Becoming Botanical

We are now a highly botanic family. Over the Christmas break we finally broke down and got the family membership. The South Coast Botanic Garden is just a couple of miles away on the up-slope of Palos Verdes, and the memberships are much cheaper than the more renown Huntington Library and Descanso Gardens, and the best thing is that it is usually almost empty. Stacy has been bringing the kids here for a couple of years, usually on their occasional free admission days, and they love it. I'd been there once before many years ago (in my pre-Stacy days) to attend a "Shakespeare in the Park" type production. I remembered being impressed with the size of the garden, considering its rather urban setting.



It's not particularly in-your-face dramatic (especially not last week, a few days from the drab winter solstice), but it is big and peaceful and has a lot of trails and huge trees and you can get momentarily lost and pretend for a few minutes that you are not in Los Angeles. There's a good sized duck pond, a children's garden with little fairy-tale figures and constructions scattered about; there's a large rose garden, and several wide open manicured lawns. While there are a few of these "maintained" areas, in general it isn't an English garden where everything is trimmed and tidy, but a botanic garden where dozens and dozens of species are preserved and pretty much allowed to grow as they see fit. It's pretty in its unkemptness. I'm looking forward to seeing it in the spring and summer to see what the gardens hold for color.

The kids are most excited about the duck pond. They make a point to hit the lake each time they visit and go "fishing." This basically amounts to getting a long stick and dipping the end into the pond and just standing there. Can't say it captured my sense of adventure, but hey! - L and N have unique tastes.

The garden is a particularly good place for N to indulge another of his hobbies: stick hauling. A visit to the garden with out dragging a large piece of wood hither and yon is a visit sans point. He acquired a couple of good ones that day and carried them proudly. It is especially fun, he found, to run ahead of the group and get to a narrow spot on the trail and to whip around and bar the way with his stick, yelling "Caution! Caution!" I'm not sure if he thinks he's a railroad crossing, or a knight guarding some remote access to a hidden castle. At any rate we are not permitted to cross until we identify our favorite vegetable. (And evidently we don't get much of a choice for favorite vegetables either, since the right answer was already decided upon for us by the valiant Sir N before the query was given.)

"Caution!"

At one point in our walk around last week, we rounded a bend in the trail and came upon a stunning evergreen of some type that was glistening silver. On getting closer I realized that the dew of the morning had totally bathed the tree and, for some reason, wasn't evaporating away. The picture does not do it justice: The tree looked positively bejeweled. Everyone else somehow managed to walk on by it without much ado, but it floored me.

There may not be a world class art gallery adjacent to a world-renown tea house at the SCBG, but it's quiet and laid back and the kids can run and holler and (don't tell) even pick a leaf or two without Mommy and Daddy being swooped up by security guys in dark suits, sun glasses and ear pieces. It's more our caliber.

End-of-visit Burnout

And despite what Sir N might think, my favorite vegetable is not broccoli.