Answering Trevor!

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Hi Trevor,

One of these years I hope I have the pleasure of meeting you!

Sorry I haven't gotten back to you earlier in the day, but it's Monday, and I'm preoccupied with a new baby: house-husbandry is never dull!

Your garden sounds wonderful, a profusion of plants to play with: and bravo for using your water so well! It sounds like the local birds have no trouble with the exotic decor or cuisine, though I'm curious about the Koalas: I thought they eat only Eucalyptus leaves.

You have much more rain then we do in southern California: your 26 inches of rain over 7 months is way more than our 13" of rain mostly over 3 or 4 months.  If I had as much rain as you, and a 60,000 gallon cistern I could do without an irrigation system too.  But to garden where I am now without irrigation, I doubt I'd get a Rosemary to make it through the summer, let alone Hostas or Hydrangea 'Annabelle'.

(You have to be careful what you post on Facebook!)

As for your critique of the Robert Irwin garden at the Getty Museum:  hmm, were you once an art student?  I was, and I laughed hearing your scathing critique of the American art establishment as "elite, exclusive, self-indulgent, affected with unattainable knowledge and an impenetrable mystique".

Fighting words!  I would have to agree; the art world was a nut I certainly couldn't crack.

That said, I kind of like the gardens at the Getty.  They are so absurdly extravagant and labor-intensive, I can't help thinking about both the French Revolution and Alice Through the Looking-Glass when I'm there.  Did you know every spring an army of gardeners removes every other leaf from all the London Planes so the plants beneath them will have enough sunlight to grow?  I kid you not!

But that obliviousness to surrounding conditions seems typical of most gardens in really dry areas.  The Olives and Lavender of a Provencal garden might blend seamlessly with the surrounding maquis, but the oasis on the edge of the Negev or Sinai is a walled Eden, where fountains burble amidst flowers and fruit trees in the shade of the towering Dates, a world away from the scorching sands outside.

So that insularity of the irrigated garden is typical.  But in climates that are so dry that you really have to have irrigation to have a garden, it's probably inevitable.

I hope you let us know when you might be in California.  Meanwhile, I'm on Facebook too (as Ben Armentrout-Wiswall), but I post more photos on Flickr.com  (as Ben Wiswall).  The flickr photos are organized in sets, so they're easy to access by category.

As I think you all say,

Cheers!

-Ben Armentrout-Wiswall

Simi Valley, CA