Aloe*N Garden

We needed to get away and the only way we could do it safely was by driving down to Santa Barbara. We stayed at the Belmond  Encanto  and visited the Santa Barbara Botanical garden. Did you know that all of Santa Barbara is like a large garden. The Aloes and Agaves are crazy. What I loved as well were the rock formations and the beautiful sandstone rocks in all the front yards. The poppy field at the Botanical garden was really stunning.  Our little bungalow. Oh hi. Just walking down the street on someone's front yard. The California Poppy Meadow  A moment or repose  Wait lets go back to the meadow. Note to self, buy poppy seeds for the hill back home. Lets give this a standing ovation. Bravo!!! What do they feed these things? The heated salt water pool overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Who was this lady? Damn, I thought I was crazy but this lady took it to a whole new level. Sometimes it's hard for me to walk away. I see a plant and I want to give it a home. Ruth Bancroft's garden is several acres and literally has thousands of plants. I think I literally died and then went to heaven... as I'm sure others do when they visit. I walked away invigorated. I don't think onto this point I'd ever seen another  agave other than Agave Americana or Agave Blue Glow. Seeing the Salmiana or Atrovirens was a revelation and you know I have the space for that! Note to self: buy an Agave Salmiana or Antrovirens and a couple of those tree aloes. 

PARADISE: According to Wikepedia: Originally denominated by a single noun denoting "a walled-in compound or   garden ", from " pairi " ("around") and " daeza " or " diz " ("wall", "brick", or "shape"), philosopher and historian   Xenophon of Athens   borrowed   the   Old Iranian   *paridaiza(h) , Late Old Iranian   *pardēz   ( Avestan   pairidaēza ,   Old Persian   *paridaida , Late Old Persian   *pardēd ) into Greek as   paradeisos .   This term is used for the   Garden of Eden   in Greek translations of the   Old Testament . In Persian, the word  pardis  means both paradise and garden.T he idea of the   enclosed garden   is often referred to as the paradise garden because of additional   Indo-European   connotations of "paradise" The essential plan of a paradise garden is a four-fold layout ( charbagh ) with a pond or fountain in the center. Later designs ...

From the lake to our house is a gradual climb from sea level to about 150 feet. Once you get to the 1600 block of Trestle Glen you start to see outcroppings of Franciscan Sandstone. According to map on Wikipedia: By Mikes Clark - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26589719 Our house would be in the green colored strip. In the photo below you can see a picture of a sandstone outcropping near our house. Here is another picture for scale of an outcropping under a neighbors deck.  Rock like this was quarried in Piedmont before he city incorporated in 1907.  When I started to dig in the back yard I found some sandstone peeking out. Little did I know at the time that there was a huge outcropping that had been covered up in the 1950's.  There are two creeks that converge and lead to Trestle Glen but get subverted around Valant in Piedmont. Yesterday it rained and I was able to get a picture of the amazing waterfalls falling over the bedr...

The area where we now live, is just up from Lake Merritt and close to the border of Piedmont, but if we go back hundreds of years you can imagine that local indigenous people lived here. In fact, it is fact that they did. According to Bay Nature Magazine, " Few humans foraged the slough back then, although in the richly forested Oakland hills, Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone Indians seemed to have settled in a village along the banks  " of Indian Gulch Creek in an area that became known as Trestle Glen.  The Chochenyo fished the estuary, thanking Duck Hawk, the hero and benefactor who had made the earth a safe place for humans to live, for the food they took from it. Know the Land:   A Land Acknowledgement is a formal statement that recognizes and respects Indigenous Peoples as traditional stewards of this land and the enduring relationship that exists between Indigenous Peoples and their traditional territories.  Why do we recognize the land: To recognize the land is an ...