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Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden, part 1 of 2
One of the most beautiful places we visited on the island of Hawaii this summer was the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden (HTBG).Located on a 17-acre site above Onomea Bay about 10 miles north of Hilo,...
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Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden, part 2 of 2
Part 1 of this post ended at the edge of Onomea Stream. Let’s continue from there.Onomea Stream just below Onomea Falls. As you can see, the setting is magnificent. I was imagining laying in a hammock...
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Plant of the week: Aeonium hierrense and Aeonium escobarii
Loree Bohl over at Danger Garden started the “ favorite plant of the week” meme a few years ago. Many other garden bloggers have followed suit. I’ve done a few “plant of the week” posts but never with...
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More front yard makeover baby steps
The front yard—at least the planting strip outside the 4-foot fence—is continuing the transformation that started when we removed the Pittosporum tobira hedge and created a mounded “desert garden”...
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Ancient prickly pear at the Sonoma Mission
Yesterday was Veterans Day, one of the few public holidays we have in the U.S. I played hooky and went on a road with a friend to Sonoma, just a little over an hour from Davis. After exploring...
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Quarryhill Botanical Garden
I’ve been to most botanical gardens in Northern California but one had eluded me until this week: Quarryhill Botanical Garden. It is located outside the small town of Glen Ellen, best known as the home...
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What’s in bloom, mid-November 2014
Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day, a meme originally introduced by May Dreams Gardens, is the 15th of each month. I usually miss it, being as unorganized as I am. This month, however, I’m only two days off,...
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Arizona redux
Like yesterday, today has been a gloomy, gray day with on-and-off-again rain. Not much, but enough to get everything wet. Yeah for the rain—we desperately need it—but it prevented me from taking photos...
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Damn those leaves!
Don’t get me wrong, I love trees and I know that falling leaves come with the territory. But while I like autumn, I don’t enjoy dealing with this:The photos above and below were taken standing in our...
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Aloe anticipation at UC Davis
The University of California Davis campus has several aloe hot spots (see this post from February). Curious to find out whether any of their aloes are flowering yet, I decided to go on a little outing...
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Gardening books at closeout prices
I love books. Fiction or non-fiction, I devour them all. I have over 50 books on and under my bedside table, all waiting to be read. That’s in addition to the thousands of books scattered all over the...
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Ruth Bancroft Garden Black Friday sale extended until 12/4/14
Black Friday sales are great for people buying electronics, appliances and maybe clothes, but usually there's nothing special about them for gardeners. This year was different. For the first time, the...
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Fall color at my house—and real rain, finally!
While some areas of Davis have quite a bit of fall color—especially the older neighborhoods downtown with their majestic trees—there isn’t much at our house. But I did find a few pops of color over the...
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Ruth Bancroft Garden in December
After selecting my plants at the recent Black Friday sale at the Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek, CA, I took a stroll through the garden itself. Fortunately, the rain had stopped by then, and at...
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Of leaves and lights
Just recently I wrote about the pesky leaves that keep bothering my poor succulents. Since then we’ve had three inches of rain, which has brought us above normal for the season. That’s exactly what...
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20 hours of nonstop rain
The much touted storm forecast for Thursday, December 11, 2014 did arrive and it did bring quite bit of rain to Northern California, but it wasn’t as cataclysmic as the media had made it out to be. At...
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Goodbye Aloe; hello Aloiampelos, Aloidendron, Aristaloe, Gonialoe and Kumara
Taxonomists—scientists describing, naming and classifying organisms—love change. They are constantly assigning and reassigning plants (and animals) based on the latest research findings. The decisions...
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Mushrooms in my succulent bed
Here’s a topic I haven’t talked about much on this blog: mushrooms. But then, the past few winters have been very dry so mushrooms haven’t been a common sight. This year, I have a feeling, will be very...
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Four books on agaves
It’s no secret that I love agaves. I’ve written more posts about agaves than any other group of succulents. It’s no surprise that I sometimes get asked if there are any books on agaves that I would...
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#GBFling14: John Kuzma Garden
Five months have gone by since the 2014 Garden Bloggers Fling ( #GBFling14) in Portland, Oregon. I haven’t even covered half of the gardens we visited yet, so it’s high time for another...
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