Interesting Details at Getty Villa

For those who do not know, Getty Museum hosts a world-class collection of Western Arts in two locations, one is the sleek and modern Getty Center overlooking the Los Angeles basin, and the other is the Getty Villa, the original musuem on the Pacific coast in Malibu. A few weeks ago, I visited both, with […]

Gamble Garden Tour 2011

Today and tomorrow (April 29-30) are the Gamble Garden Spring Tour days. I signed up early this year and joined the mostly female crowd to see five beautiful gardens in Palo Alto today. Ever since my plant interests shifted to the more exotic groups a few years ago, I have been skipping this event since […]

Wave Garden in Point Richmond

The season of garden tour is upon us and I am already getting a head start with a trip to the Wave Garden last Sunday (April 10) organized by our venerable Bay Area Horticultural Group aka The Hortisexuals. Point Richmond is definitely a diamond in the rough. The troubled reputation of the city of Richmond […]

Presidio Habitats Exhibition

Last Sunday (April 3, 2011) I joined a small group for a guided tour of the Habitats Exhibition at the Presidio in San Francisco. This is an outdoor art exhibition with a theme of designed habitats for wildlifes that are currently here and those that once lived here. It is sponsored by FOR-SITE foundation and […]

2011 San Francisco Garden Show

I went to the SF Garden Show last Sunday (3/27) to help man the Hot Plant Picks booth. The crowd was big and the show gardens were very excellent again. Here are some of my favorite gardens: First is a show garden sponsored by Filoli and built by the Garden Route Company. The fuzzy green […]

Garden of Flowing Fragrance

In early May, I was fortunate to get invited by the Huntington Botanical Garden to give a talk about Classical Chinese Gardens in Suzhou. While over there, I went back to visit the Classical Chinese Garden on site, Liu Fang Yuan (流芳园) The Garden of Flowing Fragrance.

In Memory of My Old Garden

It has been terribly busy in the last few months since we are moving to a bigger home. We have put up our old home for sale and it is almost certain that it will be sold in the next month or so. When we first bought it in 1999, the backyard was 1000 square […]

New Ancient Plant Garden

Sorry if there is any confusion, but my topic today is a new garden of ancient plants at the San Francisco Botanical Garden near its north entrance . I happened upon this garden after I took my brother to the California Academy of Sciences last month. Even after a tour that is too brief, I […]

Trip to Beijing Part 2: 7th China Flower Expo

A good way to get over jetlag is to follow the local time schedule with lots of physical activities, and I did just that by going to the 7th China Flower Expo the next day after I landed in Beijing. This once-every-four-year event is the Olympic Games of the Chinese horticultural industry. A brand new […]

Filoli

My son had a play-date last Sunday afternoon (5/24) and my wife said that we have not visited a garden together for quite some time. I guess I must have been really good in my previous life to be this blessed, so we decided to go visit Filoli. For those of you who do not […]