![]() ![]() But you’re here for the Judy Kameon–designed grounds, viewable by hotel guests and by diners at Norma’s, one of the Parker’s restaurants. ![]() That’s one reason it draws celebrity guests like Brad and Angelina and Robert Downey Jr. With its iconic 23-foot bris de soleil-that’s French for a shade-producing decorative wall-rising at the entrance, the Parker Palm Springs hotel is high style right from the start. Time your visit for late winter, when canary yellow flowers from palo verde trees fall on spiny barrel cactuses like yellow snowflakes. And luckily there’s barely a step you can take without being protected by the shaded canopy of a desert tree. You’ll want to take your time exploring-each step reveals a slightly different, hypnotizing vantage point. Cactus, for example, that are usually shown off alone are massed together, creating lushness not common in the desert. Instead, landscape architect James Burnett drew inspiration from the Annenbergs’ large collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings (Cézannes and van Goghs among them) to create a 9-acre canvas where plants are used almost as paint. ![]() When the center expanded nearly a decade ago, drought-mandated water restrictions prevented a continuation of the green, lawn-heavy landscape beloved by Leonore Annenberg. (President Obama visited five times.) But its gardens transcend politics to become a shining example of sustainable landscape design. Charities also run alternative indigenous open gardens to accommodate those who'd choose Tecoma capensis over Lonicera japonica.Almost every American president since Eisenhower has visited Sunnylands, the estate and retreat center built by media tycoon Walter Annenberg and his wife, Leonore. Homes and gardens magazines in that country regularly feature exclusively indigenous gardens, and sometimes even highlight indigenous plants with a specially designed graphic. In South Africa the native or indigenous plant movement has become particularly strong over the past 10 years or so, and for many gardeners, younger ones especially, growing indigenous plants, and even plants indigenous to the area in which one lives rather than indigenous to the country, has become the norm, rather than the exception. ![]() Of course there's nothing unusual in moving plants around the world – explorers and plant-hunters been doing it for centuries – but seeing the display has had me thinking about domestic gardens and what we grow in them. These are plants a long, long way from home and, their urban context aside, they just don't seem to fit an English spring. Kew, in collaboration with the Museum, has planted up a temporary garden of South African plants, bringing in their words "a small corner of South Africa to the heart of London".Įven to my South African eyes, the collection of familiar proteas, euphorbias, aloes, restios and proteas looks a little out of place against a backdrop of buses, cabs and the imposing architecture of the museum itself. There's an otherworldly display of plants outside the British Museum right now. ![]()
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