The eighteen Southern California desert gardens in this book represent a design genre that demonstrates how their owners and caretakers, often with little more than good intuition and a sense of color and proportion, can create beautiful gardens.This is especially the case in the private gardens: few of them are designed according to landscape architecture standards; instead, they represent extensions of the greatly enriched lives of their owners and cultivators. However, the desert or cactus garden does have its dark side--the threat of serious pain posed by some brutally spiny cacti. Hieronymus Bosch may have used some of the specimens in this book to depict Hell, while Fragonard may have selected others, spiny or spineless, to serve as luxuriant flora along the road to Paradise.

Whether explosive displays of columnar cacti and brilliant wildflowers cascading down sun-bathed hill-sides, meditative, botanical expressions of an organic,spine-laden geometry set within the quiet, earthen walls of a Spanish colonial mission, or twilit, verdant groves evoking a prelapsarian topography-this book captures the numinous light and beauty of 18 unique and rarely photographed private and public desert gardens between Santa Barbara and San Diego. Featuring the most important desert garden in the world at the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, as well as the Moorten Botanical Gardens in Palm Springs, Balboa Park in San Diego, and many exquisite private gardens, the volume celebrates the sculpturesque charms of cacti, aloes, and other suc-culent flora that have adapted to the extreme conditions of the desert.

Combining spectacular garden views in idyllic set-tings and ravishingly beautiful images of particular specimens-with text by the renowned desert gar-den expert Gary Lyons that balances the poetics and technical aspects of this garden genre-the book serves as an inspirational guide to these horticultural treasures. Because interest in desert gardens contin-ues to grow dramatically, the book also includes the addresses and visiting hours of gardens open to the public, and provides a bibliography of what one needs to know in order to create one's own.

Introduction:The Desert Garden in Southern California, 

Gunter Schwartz Garden, Santa Barbara,    

Frank Jordano Garden, Santa Barbara,   

GannaWalska Lotusland, Plontecito,    

Gary Lyons Garden, Burbank,    

Ftck Garden, Pasadena, 58

Los Angeles City Zoo, Griffith Park. Los Angeles. 

Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden. Claremont. 

Huntington Desert Garden, San Marino.  

San Gabriel P1ission, San Gabriel, 

Getty Center Cactus Garden, Los Angeles  

P1odelo Shales, Pacific Palisades,  

Serra Gardens, Malibu,    

P1oorten Botanical Gardens, Palm Spnngs,   

Living Desert Wildlife and Animal Park Palm Desert.  

O'Neill Garden, San Juan Capistrano.  

Patrick Anderson Garden, Fallbrook.  

Phil Favel Garden, Escondido,  

Balboa Park Cactus Gardens, San Diego,  

Index,  

Directory and Bibliography,