I saw cactus one winter

Over the past decade I've made several trips to Los Angeles for business, but most of those trips were during spring or summer. Only one time did I leave the cold and snow of wintry St. Louis and get to enjoy the sunny warmth of southern California: in late January 2006. Luckily my wife and I planned ahead and booked an extra day so we could do something fun, and we chose to visit The Getty Center.

Perhaps January isn't the best time of year to visit, but we were more than pleased with the weather, and spent a really enjoyable few hours touring the museum and gardens before heading to the airport.

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It was probably the time of year, but the plants that really made the biggest impression on me were the succulents and cactus in the gardens and surrounding grounds. I had never seen a mass planting of any cactus before, and there were several here.

The textures and colors are wonderful!

The Getty Center is up on the top of a hill (or is it a small mountain?), overlooking the 405 freeway. You can see it in the background:

It's easy to forget the outside world while you're here.

All of the above photos were taken in the Cactus Garden at the Center, which you can only view from a distance. (For some reason they though it wouldn't be a good idea to let people mingle with these plants.)

The Central Garden is where you can get up-close and personal with plants. There were a lot of non-spiny succulents that caught my eye:

This is a beautiful combination.

Actually, that last one may have had some spines -- not sure. There were smaller scale succulents too:

Not sure if these are Sempervivums or Echeverias.

Echeveria. If I grew this I'd have to bring it indoors in the winter.

There was a good variety of plants, most (all?) of which are not cold-hardy enough for me to grow in the ground and expect to survive the winter. Some really beautiful plant combinations though.

I like the curvy snake-like leaves in this one.

There were plenty of non-succulent flowering plants too, in bloom even though it was January:

I imagine this is a hummingbird magnet

I wish I knew what these were. I love the blooms!

I think what made this afternoon so special was that most of the plants were unknown to me. For instance, I have no idea what this next plant is, but I love it:

When you have no idea what a plant is, it's pretty difficult to look it up. Is it a reed of some sort? I'm hoping somebody who lives and gardens in California will be able to help me out here.

Even though that trip was five years ago, every winter about this time I look over the photos again and fondly remember our warm, sunny afternoon in the gardens of The Getty Center.
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