number 2

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Thanks for the tour! Are you going back in summer when they are all in bloom?

Number 30 is my favorite because the pink flamingo looks like it is about to bite the garden gnome.

I had a couple, but they look so awful in the winter I threw them out. One of those plants I like in other people's gardens.

I am wondering how many will still be around in 10 years. Japanese,rose cottage, xeriscape, it doesn't seem to matter what the theme is, although I like them best with tropicals. I noticed that palms and plumerias often were planted together and the interest in planting palms was the same time as the peak interest in plumeria. Some people have even put up tikis which used to be more common in the 60's. By the 80's, most of the tikis had been removed.

Kitty - I am staggered. Tell you what though, I would have one - some of those older specimens looked brilliantly prehistoric. I might be tempted to get the spray paint out though (I painted a dead crab-apple a completely artificial blue and it looked rather fabulous - to me) Feeling terribly envious of the palms too - I won't ramble on about the huge (and hugely expensive) phoenix a customer insisted on - a 6 year adventure in stress but I am tempted by butia palms (supposedly a tad hardier than many).

Course, I am tempted by this and that on a daily basis but reality (in the form of bank statements) usually prevails.
Kitty, being terribly nosy, I examined your pics minutely (always utterly fascinated by different areas/cultures/gardens) - thank you so much for the massively enjoyable safari (wouldn't mind shots of the natives either).

have heard this phrase and am familiar with Tiki Torch, the echinacea, but haven't the foggiest what a tiki actually is (apart from it being Hawaian (sp?)

Back in the 50's there was a Hawaiian/ Polynesian craze in the US. ( Disneyland's Tiki Room ) Remnants of it lingered on when the houses were bought in the early 1960s. Large carved wood statues were called Tikis and people put them in their yards as ornaments. When they were almost all gone, I wanted to have a palm trunk carved into a tiki ( just for neighborhood nostalgia) with faux gemstone eyes but was overruled. The garden at number 7 has some large tikis and a fantastic assortment of tropical fruits. There must be 12 palms alone in front and each one has a hummingbird feeder fastened on it high up on the trunk. They also grow sugar cane, pineapples and a wide selection of Hawaiian gingers. I like to walk over there at night in the summer when it's warm and there's a full moon and see all the tropical flowers and smell the fragrance.

Kittymoonbeam, you weren't just kidding. A couple of the big ones are impressive, but mostly I kept thinking a deer was hiding in the bushes.

Sherry

Here is a link that might be useful: If only sweat were irrigation...

A common name for plumeria is "dead man's fingers". Can't you tell I'm jealous?

Cath

A fascinating safari, thank you Kitty! I appreciated the peep into all these gardens and I believe I would have a plumeria, too, in the right climate, a big sculptural one. Now I don't covet any more exotics. It's enough to have to drag the agapanthuses and the red leaved cordyline inside every autumn.

Conifers are already enjoying a minor revival in Sweden and my not so trendy husband bought a yellow Pinus contorta 'Chief Joseph' last year because he liked it. I am not so sure because we have two tall native pines next to it that will perhaps make it look too unnatural when it grows up.

Daylilies, echinaceas, hostas and heucheras are enormously popular and many people collect them. But Swedish gardeners in general are fairly conservative, at least those who have not paved over their gardens or have only lawns. The oldfashioned granny garden is still the ideal for most people, full of peonies, irises, asters, poppies and the common yellow daylilies, no fancy varieties. The most common roses are either one of two spinosissimas, Double White or Poppius, two albas, Maxima or Minette, Blush Damask and a few of the more common gallicas. We had postcards made of these common roses to give to people who came to have their roses examined at our Roses Antique Shows 2005-2010, a national project to collect heritage roses. People were happy to have a name to their roses but it was boring for us investigators to see so many of the same varieties on every occasion. Some more unusual roses came, of course, and 1500 of them are now grown in a trial field.

I'm so sorry but I totally missed that this is a California forum!