Fall, the Getty Garden and The Secret Life of Water

Autumn succulents

September at the Getty Gardens

The garden at the Getty Center in L.A. always has a wonderfully demented charm next to Mier’s austere white temple of gleaming travertine and straight lines. The maze pond is about as regimented as the garden gets, and still manages to be subversive (as, say, Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase) Azaleas in the middle of –a pond?  

Having established itself as unconventional with the water maze, the garden takes off like a Henri Rousseau landscape

 

The Fall garden is notable for it’s masses of dahlias, cannas and color combinations

This is one of  the bougainvillea parasols---cold  iron forms when the garden was planted. Now… it works.

Here are dahlias  golds and yellows combined with orange roses..



The garden has it's wild warms balanced by the colder greys of a mass planting to the left:

Dahlias are not the most water economical  of plants.( At home, the dahlia bed is on a gray water system.)  Hopefully, the Getty Garden uses recycled water. (They do store a million gallons of water to use against possible fires.) And use goats to clear the brush :

          " Using goats to clear brush saves energy, reduces waste, and is just one of the strategies that helped   the Getty Center earn its Silver LEED certification recently.  LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, and certification recognizes environmentally responsible design, construction, and management.  In 2005, the Getty Center became the first facility in the country to be awarded LEED certification for an existing building, earning its Bronze certification in the first days of the formal LEED program.  The Getty earned its new, higher Silver Certification this month by increasing its efforts to minimize waste and energy use beyond the 2005 levels" (from a press release by the Getty)

Spanish Goat (Scrub goat)

This is the Getty Cactus Garden, which  has not pleased everyone although it is, like goats, effective at surviving in a very difficult environment


Photo from Ency. Britannica

This photo was taken some time ago ---all the cactus are larger. However, this September the Cactus Garden looked greyish, i.e. water starved. Even cactus need to be sprinkled occasionally as the gardeners do at the Huntington Cactus Garden, and at Lotusland .

Water. The Secret Life of Water by Masaru Emoto. Emoto studied water crystals and how the crystal shapes could be effected by---- I’m going to let you find out for yourself. This is a remarkable book, highly recommended .

Angel Trumpet femme fatale

Angel’s Trumpet-Official name of genus is now Brugmansia. Many SoCal gardens have them as the flower is beautiful and night-scented. First saw them in the Getty Gardens, trimmed to a parasol shape, dripping with flowers, looking like they belonged in a  Rousseau painting  (Le Douanier.)  Enchanted, secured one for the garden. Discovered over time the way to achieve the parasol effect with lots of pendant blossoms was to prune the sucker heavily, as it blooms on new wood. Such a pretty plant.

(photo from W commons)

Always knew the plant was toxic—it is a member of the solanum family, (Deadly Nightshade, tomatoes and potatoes.) The  closest relative is loco-weed, Datura. But a lot of wonderful plants are toxic; say oleander. Never personally held toxic quality  against the Angel’s Trumpet.
However,according to the what's left of the L.A. Times, the  latest teenage turn-on in South L.A. is the Brugmania flower which ingested, is hallucinogenic. (Social Notes From All Over Dept.) The police in L.A. would like you to get rid of the plant if you have one flowering in your garden.

Haven’t had any trouble with drug-crazed teenagers harvesting my flowers, but was bemused to find the name Angel’s Trumpets might signify  the crack of doom summoning you to the next world……

The Reader is warned.

Note:
See W for chapter and verse on varieties, more pictures, directions for cultivation if you are a drug-crazed teenager or,equally crazed, an obsessed gardener.