Saturday, January 31, 2009

Jardim Botanico at UCLA

This weekend I have been out at UCLA doing some interviews toward an oral history of TV Globo, which is located near the Botanical Garden, or Jardim Botanico, of Rio. I have been staying just off campus at Hilgard House, right down the street from UCLA's own botanical garden. It is a great place to walk in the morning, plus it gives me a chance to muse on the odd symmetry or possibly the bad pun of thinking about both botanical gardens, but in very different ways.

UCLA's garden is quite a marvel of compact diversity. It can't take up more than a couple of acres at most. But it has jungle environments, as you can see here.

It also has desert environments, like enormous prickly pear you can see here. The garden tries hard to get you to suspend your disbelief about being between a city street and hyper-modern UCLA. In fact, it made me think of a favorite scene in a novel by Gene Wolf in which his characters wander around in two magical botanical gardens. But it is hard to get away from the screen fence you see here,














or the street behind the desert plants you can see here where the garden dead ends at the top of little hill and merges back into plain old Hilgard Avenue.














It has also has some California foothills environments, like this one.

Quite a wonderful place to wander about and get a bit or exercise.

1 comment:

hoolia goolia said...

OOoh, the gardens look awesome. I can totally see the Gene Wolfe thing too.