Sitting in a window seat in a plane descending into Los Angeles I could see the crisscrossing highways with the iconic cloverleaf intersections and the sprawl of buildings, but I could also view the majestic hills and canyons unspoiled by humans. During my week stay there I spent many hours walking in the wild southern California landscape and in the city of twelve and a half million people.
I stayed with a friend just a few blocks off Ventura Boulevard, an unbroken eighteen mile commercial strip. I wandered out the front gate, through the residential neighborhood, inhaled the warmth and marveled at the front gardens of citrus trees loaded with orange and yellow fruit, plus cacti and succulents, plants that I have grown in pots since childhood, thriving in the desert climate of Southern California. Massive jade trees, blooming aloes and agaves, rosemary shrubs, and aeoniums with glossy, waxy rosettes of green or dark burgundy, some flowering in chartreuse.
The next morning me and my hiking buddy set out for an urban walk along the Los Angeles River, when I was stopped by the strikingly elegant Art Deco building of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Jeffrey Bissiri explains how two architectural styles contributed to the structure: “The California mission architecture was reinterpreted in the new Art Deco style.” In the graveled courtyard in front of the municipal building was a planting of different aloe species aglow with warm orange blooms and visiting hummingbirds. The juxtaposition of the human-made and natural beauty would have knocked my socks off but I had already shed them.
And down by the river was a bank alive with wildflowers, native and escaped. Blue lupins; flowering buckwheat; Erodium moschatum, from North Africa which has naturalized, blooming in pink with sculptural seed pods; a native shrub called the Giant Coreopsis with golden flowers all flourished on the bank. The river itself flows in the spring but along a concrete river bed instead of a natural one. In 1938, after two destructive floods, the Army Corps of Engineers began the transformation of a natural waterway into a huge concrete culvert.
Sunday started with a rainy visit to a farmer’s market off Ventura Boulevard. Fresh citrus, avocados, artichokes, almonds, walnuts, mushrooms, Mexican food, Korean food, and stems of spectacular Proteus in soft orange, cream, and yellow hues. I left there with two other L.A. friends to hike the rolling hills of Upper Virgenes where a hawk hovered above us in the wind and the California poppies bloomed on the slopes. Then we drove down to Malibu Beach. I soaked my feet in the cold Pacific Ocean while brown pelicans flew over in pairs and whimbrels hunted in the sand with their curved beaks when the waves retreated. The hillside was golden with masses of Giant Coreopsis, Leptosyne gigantea, in bloom which will drop its leaves when the hot, dry season comes.
John Muir called Los Angeles a place where “Mother Nature is most ruggedly, thornily savage. The thorny chaparral…swoops into every hollow and swells over every ridge…in shaggy, ungovernable exuberance, fairly dwarfing the utmost effects of human culture out of sight and mind.” Once you leave the glitzy, overpopulated, developed area of the city and step into the surrounding wilderness you understand John Muir. We entered Malibu State Park just after dawn on a foggy thirty-seven degree morning, walked hilly trails, scrambled on the cliffs to view wildflowers and stared in awe as the fog burned off and small mountains emerged. Two hours later it was sunny and twenty degrees warmer. On the Dixie Canyon Trail we climbed up and had a view over the developed valley with the snow-capped mountains in the distance.
We drove to Beverly Hills to make a pilgrimage to an amazing tree just off Santa Monica Boulevard . Planted around 1910, the Moreton Bay fig tree, Ficus macrophylla, is a native of Australia but has obviously thrived in this city despite pollution, drought, and humans who climb and carve their initials in its bark. Aerial roots create buttresses to a massive trunk of smooth gray.
Most people zoom down the boulevard unaware of this beautiful creature. What can’t be missed in Los Angeles are the ubiquitous palm trees, also not native. The most common, often planted flanking the wide streets, are Mexican fan palms, Washingtonia robusta, creating iconic images of the city.
I always tell anyone going to Los Angeles that they should visit Huntington Gardens, created by Henry E. Huntington and his head gardener, William Hertrich. Huntington was a millionaire railroad tycoon who bought over 800 acres where he built a mansion and a separate library building, and planted gardens. There is a Japanese, a Chinese, a camellia, and a desert garden. I have seen them all but it is the desert that I adore. Ten acres of barrel cacti, some planted from seed over a hundred years ago; aloes, blooming in delicious orange shades; agaves, with twenty foot gooseneck flower stalks; Echeveria ; Euphorbia; and winding trails around the sixty beds. It’s a dream landscape.
My trip was a wonderful week in a different world, but home called. Spring was on its way and my garden was waking. Ah, but I made it back and a day later we were buried under three feet of snow, a fine welcome back to the hills of western Massachusetts.
“Take me home country roads.”— John Denver
March 2023