Ornamental Grasses

These ornamental grasses grew in the garden this year:

MosaiCanada 150

I kind of got derailed about posting about Hawaii, but I will get back to it!  In the meantime, here are some photos of the MosaiCanada topiary displays that are in Parc Jacques-Cartier this summer.

Ed got to learn about a lot of sterotypical Canadian iconography on this outing.  Here he is with the Mountie, representing Saskatchewan:

The lobster fisherman, Nova Scotia:

The muskoxen (my favourites!) represent the Northwest Territories, and the inukshuk is for the northern lights (which are pictured on the other side so you can't see them from this angle):

The drum dancer is for Nunavut, and the polar bear behind him is for Manitoba:

The dragons are for Beijing, I guess they get an honourable mention on Canada's 150th, so we can't be accused of being too parochial.

The voyageur:

Bison grazing:

And a couple of Mother Earth:

I really liked this event, it was my favourite of the Canada's 150th birthday celebrations.

Bumper crop of oranges

We've had William, our orange tree, for several years now.  Most years we get an orange from him, one year as many as three.   This year, we moved to the house with the roof deck, and living four stories closer to the sun seems to be agreeing with him.  Plus, we tried watering him more this year.

Here's William in April 2015, on the right, a few months after the move, and before blossoming:



William grew a lot up on the roof deck, and filled out considerably.  I forgot to take pictures while in blossom, but he was covered with them.  Of all the little fetal oranges, nine started to grow, and seven remained on to grow to full size.  Here he is in November, with oranges.  You can see that they are full size, even on a small potted orange tree:





Here he is on December 31, with the oranges ready to pick:



Here are the slices from one of them:




















We ate them while my brother and sister-in-law were visiting.  They were the best oranges we'd ever had.

I hope we get a good crop next year, too.  They were delicious.

Baby Goliath turns three!

Our little Giant Sequoia moved to West Hollywood earlier this year.  We came along too.  He has his own corner of the roof deck now, and is thriving as he reaches for the sky.  I think the dead needles close to the trunk are a normal part of the growth phase, if I understand correctly, as the new growth is really healthy looking:

To see how big he is getting, here he is beside William the Orange, who used to tower over him.  (William has seven full-sized oranges this year, I'll post about that once they start to ripen):

Here's little Goliath last year, 2014, when he turned two, with William and his orange crop in the background:

And fall of 2013, when he turned one:

And the two below are from 2012, when he was just a little newborn giant sequoia, with his buddy William the Orange behind him to show how far he's come.  (William has gotten a little shorter, possibly, I think the top part might have died off and he got beefier, but still, he's not that much smaller.)

The roof deck

I'm still up in the progressively more-frozen north (the icebergs aren't drifting by any more, they are stuck in the forming ice), but I thought I would post these photos of my roof deck back in Los Angeles, for a little contrast.  These are from April 18, and I guess I was too busy doing not much of anything back then to post them!

I love bougainvillea, and now I have one.  It doesn't always look this good. It almost died of transplant shock when we first got it, and now waffles between looking dead, and being totally and spectacularly covered in hot pink flowers:

A couple of views from the north side of the deck, looking northeast, and then northwest.  The hills are loosely the Hollywood hills, although they have different names in different little sub-neighborhoods.  Click on the photos to get a better look, you can see the Hollywood sign in the distance in the first one:

Looking to the southeast, that is downtown off in the distance.  I forgot to take a photo looking southwest, but you can see Century City from our place.  We can't quite see the ocean, we aren't up high enough.

We don't have any pets, so we have named a lot of the plants.  That is Goliath the Giant Sequoia on the left, I'll be posting about his third birthday once I am back in LA.  That's William the Orange beside him (I never said they were terribly creative names):

The boxes of succulents, we inherited from the previous owner, we think they were staging props:

I forgot to take a photo of the lounge chair, but we have one.  It's tucked into a little alcove in the wall where it stays shady until mid-day, and I read up there sometimes.

I'm looking forward to going back ... it's nice to be able to drop back into summer, no matter what season I leave Canada in.

Baby Goliath turns Two!

Our little baby giant sequoia tree is growing up fast ... he turned two this fall.  (Those are oranges on the tree behind him ... we've been waiting for months for them to ripen)

Here's how he looked in October of last year at age one:

And here is how he looked when we first brought him home from the Sequoia National Park gift shop, back in August of 2012.

He seems to be growing pretty exponentially, much faster than doubling his size every year like the gift shop lady said he would.  We expect him to be terrorizing the neighbourhood any day now.  We'll try to repot him soon.

Joshua Tree National Park: Cholla cacti, Cottonwood Spring oasis, and dinosaurs at the drive-thru

March 14 was our last day at the park.  We drove south as we planned to head back to LA along a different route.

These are Cholla cacti.  We would have liked to get out and look at them here at the "Cholla cactus garden", but there was roadwork going on and we couldn't stop.  I got this slightly blurry photo from the car though, they are something to see, backlit by the sun:

Our destination was the Cottonwood Springs trail.  What do you know, there were Chollas there too:

An entrance to an old mine shaft along the trail:

I don't know what these are called but they are very surreal looking plants:

This is the oasis at Cottonwood Spring, it's a bigger and lusher one than the one we saw yesterday:

Here are some other tourists heading towards it, for scale:

Cottonwood trees also grow along the spring downstream from the oasis.  It was March so they were just coming into leaf:

Some fan palms at the base of the oasis palms:

These palms are tall, and shaggy, having never been pruned the way the urban ones usually are:

So that was it for Joshua Tree park!  Didn't take long to get back to the outskirts of Los Angeles.  And of course, in Los Angeles, anything is possible, including dinosaurs at the Burger King drive-thru:

That was the last park we visited in 2013.  I'm itching to visit another, maybe this spring.

Joshua Tree National Park: an oasis, some even better rocks, and a lookout

First thing on March 13, we visited a small oasis, the Oasis of Mara.  It's just a couple of small clumps of palm trees, but it was an important water source back in the day:

Next, we went to see the Arch rock and hike the trail around it.  Here's me and the Arch:

The best part of this trail was actually off the beaten path, in behind the arch rock.  We climbed over a rock, squeezed through a couple others, and came out to these natural paths in between some really cool rock formations:

Next, we went to hike the Skull rock trail.  Here's the skull:

After that, a lookout.  This looks to the valley southwest of the park.

Driving back towards the hotel, we passed through some groves of Joshua trees where they were particularly lush and tree-like:

... and that was March 13.  Next up ... March 14!  Can you believe it?  Coming soon ...