Bonsai Show

This past weekend, my lovely wife and I decided to pack up one of the two children, as the older was with his grandparents and head to the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California.  Nothing calms my nerves like stepping through the entrance of the gardens.  While I can spend quite a sum of blog space writing about this amazing place, I've decided it would be much better for everyone involved if I focused on one particular spot.  We spend a bit of time here, and I will have plenty of opportunity to write of all of the various gardens in the future.  Plus, as you are beginning to witness with the most recent post, I can be rather long winded.  I started talking about a tree, then gave instructions on eradicating a gopher, listed the proper cocktail to have, returned to the tree, then finished up with football scores.  For this particular post, I'll try and stay on task and only discuss the 53rd Annual Bonsai Show.

The show took place in Bonsai section of the Japanese Garden that is shown in the picture above.  The grounds also contain Chinese, Australian, Palm, Desert, children, herb and many other garden types.  The trees on display were, as one would expect, stunning.

Olive.  A far cry from ours.

Trained along a piece of driftwood.  I cannot begin to imagine the patience and vision it takes to create these stunning displays.  I can safely say, this is far beyond my attention span at this stage of my gardening journey.

This is actually two trees, the second being atop a pedestal just behind the front tree.

Luckily, we were blessed with beautiful weather of 85 F (29 C) during the day.  We're anticipating a storm this week and the temperature should drop about 25 degrees.  Monumental by California standards.  I may have to take a sick day.  Rain and 60 degrees?  I believe that's the first sign of the apocalypse.

On one last note, I couldn't help but jump to one tangent, we visited one of the libraries that was set up in one of the multitude of art galleries.  It was set just as the Huntington's had left it with floor to ceiling bookshelves and French antiques.  Of course, books are our second passion, my lovely wife is studying to be a librarian, so we bee lined to the stacks.  I was quite excited to actually find a series I owned!  Well, not the same exactly as I'm sure there's is older, nicer, more expensive, etc.  I had to snap one picture.

Unfortunately, the Canon Rebel T1i does not have a "shoot pictures of books through glass" setting.  Shocking, actually, as I'm sure this camera could not only make me a fantastic cup of coffee, but put a man on the moon as well.  I'm sure it was user ignorance.  Either way, you get my mug as part of the photo, as well.