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 […]
Schefflera taiwaniana (台湾鹅掌柴) is a new evergreen shrub from high mountains of Taiwan. The unique thing about this elegant beauty is that it is much hardier than your typical house plant Scheffleras (S. arboricola and S. actinophylla ). Now Monrovia Nursery may have been too optimistic to give it a cold tolerance rating of USDA […]
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 […]
My koi-keeping hobby has taken me to Cherry Hill Koi near the famously creepy Winchester Mystery House and the trendy Santana Row shopping area. And the most exciting discovery is a big specimen of Magnolia X alba, which I called the king of all fragrant plants in a previous blog entry. For a long time, […]
Recently I have been driving along Pruneridge Road in Santa Clara on Saturdays, and look what I found at one of the otherwise nondescript frontyards.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Cactus and Succulent Society of San Jose had its annual sale last Saturday (April 2). Last time I attended this show was in 2006, and I remember the big crowd in a buying frenzy and all the fascinating show plants. Now I am happy to report that the show has kept its tradition very […]
A little over a week ago, one of my most treasured plants started to bloom for the first time. It is a compact cultivar of Clivia miniata from China. This plant started as a gift seed from my mother back in the fall of 2007. A few more seeds came in the same batch but […]