Balboa Park Cactus Garden, Spanish Village

Every time we've visited the Balboa Park Cactus Garden in the past has been in early January. This year, early February seemed like a good idea.

It is quite surprising the difference that a month makes. The dormant plants are waking up, some plants and trees are already flowering, and because of the serious rain we had two weeks ago, the cactus are all plump and prepared for any dry spell.

This tree was basically bare except for these flowers which were very interesting. From their structure, they look like they will be blooming for a very long time, and old petals will make quite a mess before it's over. We just thought it looked very pretty at the moment. We did see other trees that looked similar except that their flowers were red.

Next is a good sized palm beside the bloom of a very large agave americana [the century plant]. Once this succulent blooms [70 or 80 years old] then the plant dies. The flower stalk is at least 50 - 60 feet high!

This next succulent had a straight bare trunk with its first branches 20 feet in the air! Quite a spectacle.

These are Opuntia [prickly pear] cactus lining the walk we took. Not a good place for stumbling or weaving; those spines may be small but they are very nasty.

In the same garden we found this stand of column cactus; they'd make a pretty good fence wouldn't they?

Balboa park was originally created for a worlds' fair, back in the thirties. The architecture is very Spanish and very elaborate. Those were times when labour was cheap and jobs were few. This is probably the time when the American government made its greatest public works: best structures, parks, roads, etc. [the New Deal to solve the depression of 1929]. The buildings at Balboa parks are a fine example. Now they house museums, art galleries and the like. Here are a few scenes of galleries, doorways and vistas to give you a very small sample of a great people place.

Part of the park consisted of smaller spanish styled buildings, much like a village. It was dubbed Spanish Village and turned over to the artist colony of San Diego. It is very colourful, has a great choice of eclectic art pieces and is well planted with interesting plants.

Here's a vine in flower in the eaves of a tiled roof.

Along one of the small streets was this fascinating device. The telescope is actually a kaleidoscope [has many mirrors along its length to making interesting geometric patterns] set to 'see' the little planted garden in the flower pot. What makes this unit so fascinating is that the large metal bowl under the flower pot, can rotate freely, thus making a varied and very colourful display of geometrics in the kaleidoscope. Neat!

Here are a few more general scenes within Spanish Village, and its many different artist galleries.

These final four pictures were all made at the same gallery, and involve a lot of colour, many reflections, and I thought they made for interesting [if busy] pictures.

The next is my favourite.

So tomorrow we pack and stuff the car. Saturday, we'll convoy with Kathleen and Phillip to Los Angeles and check out the gallery and a public garden.