Recently I visited a friend near Santa Barbara, California, and one day we took a day trip into Los Angeles to see the Huntington Botanical Gardens. In particular, my friend wanted to show me the Desert Garden exhibit. She thought it was pretty special and the highlight of the gardens. I concur with her assessment ... I've never seen such profusion of cacti. The garden has existed for over 100 years, so some of the cacti have grown to monstrous proportions. One cactus of this age is reported to weigh in at 20 tons! And some yucca-type plants have a height of 60 feet.

I had no idea the variety of cacti and succulents that existed. The desert garden display features more than 5,000 species of succulents and desert plants!! And is spread over about 10 acres. It was truly astounding -- dizzying, almost overwhelming, in fact, with the often stark geometry of cacti overlapping one another, and so many varieties packed in so close together. It was so densely grown with such variety, it was like a rainforest or jungle, but of desert plants. A unique place, indeed.

So here is a photographic glimpse of the desert garden for you to contemplate the wonders of nature with. The first photo I originally featured in the Friday Photo section before I put together this post. It gives you a very rough and, frankly, pretty inadequate idea of the varieties of desert plants co-existing in the display. One of my friends made the remark of this display area: watch out for banana peels! You can just see Wylie Coyote go skating into one of these prickly scenes, right?

It's a giant octopus! Or a cartoon alien.

There were a fair number of fading cactus blooms and the pods of ones completely finished. But I managed to find some flowers still dazzling in full spread and color.

The golden barrel cactus seemed especially photogenic to me. From the Gardens' website, they say: "The ribs of the golden barrel cactus resemble an accordion, expanding and contracting as the plant stores and uses water. Many of the golden barrels you see here were planted from seed before 1915 and now weigh several hundred pounds." 

And lastly, some of the fauna in the garden ... a sweet little pigeon, and me and my friend, Vida, who so kindly introduced me to this magical desert garden that has forever changed the way I think of and appreciate desert plants.