Yesterday (April 11) I attended a board meeting of my local district of Association of Professional Landscape Designers (APLD) in Palo Alto. With a little free time before the meeting, I went by Elizabeth Gamble Garden for a quick tour. Gamble Garden is a local oasis of horticulture with two and a half acres of well-tended plants. It is free to the public and open all year. Since they have many mature specimens of all kinds of garden plants (no tropicals yet and I need to volunteer to help), I usually go for a visit at least once a month to see what is in season. Yesterday the first attention-grabbing flowers were the long blooms of Wisteria floribunda and the double ones of Wisteria sinensis.

Another smashing beauty at a far corner is Azara dentata whose yellow flowers are blindingly bright. The fiery new leaves of Pieris japonica below make a scorching color combination, definitely not for the faint-hearted.

Fortunately, or unfortunately for some, other parts of this garden do offer cool respite for this chromatic overload.