San Diego Botanical Garden - Part One

This wonderful garden has four miles of garden trails on 37 acres of what use to be a farm.  It began as "Quail Gardens"  in 1971 with many water smart gardens.  In 2009 the name was changed to San Diego Botanical Gardens.  San Diego County no longer supports it, rather it is operated by a non-profit organization.  It seems to me that any garden in California will be successful because the state is one of only five small regions in the world with a Mediterranean type climate.  According to  information provided by the garden, California has 4,300 species of flowering plants.  And not only did the plants delight us in the garden, but also many butterflies and hummingbirds.  The latter especially like the weeping bottlebrush tree.

That tree is from Australia.  Other sections of the garden also had plants from Africa and Central America.  In the Mexican garden there are many agaves, salvias and cyclamen.  We also saw some festive topiary mariachis.  Dancing to the music are other topiary figures.

In the children's garden we walked through a tree house created to look like an African strangler fig tree.  Other fig trees, along with many tropical plants and ferns have been planted in its concrete branches.  Also in the children's garden is an Elephant Foot Tree Forest, in which can be found many pony-tail palms.

Through out the garden are many pieces of artwork, one of which is the "Shime' Sculpture".

 Its secondary title is "Bamboo Holds The World Together" and was created by S. Glassman in 2007.  The gardens have one of the largest collection of bamboo plants in the world, and feeds the pandas at the San Diego Zoo.  I will have more on this beautiful park in my next posting.