If you love colorful art glass and gardens, don’t miss the Chihuly Garden and Glass museum on your next trip to Seattle! I have been a Chihuly fan for many years: I think his work is just fantastic, and now he has a new gallery purpose built to showcase his wildly extravagant creations: details at […]
Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens
Consider spending a wonderful long weekend on the Mendocino Coast: just a couple hours north of San Francisco, it is a great place for relaxing and seeing great gardens! The Mendocino Coast Botanical Garden in Fort Bragg is always the centerpiece of our visits to the coast, with so many rhododendrons, heathers in all shapes, […]
Washington State: Tulips & Lilacs
We drove north into Washington State to visit the tulip fields at Holland America Bulb Farm in Woodland: what a delightful outing! Row upon row of amazingly bright and beautiful tulips: all labeled so that you can buy your favorite varieties. I’m afraid I went a little crazy and ordered over a 100 bulbs: they […]
Alcatraz Island, San Francisco, Californ...
Alcatraz, San Francisco, California, USA We had the rare opportunity this month to join the Quarry Hill volunteers for a special tour of the gardens of Alcatraz: what a unique gardening experience! While you may think of Alcatraz as a prison, the island was also home to many families who did their best to […]
Gilroy Gardens
Photo by Richard Reames. Wikimedia Had a great visit recently to a place we’ve been wanting to see for years: Gilroy Gardens. You probably don’t know about the “Circus Trees” lovingly grown and tended by a real one-of-a-kind gardener: Axel Erlandson. A Swedish immigrant to California, in 1925 he began to shape trees as a […]
Hearst Castle and Filoli Gardens
Enjoy English gardens? If you can’t quite manage a trip to the UK, you can visit a very English garden not too far away. Located south of San Francisco in Woodside, Filoli is a magnificent estate originally built by the owner of the Empire Mine in 1917. It was expanded and developed by several wealthy […]
Bellevue Botanical Garden
Just outside Seattle, Bellevue Botanical Garden is a FREE venue to delight your senses in all seasons of the year. The beautifully maintained gardens include a really lovely rock garden with an amazing variety of dwarf conifers, a lush perennial border filled with gorgeous grasses, and a relaxing strolling path through the woodlands and […]