Lymond at Mac.com
(not drawn to scale)
The Huntington Cacti, and More
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It was our twelfth wedding anniversary, and what better way to spend it than sauntering through the gardens at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, followed by high tea. And so, that's what we did.
Sure, it's late November, but it's also San Marino, California, which means that roses are still blooming, and bees are still doing their bee business in them.
The previous week had been hot and dry and clear, but the locally well-known onshore flow had finally kicked back in to bring the temperature down to the low 70s (or the low 20s, for those of the Celsius persuasion) and to filter the light through a golden marine haze.
The Huntington's cactus garden always looks surreal, but the light on this day suffused the place with a lambent loveliness in which the thorny succulents seemed to glow.
These tribes of mammillaria had been placed to catch the lazy afternoon sun, looking something like alien urchins that had struggled to crawl out of a volcanic lake onto a pumice-littered shore.
I don't recall what kind of euphorbia this particular corkscrewy variety is, but it is a very twisted specimen indeed.
Barrels of fun...if you like thorns. I imagine it would be a painful experience to be chased through a field of these at midnight. (Yes, I think of stuff like that. It's part of my dark charm.)
Leaving the cactus garden, we wandered through the Australian glades, where the sound of an odd bird pricked the ears of my espoused digital medievalist.
And from Australia, it's really not that far to Japan, where we caught a glimpse through the greenery of a bridge over placid waters.
After tea, refreshed and replete, we approach the garden's egress, where we see a statue of Neptune, depicting the moment of sudden realization when he notices that he has lost his bathing trunks in the surf.