Altho technically this belongs in The Garden Traveler forum, hardly anyone posts there and right now there's mostly spam messages. So I'll ask everyone's indulgence and post some garden photos from our recent Sonoma/Mendocino County trip. I'm usually on the Cottage Gardening forum, and took photos of three public gardens: two very well-known, and one quite obscure one.

This thread shows photos from the MacCallum House B&B in Mendocino, CA, and the Hallberg Butterfly Gardens in Santa Rosa, CA. We also visited the famous Mendocino Botanical Gardens and those photos will be on a separate thread - there's a lot of them! Hope you enjoy these:

MacCallum House, Mendocino. A famous historical B&B, they have multiple buildings and some very lovely plantings. Four hours north of San Francisco, it's on the coast, cool and foggy. I live less than 5 hrs SE, but my callas are almost gone compared to these!
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Standing in the same spot as above, but turning to the right: this 2-story bldg used to be the barn, and has been renovated into guesthouses. Kids love to play on that long stretch of lawn!
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This plant is rarely seen in CA: McH has both pink- and white-flowering angelica:
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A single petal rose is past its prime and drenched with raindrops:
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Alstroemeria was everywhere in Mendocino. This orange variety was with "Johnson's Blue" geranium:
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A pink alstroemeria:
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A lovely bearded iris:
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The little-known Hallberg Butterfly Gardens in Santa Rosa CA was a delight. Louise Hallberg is a charming lady who is 96 years young! She has lived all her life on the family farm, which is now a 9-acre designed butterfly habitat. All the plants are for the benefit of local bird and insect life. She loves to show busloads of schoolkids the lifecycle of the many butterflies.

We only saw a few varieties (it changes according to season) but made it up in quantity - we saw over two dozen butterflies on our little 1/2 mile tour. This is CA Wine Country, and I can recommend if you are traveling with kids, make an appointment and stop by. It's a refreshing change from the usual tourist places.

Most of the butterflies we saw were this one: the Pipevine Swallowtail. This is a male, the females are all-black:
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The Western Tiger Swallowtail is one I also have in my garden:
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A very striking Widow Skimmer dragonfly. My thanks to Andrew Williams of CritterZone, courtesy of Google Images. We saw this amazing dragonfly but I couldn't get a photo of it fast enough. It's extremely large, easily as big as my spouse's hand!:
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An old single petal rose had all the bees around it:
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This is a CA buckeye tree in full bloom:
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Abutilon makes the hummingbirds and hummingbird moths very happy:
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I don't know the name of this striking plant, although it grows in our sunnier microclimates. The brilliant flower color is amazing against the silver-gray leaves/stems:
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The trees below are now dead, but Ms. Hallberg had the trunks saved so visitors can see how the acorn woodpeckers hid their acorns away. Sadly, she says she hasn't seen any in several years now. With increased urbanization surrounding her property, some species of wildlife and insects have shown considerable decline in her garden.
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