Succulents and More™

This is a continuation of my previous post featuring random pictures from around Santa Barbara. To see other posts from my recent trip, click here . Aloes As I mentioned earlier , Agave attenuata , the foxtail agave, was the most common landscape succulent we saw in Santa Barbara. But there were plenty of aloes as well. The ones that were in flower were immediately noticeable. We spotted many Aloe arborescens , but for some reason neither Kyle nor I took a single photo (they’re pretty boring). I did take photos of Aloe ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ , lots of them. Last year, Randy Baldwin of San Marcos Growers told me about a mass planting of ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ in a local business park. I featured it in this January 2025 post , together with a spectacular display of Aloe ‘Birds and Bees’ in another commercial landscape nearby. I wanted Kyle to see both of these plantings so we stopped there after we left San Marcos Growers on Friday afternoon. Unfortunately, the ‘Birds and Bees’ were past their prim...

We spent last weekend with my mother-in-law in the town of Mount Shasta in far northern California (about 45 minutes south of the Oregon border). Saturday morning was magical, as chronicled in this post . By late afternoon, billowy clouds had begun to build up in the sky, and we decided to head to the Living Memorial Sculpture Garden for sunset. Spectacular evening clouds Looking northwest from Highway 97 The Living Memorial Sculpture Garden is located 13 miles northeast of Weed, California . Yes, there is a town named Weed (its motto is “Weed like to welcome you”), and in spite of the wealth of marijuana-related souvenirs being sold in local shops, it has nothing to do with pot. Instead, it gets its name from an early developer named Abner Weed. in 1897, he established the Siskiyou Lumber and Mercantile Mill, which by 1940 became the world’s largest sawmill.

I haven’t posted much in the last two weeks because we’ve had friends from Australia staying with us. Last week we spent four days in the Eastern Sierra, the vast high desert east of the Sierra Nevada range. Sparsely populated and spectacularly beautiful, this part of California is a wonderland of mountains and lakes, sagebrush and tumbleweed, and even the occasional ghost town. In the “olden days” my wife and I spent quite a bit of time of here, camping and exploring. In the last 15 years, our visits have been few and far between, but the Eastern Sierra is always in our heart. Mono Lake at sunset Our home base was in Mammoth Lakes , the largest and most developed town in the Eastern Sierra. Located at an elevation of 7,880 feet (2,400 m), Mammoth Lakes is a world-class ski resort which in the off-season (summer) offers remarkably reasonable accommodations and easy access to alpine lakes, hiking, fishing, mountain biking and a host of other outdoor activities. It’s a great spot to...

I know some people are quite happy to return to their normal lives at the end of their vacation. I’m not one of them. I could be on vacation forever. Or at least give it a valiant try. On our final evening on Hawaii I went to ʻAnaehoʻomalu Bay in Waikoloa. Also known as “A Bay,” this is the place to watch sunset in South Kohala. Lots of people walk over from the nearby Hilton and Marriott. (I’m sure real celebrities are carried on litters like Cleopatra, but I didn’t spot any of them.) There were relatively few clouds on Monday evening so the sunset wasn’t as epic as it could have been, but it was still astonishingly beautiful. Before the sun was setting, people were playing around and yakking away like they’re wont to do on vacation. However, the closer the sun got to the horizon, the quieter it became, and as it touched the ocean, a reverent hush blanketed the beach. It was the perfect ending to our vacation.

On Monday, Labor Day here in the U.S., we had the strangest weather. It was overcast most of the day—a rare enough event in the summer—and just after sunset the sky lit up in the most amazing hues of salmon, orange and raspberry. “It looks just like before a tornado,” said a friend from Colorado who has been visiting. Tornados in our area are exceedingly rare—and we didn’t get one that evening—but there was something so unusual about this light that it brought out most of the neighborhood, causing an impromptu gathering in the middle of the street. We even had a full rainbow although I wasn’t able to capture it all.

Before we left Tucson for good, we swung by the eastern section of Saguaro National Park. This section is larger than the western section located near the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum . Due to time constraints we could only visit one section, and in hindsight we should have gone to the western section because the saguaros are much more plentiful there. But the loop drive through the eastern section was still beautiful. Saguaro ( Carnegiea gigantea ) with multiple arms Saguaro forest My eagle-eyed wife spotted one tall saguaro in flower. Typically they bloom in May and June, but as is the case with humans, some specimens clearly march to the beat of their own drum. I took the next photo with a long telephoto lens and I was apparently so engrossed in this special sight that I stepped in a nest of fire ants. Before I knew it my ankles were burning (I’d chosen today of all days to wear super short athletic socks). The pain was quite sharp and I ended up hightailing it back t...