).  Hence, Descanso showcases their Camellia Forest – currently North America’s largest camellia collection – which is still thriving under the protection of a remnant California live oak (Quercus agrifolia) forest!  This collection alone includes more than 30,000 camellia plants representing more than 650 camellia taxa (species, varieties, cultivars and hybrids), all growing on 20 acres. Many of these camellias are more than 20 feet in height. (I shiver from the cold—even indoors—close my eyes and imagine the sea of pink and red and white dotting these broadleaf evergreens under those craggy, broad-spreading oaks right now, in the midst of camellia season.) 

The current public garden was created thanks to a dedicated group of local “volunteers and philanthropists” who formed a few years after Boddy sold it to the County of L.A. in 1953. (For all its sprawl and paved surfaces and huge population, that must have been one wealthy – or very lucky, or very forward-thinking  – county!)  To me, Descanso Gardens – a place of rest, education and nature for that restless L.A. population – is impressive not only for its gardens and unique setting “in a natural bowl in the San Rafael hills,” but because it has succeeded as a public garden thanks to local residents with a strong sense of purpose and volunteer spirit.