Curmudgeon

I had never heard of this little park until yesterday, when someone described it to me and insisted I go. It sounds kinda hidden with few visitors on weekdays. Tranquil, with pools, a stream, and lots of lush foliage. Photos on flickr confirm the report. In turn, I referred my informant to the Meditation Garden Above The Shooting Range at the Los Angeles Police Academy.

We’d been walking past and through vast expanses of lupines elsewhere in the park, but the blooms were almost all spent. Then, as we approached Huckleberry Meadow, we came upon large patches of lupines still in full bloom. Different microclimate, I guess. Beautiful. Made me want to go home and plant the entire property in ‘em. Closer still to the meadow, we began to pass individual specimens of the very same plants that filled the meadow with color. I noted a pale yellow, pea-like member of the Lotus family that was akin to the vigorous grower that is currently taking over my little riparian bed back home. And at first I couldn’t clearly make out what the distant little orange dots were, until I found myself beside a miniature lily: bold and breathtakingly elegant. I nearly hyperventilated, realizing that THAT plant is also in my riparian bed, apparently on a very different bloom schedule than there in the forest.

So now in my head, I’m plotting a meadow—a 15’x2’ meadow, that is—on the little terrace outside the master bedroom. Yarrow and lupines, Lotus and the tiny lilies. It’s my understanding the Indian paintbrush does not transplant well, because it has a symbiotic relationship with some fungus or something in the soil. That fungus or something is either there or not. But it bears investigating, because the drifts of red-orange Indian paintbrush in the meadow provided the far end of the yellow-to-red spectrum, with the orange-yellow lilies and Galliarda filling in the midrange.

I’m excited to have a new garden project!

This morning, I took this photo of the post office, opened in 1890, I think. Kaweah was a short-lived utopian community in the wilds of Central California.