I’m discovering the joy of growing cactus, not just for the plants’ unique shapes and light-catching spines, but for their stunning flowers as well. Their flowering may be brief — generally just a day or two, so you don’t want to miss it — but what they lack in duration they make up for in beauty.

With oversized flowers, this cactus looks like it’s wearing a hat worthy of a royal wedding.

This week my misshapen little ball cactus bloomed too. Hey, do the flowers always match the coloring of the spines? I just noticed that.

It always amazes me that such prickly, inhospitable plants can produce such stunning flowers.

For Bloom Day, here are a couple of other scenes from my garden right now: ‘Colorado’ water lilies in bloom in the stock-tank pond…

…and purple coneflowers in bloom wherever their seeds have taken root.

For more Bloom Day posts, visit meme hostess Carol at May Dreams Gardens. And remember, it’s Foliage Follow-Up tomorrow!

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By the way, if you follow me on Facebook (and if not, I hope you will), I’m folding my two separate pages — Digging and Lawn Alternatives — into a new Facebook page called, ahem, Pam Penick. Please “Like” my page to enjoy photos of beautiful gardens and lawn alternatives, get notifications of my blog posts and upcoming talks, and just hang out with me and talk plants! I hope to see you there!

Speaking of garden talks, I’ll be in San Antonio next Monday at noon to give a free talk at the San Antonio Garden Center about losing the lawn and gaining a waterwise landscape or beautiful garden. Lawn Gone! book-signing afterward. Please join me! P.S. If that’s during your work day, just bring a bag lunch and come on out.
Where: 3310 N. New Braunfels, San Antonio, TX (adjacent to the San Antonio Botanical Garden)
What: Essentials of Gardening class, hosted by the Gardening Volunteers of South Texas

All material © 2006-2013 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Just before closing at Santa Barbara’s Lotusland, we explored the Cactus Garden, which I found even more fascinating than I expected. Despite what outsiders may imagine my home state of Texas to be like, this isn’t it. Tall, columnar cactus like these, for example, are largely unknown in central Texas. As the late afternoon light shone through their spines, these somehow humanoid plants wore full-length halos.

Lotusland founder Madame Ganna Walska never saw this garden, at least not in this incarnation. The plants were donated in 1999, several years after her death, by her old friend and cactus collector Merritt Dunlap. More than 500 plants and more than 300 species make up the Cactus Garden, which opened in 2004.

Cacti are perhaps the most otherworldly of all plants. Their architectural shapes look fantastic paired with flowering perennials and loose grasses, as you’d likely find them in nature. But here they have only each other for company, and the result is quite surreal. For one thing, they have such textural “skin,” often with glowing spines.

The slender bodies of some stretch toward the sky.

Others creep along the ground, like snakes or leggy, green tarantulas. Check out those frivolous, lipstick-shaped flowers.

Pincushion-like spines, as long as darning needles, cradle starry, jewel-like flowers on some plants.

Chips of shale mulch the cactus planting beds and match the gray gravel paths that wind through the garden.

I just can’t help anthropomorphizing these slender, erect plants, even those in bloom. These all seem to be looking at something to the left.

Gorgeous flowers on such rugged, prickly plants! Do you think these open in the evening? I wasn’t sure why they were closed well before day’s end.

Many gardeners chase after blue flowers, but how about the baby-blue “skin” of these columnar cactus? I absolutely loved the chalky blue of these plants.

A mounded viewing terrace in the center of the garden offers dramatic, 360-degree views of the Cactus Garden. Here’s just one view from the terrace.

I think Madame would have approved of this garden. Like her others, it relies on massing of species for effect and it certainly contains many oddities of the plant kingdom.

And the stunning flowers of summer add the perfect finishing touch.

