Garden miscellany

Here's an interesting garden juxtaposition. To set the stage: This photo was taken at the LA County Museum of Art. The permanent garden that lines the walkways between buildings has a high level of LA-style design: Bright red painted steel uprights for the walkway roof, exceptionally straight and perfectly aligned COR-TEN steel retaining walls, COR-TEN steel raised planters that resemble wooden planter boxes, and a range of imported plants starting with turf grass and ending with palms.

Surrounding the BCAM building and LACMA's courtyard is a 100 palm tree garden, designed by artist Robert Irwin and landscape architect Paul Comstock. Some of the 30 varieties of palms are in the ground, but most are in large wooden boxes above ground. - Wikipedia (but of course those wooden boxes are actually steel that resembles wood boxes, so Wikipedia is wrong in that small matter.  Also the palms are not all, strictly speaking, palms.)

Given the high level of design and the mix of imported plant materials I thought that this reindeer (clearly made from artificial plant materials, surmounting a "bark" hill that is dotted with plastic flowers, and surrounded by a synthetic box hedge) was a sly comment on the permanent garden.  Alas, it is a marker for the entrance to the Tim Burton exhibit and destined to move on when the exhibit closes on Oct 31.  The reindeer was a prop in the movie Edward Scissorhands.

Tim Burton has a fairly prolific career so there was ample material but when it was all said and done I was left feeling like I'd had a Dodger Dog and a large Coke instead of a five course gourmet meal.

Here's another "garden" looking north from the end of the Palos Verdes peninsula.  I believe that's Rhus integrifolia (Lemonade Berry) in the foreground.  I saw a large Mimulus on the cliffs as well in full late summer dormancy.