So here’s another thing that happened.
I went to the see the newly refurbished Beverly Hills Cactus Garden
(note for pedants, it’s more correctly a xerophile garden – there are plenty of
plants in there that aren’t cacti).
Also, as I remembered it, it wasn’t a place that was likely to benefit much from refurbishment – surely the whole point about cacti is that you just leave
them alone and let them do whatever it is they want to do. Still, it was a walk, even though I knew it
wasn’t going to be much of one, since the place just isn’t very big.
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| Before |
The real joy of the Beverly Hills Cactus Garden,
refurbished or not, is that it’s a chunk of desert that sits right there alongside
Santa Monica Boulevard – the old Route 66 – you walk among the opuntia and the
pachypodia as the traffic flies by.
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| After |
You know me, I can look at cacti all day, every day,
but once you’ve walked back and forth a few times you’ve pretty much “done it.”
If you think, oh maybe I’ll sit on a bench and soak up the vibe for a while,
well you’re out of luck. There are no
benches and although you can sit on a wall, you’re not going to be comfortable
lingering for very long. This is no
doubt deliberate. I suppose they want to keep out the riff raff, the homeless,
and in fact just about anybody with time on their hands.
And so being in need of a bit more of a walk I took a stroll around the neighborhood. I always say that I'm surprised they even let me in to Beverly Hills. And I saw a house with a fabulous patch of color
in front of it, with a gardener standing in the middle of what turned out to be a sea of flowering ice plants.
I took a picture and the guy saw me, and he shouted to
me, quite cleverly I thought, “Hey, am I doing something wrong?”
And I said, “No, looking at that garden I’d say you’re
doing something absolutely right.”
This both amused and wrong-footed him.
“Because the other day,” he said, “I was working, and
this guy from the power company came by and he took my picture with his
phone. And I said to him, ‘Hey, why did
you take my picture?’ and he said he hadn’t taken my picture but I saw him take my picture.”
He seemed more indignant
about being lied to than about the picturing-taking itself.
So I said, “Well yes, I suppose I did take your
picture but really it was the garden I was photographing. It looks fantastic.”
And of course since he was the man who looked after
the garden, he was obviously pleased and flattered by this, and of course I did
actually mean it, and also from the way I was talking I was obviously not
threatening.
So we had a conversation about gardens, and he said
the ice plants didn’t usually flower at this time of year, but there’d been
rain and then a very hot spell and this had confused the plants and they’d
burst into flower. Usually July and August
were the times when those particular ice plants looked their best.
I said I’d like to come back then and take another
picture and he said, “If I’m here and you take my picture I’m going to want
paying.” I said I thought that sounded
very reasonable.
