Find Spring in Blooms of Descanso
Spring is such a sly, untouchable moment. It’s the tick of a chronometer at a lonely observatory and winter dying in silence. Calendars generally ignore spring. Diaries deny it. Both give bigger play to Halloween.
But at Descanso Gardens in La Canada, spring is given its gorgeous due through a skein of special days that shape the season into a 165-acre showcase.
Not incidentally, this is the final weekend of Descanso’s spring flower and garden show for neighborhood clubs, local schools and individual growers--but see the event as a short trailer to the perennial delight of Descanso, a public facility too often shadowed by the mighty reputations of Griffith Park, Huntington Library and the Los Angeles State and County Arboretum.
Without even thinking beneath its surface, impeccable Descanso (meaning rest ) is restfully impressive.
It holds the world’s largest camellia forest, 100,000 frivolous shrubs beneath a 30-acre parasol of stern California oaks. Her old-fashioned roses began their cultivation in 1200 BC. The moderns are a 6,000-bush parade of All-American Rose Selection winners since 1939.
Descanso has six miles of garden trails and a Japanese teahouse. There are tram rides and docent tours and benches besides tiny clearings. Through Thursday, there’s a one-woman show of watercolors by Ruth Basler Burr interpreting views of Yosemite and English cottages, the camellias of Descanso and the roses of her own back yard, all by powder puff in pastel shades on soft, tiffany paper.
Stroll from chattering creek to Fern Canyon. Sit on a turtle back rock. Feel this place.
The smells are damp leaf mold and floral potpourri and beeswax candles in the gift shop. And those 100,000 camellia trees and shrubs fighting for your nostrils.
The sights are glossy, overfed ducks dragging downy chests and older adults meandering happily around gardens where the pace clearly, and gratefully, is slower than theirs. And the roses: Ginger Snap a titian blaze, Roman Holiday building broad candelabra and Chrysler Imperial, as usual, almost nonchalantly, mass producing blinding reds.
The sounds of Descanso are the purest there can be. Water. Birds. A breeze through fat leaves. Bees. Your footsteps. The croak of a duck that carries a half mile. And it seems impossible that this enclave can keep such peace within a megalopolitan snare formed by the Glendale, Foothill and Ventura freeways.
And wandering Descanso produces grand thoughts to grin by.
Hey, this place probably represents the best justification in the world for buying and wearing a Panama hat.
It’s odd that looking at calla lilies growing here in their garden state will not make you think of funerals.
People do not seem to shout in gardens nor do they leave graffiti, so maybe it is time to reseed and regreen Greater Los Angeles.
Then two girls, about 8-years-old--9 tops--came walking. They carried discarded flowers in their hands. A broken daffodil. A fallen camellia. Poppies. Azaleas.
They held them in front. As if making offerings. They spoke about their blooms.
“This is the power of life,” said one.
“This is the power of dawn,” said the other.
“This is the power of man’s goodness,” continued one.
“This is the power of God’s thought,” countered the other.
And too soon, I thought, you will both become adults and lose such clarity, and that’s a pretty sorry price to pay for this drag of growing up.
I wandered back through the roses and past the bird observation station and to the plant propagation center where Mike Sydoriak, bearded, bowed, straw hatted, grizzled and wonderful, was packing away his tables of herbs for sale.
“Did you find anything you like?” he asked.
I like it all, I said. I even found spring. And the power of dawn and man’s goodness.
Spring flower and garden show, Descanso Gardens, 1418 Descanso Drive, La Canada Flintridge, through Sunday, 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Admission $3 for adults, $1.50 for ages 5 through 12 and seniors 62 and over ; under 5 free. Call: (818) 790-5414.
