GardenBook

 It's been very many years since I have visited a zoo, and I couldn't even tell you which zoo it might have been, but I had heard anecdotal  information  that suggested the Santa Barbara Zoo had good landscaping with excellent plants  and was worthy of a visit . I'm always up for  some plant viewing so I  added the zoo  to my road trip agenda. A bit of googling revealed that this particular zoo is well regarded, is small, provides naturalistic settings for the animals and it was only ten minutes from my hotel .   There were a lot, really a lot,  of children there, and the facility had numerous family-friendly features including a large park like play area , picnic areas, Giraffe feeding and a zoo train among other attractions.  Because I am notoriously child-phobic I spent quite a bit of time positioning myself  as far away as possible from the hordes. If I were to visit again , it...

 On my journey up Highway 101 from Santa Barbara I took advantage of an opportune  break in the rain to swing by San Luis Obispo Botanical Garden. It was on my upended agenda in any case, though it was to be a stop on a day of nursery crawling.The weather forecast pretty much dictated that said nursery crawl was not to be. Since it looked like the rain would hold off for at least an hour, and I knew this garden was relatively small (this would be my first visit) I exited the highway and instructed Hal, my trusty GPS , to take us there.  The garden is located in El Chorro Regional Park, in the hills of the central coast region of California. There is a robust plan for a 150 acre garden that displays the plant communities from Mediterranean climates world wide.     Certainly this plan seems daunting, but I saw many signs in the garden as it exists today that seemed to point to significant progress.  Just inside the entry was  a be...

I picked February for my spring road trip this year -earlier than my usual March or April dates. Since I was heading to southern and central California I hoped to catch some nice blooming Aloe action at the various locations I scheduled myself  to visit , including the Taft Garden  and the desert garden at the Huntington among others. As is my custom the trip was planned out with a highly developed daily schedule including approximate departure and arrival times, where I was going to stop for gas, how long I would spend at each venue and so on. As the trip dates got closer the weather forecast began to deteriorate to the point where I briefly considered cancelling the whole thing. But I really needed to get away for a few days of solitude so I rolled the weather dice and carried on with the plan. Mother Nature apparently had no interest in my itinerary. On the plus side, the drive down 101 from the bay area to Santa Barbara was incredibly beautiful. There were patches where it...