The botanical garden is of course much bigger with winding paths and wildland hills and arroyos mixed in with curated plantings.
There is little shade, a design lapse in the original layout that would have been nice for visitors but makes for open sunny expanses and views. But there is gorgeous stonework.
A plumbago tucked into one of the stacked stone walls was lovely. The stones give it just the shade it needs.
Elsewhere the big garden of lavenders and roses was spectacular. The pink roses had gone by, but their faded softness provided a loose counterpoint among the vivid rounded lavenders. But much of the botanical garden was suffering a bit.
Mojave sages had desiccated foliage. The bigger Mojave sages were better but still tired looking. The fernbushes looked dry and tired too. Little plantings -- pineleaf penstemons, phlox, shrubs and perennials were all little and some were stunted looking.
The botanical garden is big and complex enough to make the visual tapestry still lovely to wander in. But individual plants looked not great.
Andrea's courtyard garden was the opposite. Tiny of course, bounded by walls and fences and quite lush looking.
Shade is abundant and cool and we had coffee and strawberry shortcake under the patio umbrella in the shelter of her spreading crabapple.
It's a mature garden, developed many years ago. It is square shaped with paths that have room to wander around central beds, unlike my narrow courtyard that makes plantings line up along fencelines.
It changes each season but the structure and maturity are established and give a sense of calm fullness.
In my yard the flagstones and deck and gravel dominate, the plants are the background. In hers the stonework is simple and secondary to all the plants around it.
She has two seating areas -- the dining table and then a conversation area, and both look settled and tucked into their shade dappled spaces.
The aspen in the photo above was a volunteer seedling that just popped up there.
Nestled into lush foliage around the garden there are other sitting areas which seem they are more for decor than sitting, but they are nice accents.
She has lots of pots tucked in all over the whole garden, and even those are full and bursting with lushness. (Somehow mine are always a spindly thing too small for its pot).
Two such different garden experiences, the one vast and sun baked with strugglers and big hills and views, the other intimate and shady and calmly composed.
Both had lovely plumbagos -- the one at the top of this post with little plants tucked into a stone wall, and Andrea's big thick mound of Ceratostigma plumbagoides under her crabapple, so lush and green it looked like a beautiful shrub.
Two very different very nice gardens.