Succulents and More™

Winter is my least favorite season, and I probably complain about the weather more at this time of year than at any other. Bearing that in mind, this past week has been noteworthy: fog, rain, sun, rain, sun, and wind, too. Sometimes in one day. April weather in January, you might say. As a result, this post is a bit all over the place. ☼ Sun... The sun finally came out after a solid three weeks of high fog in December. We even had a couple of days last week when the sun was out most of the day. With the soil saturated and plants sopping wet, we really needed the sun. Sidewalk bed, looking east Front walk UC Davis campus 🌧 Rain... But of course the sun didn’t last. As I’m writing this on January 5, we’re back to rain. With the ground so waterlogged, there are puddles everywhere. View from Stella’s doggie door Piles of leaves creating lakes in the gutters ☼ Sun after 🌧 rain... That was two days ago. Rain, sun, rain. Plus puddles. Flooding on the greenbelt across the street from us ❊ ...

The last outing of 2025 took me (and the whole family) back to San Francisco. While the others went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art , I visited one of the city’s biggest attractions for horticultural nerds: Salesforce Park . It’s hard to believe, but it took seven years for me to finally make it there (it opened in 2018)! As has become our custom, we parked at the Richmond Ferry Terminal and took the San Francisco Bay Ferry: San Francisco Bay Ferry docked at the Richmond Ferry Terminal The 35-minute ferry ride offers panoramic views of San Francisco and beyond. We were lucky; we had both dramatic clouds and even a bit of sun: View of downtown San Francisco from the ferry Salesforce Park is located on top of the Salesforce Transit Center right next to Salesforce Tower : View from the Ferry Terminal At 1,070 ft, the 61-story Salesforce Tower is the tallest building in San Francisco and the second tallest in California (and west of the Mississippi). It was completed in 2018 fo...