I hope you enjoyed my Lotusland series. For a look back at the rear terrace, parterre & lemon arbor, click here. A note about visiting. The garden is open only Wednesdays through Saturdays, and you must have an advance reservation for a docent-led tour. Adult admission is $35. I recommend becoming a Lotusland member, which allows you to visit for free and take self-guided tours of the garden. Membership is $75 for individuals and $125 for a family membership — about the same price as two visits.

One more thing. If Lotusland interests you, I urge you to read Gerhard Bock’s Lotusland series (5 posts in all) at his blog, Bamboo, Succulents and More. Gerhard visited in April 2013, and his wonderfully informative and beautifully photographed posts added fuel to my desire to visit.

All material © 2006-2013 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

As we charged into Santa Barbara, California’s Lotusland, knowing we had a limited amount of time and wouldn’t be able to see everything, my first must-see areas were the oft-photographed Aloe Garden and the Blue Garden. Luckily both are fairly close to the visitor’s center.

A kidney-shaped, ice-blue pool is the cool centerpiece of the hot-colored Aloe Garden. Having inherited the pool with the estate, Madame Ganna Walska painted the bottom white, lined the perimeter with pearlescent abalone shells, and installed two fountains made of giant clamshells. Starfish-shaped aloes stretch their arms across rocks around the pool, contributing to an under-the-sea ambiance.

More than 170 kinds of aloes combine to create an aloe jungle, with torchlike flowers…

…and drought-stressed foliage in shades of orange and red.

Reddish lava rock and red brick (next image) form the paths that run through the garden.

Those hot colors contrast so beautifully with the glacier-blue pool. It would be tempting to soak one’s feet if it weren’t for the barrier of abalone shells.

Across the main drive you come to the Blue Garden, which is perhaps the most recognizable of all Lotusland’s gardens. It made the cover of Martha Stewart Living last year.

Kelly green lawn meets cool gray-green in a line of mature Agave franzosinii, many of which were in bloom during our visit. These will die, as agaves do after they bloom, and will be replaced, presumably, with smaller, younger specimens.

I’m glad I was there to see the giant franzosiniis, their sinewy arms creating a living wall alongside stone posts topped with spherical finials, which mark the entrance.

Step through the gateway and you enter an enchanted space, silent, magical, all color mysteriously toned down to blue-grays.

Gray gravel edged with blue slag glass — so gorgeous! — leads you into an alien landscape where warm tones have been leached away.

Blue-green palms lift their fringed fingers overhead. Tufts of blue fescue, intersected by ribbons and pools of the succulent blue chalk fingers, carpet the ground. Moody blue atlas cedars (not pictured here) stand in droopy clusters amid the palms.

Fan dance

The blue sky and hills above Santa Barbara add to the color scheme.

Up close, blue-green pots of succulents add the finishing touch.

Exiting across the great lawn, a parting glance at the Blue Garden shows the “wall” of Agave franzosinii beneath towering palms. Look up into the live oaks immediately overhead, however, and you see what looks like jellyfish flying through the trees.

Planters of donkey’s tail (Sedum morganianum) are suspended from branches, topped with clear plastic domes (to keep squirrels off? to keep the plants free of tree debris?) that resemble flying saucers.

You’ve entered the shady, moist Bromeliad Garden, a ground-carpeting understory of fibrous leaves with cup-shaped centers that hold water, many with glossy, burgundy leaves or fuchsia blooms.

Little surprises await here too, as elsewhere in the garden, like this stone lion with a playful mane of Spanish moss draped across his head.

A long view reveals a fantastic contrast between low-growing, strappy bromeliads and the cylindrical, spiny towers of cactus in the distance.

Spanish moss drips from the trees, as if we’re in the Deep South. If I didn’t know better, I’d have sworn I was in Florida at Naples Botanical Garden.

But we’re still at Lotusland, at the rear of the main house. The back terrace beckons with tiled planters of huge sago palms.

Next up: The rear terrace, parterre, and lemon arbor. For a look back at the House Garden with cactus and euphorbia, click here.

All material © 2006-2013 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.