South Coast Botanic Garden- January 12

Today I woke up to the gentle sound of rain falling on our roof. I was told by one of our neighbors that February is the rainy month here in southern California. After touring this botanical garden Monday I am sure that the rain is much needed.  Some of the plants and trees looked very dry, or maybe they had either died or gone into hibernation. And yet the garden brochure does say that the goal of the garden is to have 75% of its plants drought tolerant.  We also discovered that just by looking at the trees it was hard to determine what season it is!  We saw a flowering Japanese apricot, and a sweet gum with its leaves turning color. The apricot tree I have posted here- it was absolutely beautiful!

This garden has 2,500 different species of plants and 100 rare specimens. They represent countries from as far away as south Africa, Australia and Italy. So maybe it was not unusual to see as many blooming plants as we did.  And it also was probably not so strange,then, to see so many unusual plants and trees. How about this sausage tree from Africa?  Note its fruit which really does look like sausage. There was also a cigar tree with yellow blossoms on it which looked like small cigars.

 

I was also surprised to see a tree aloe, which I have also posted here. It has a yellow flower on top, otherwise its leaves do look like those of an aloe plant. In the next posting I will show more of the unusual plants which we found in this garden. We spent about three hours in the garden and were constantly intrigued by all the different flowers and trees which can be seen in the garden's 86 acres.