my garden below

Quite a few people commented that I hadn't shown my garden before....Well, I think I have, but it was a long time ago....And I may not have shown it in relation to people being in it, at the time, as I did in my last post with the photo's of Wendy & Mark...

So, I thought I would post some pictures of the garden below taken from above---me on my deck---looking down at different plants, as well as from down there and looking up at my house---the picture above was taken way down in the garden looking up at a beautiful Euphorbia Cooperii... This is the view from the South East corner of the garden looking up at my house...The big plant on the right is a very small Saquaro that is about two hundred years old....They are very very slow growing...about one half inch a year, if that! And here I am in the South West corner looking up at my house...It is very hard to get a real sense of how big the garden really is when you are in these corners...cause you really cannot see that there is so much more too the 'whole'..... This picture above was taken by me looking down on the garden from my deck...it is just a small portion of the right side as you are looking down...You can see this bronze statue of a Ram towards the lower center of the picture....And just below is a closer look of this really beautiful piece of sculpture.... And here below is a picture of a beautiful Agave...there are hundreds of different kinds of Agave's...this particular one gets very very big so you need a lot of room for it to grow and it is a beautiful rich green color.... So, when you are standing up on my deck, which runs the length of my whole house, you can look down to the left side and see this Date Palm, below....This was a 'volunteer'...I didn't plant this---some bird did! You know what I mean? Some bird dropped a seed or two and Volia! There is a Date Palm growing there... When I first started my Cactus Garden 20 years ago this was so tiny I thought it would never grow enough to be recognizeable. Well, it is not really BIG yet, but compared to what it was twenty years ago, it is miraculous! And it won't ever have dates, but they call it a Date Palm, anyway! I think it is extremely gorgeous! Here is a beautiful Euphorbia Amak Verigated with an abundance of flowers and you can almost see the necter oozing out of them...Incredibly beautiful flowers and teeny tiny, too...

Here is a cluster of plants which are many different sizes and types...But what I love about this picture is that you can see the city behind all these plants....and there to the right of center of the picture is some of that 'visual polution' I've talked about many times...I just love these plants so much. They are so sculptural and the variety of greens and blues in these plants is phenomonal!

And here below are a couple of Aloe's in silouette, with the mid city beyond...you can see some of the buildings on Wilshire Blvd. and Park La Brea and beyond that the horizon and the ocean.
That building in the foreground is a large apartment building on Hollywood Blvd. just after the city part of Hollywood Blvd. ends, and the residential part begins....My first and only apartment was on Hollywood Blvd. where I lived for three years until I found my house and I've been here, ever since.... And here above, a gaggle of Euphorbia Amak's Verigated with a darling Morning Dove sitting right in the middle, there....I have a lot of these plants because they all came from the mother plant! They have grown incredibly and I love that! I also love that the birds just lite wherever they please....delightful! And those ball-like things on these Euphorbia's are the seed pods, btw.

And here is another dear Morning Dove sitting on a small tree that hasn't bloomed yet.... I love that we can see his eye so clearly....and behind him is Park La Brea and another big building on Wilshire Blvd.

And one more bird sitting on the Waterful Sculpture partaking of a bath and a bit of a drink, too.... And just to remind you what started this post....it was that first picture of Wendy and Mark ascending the middle staircase down in the garden...And here it is again.... And this is just the middle of the garden from a quarter of the way down to not quite all the way down....but there is so much on either side that you can't really see in any one photograph...well, possiby in a panoramic shot, but not even then, I'm afraid...the scope of it is just too big. It covers the whole hill below my house....

Part 2 of this post will be coming along next time....



More to come....