Sugar Magnolia

Here I am again hurrying to get to another airport so I can wait. Thank goodness for the Delta Sky Room for moments like this. We use our sky miles card for everything we possibly can including buying stock for Garden Works and for all of our home stuff. That adds up to a lot of miles each year. We use those sky miles when we can to treat ourselves or offer a trip to a family member who might be have an emergency need for a flight. Mimi and I love to check out of the bustling airports and check in to the relatively chill sky room. It’s like we left the airport, got a decent meal and came back in time for boarding, definitely makes flying more enjoyable. Good mimosas, good coffee, and a table to scratch out another article. This one won’t be hard to start, the hard part will be how to end after this trip we just embarked upon.

We kinda had three trips in one, staying 3 nights in each of the 3 places we visited. We started in San Francisco for three nights, drove to Los Angeles for 3 nights, then to Carefree, Arizona for 3 nights. Each stop was distinctly different from the last. San Francisco was all about the Dead shows and being with friends from Mississippi and from elsewhere, friends from past shows. I think we saw more Mississippi friends than we see when we are home since we don’t get out much.

Los Angeles was all about gathering Intel from the top plant people and garden centers in the country. We are trying to find even more west coast plants that will survive here. It seems to me like our plant zones are shifting a little bit and we are ready to push the zones a little bit to see what we can and can’t do, that is information I will be sharing with you when I’ve had time to get through a winter and a summer, the true test.

The Carefree, Arizona part was all about us. We spent 3 blissful days at a yoga retreat with intent of washing it all away… it worked. Mimi is a professional finder of the coolest Airbnb possible. She will base a trip around a cool place to stay. Our place in San Francisco was super cool, in a location that we recognized and was convenient for the to and fro that comes along with three nights of fun music with the Grateful Dead. They are officially called Dead and Company now due to losses and gains in the cast of characters that has occurred over a 60 year run. I still call them the Grateful Dead because the time and space between the shows when all the deadheads are taking over a town and partying, all in fun but a little on the mischievous trickster side is what we love about the scene. It makes for a really fun vibe with lots of tricks and laughs, Jesters everywhere! The music is the other half. Mimi and I love the music but over the years our love of the music is now mixed equally with the nostalgia of all our fun times with old friends and new. That part feels just like the Grateful Dead days and for that reason they will always be the Grateful Dead to me.

Thank goodness we had an idea about the weird weather in San Francisco. The days that week were clear and warm but right after dark the mist can roll in and chill things down quick. A light down jacket and long pants were just right with a little help from our fellow sardines putting off some body heat. Dancing the night away and running into lots of Mississippi people made the nights a blast. I’m sure we saw 10 or 12 hometowners, lots of Dead fans in the Northside. After the show is over each night, the fiasco of catching a bus back to area of town where our place was just hilarious. I am no good at following bus maps in an unfamiliar city, luckily we had one of those that can in our group so we made it… barely.

On the 4th day, we arose to the dry and dusty drive to Los Angeles. Mimi has a mentor that has driven and inspired her for a long time. Mimi discovered Flora Grubbs the same day she realized that the plant world is a pallet for art. Everything changed in her mind when she saw Flora working with plants as an art. We have visited her place several times in San Francisco and snuck out to see her place on one of our days on this trip. It’s always more than we hope for. This would be Mimi’s first time to see Flora's place in Los Angeles. The Garden centers that she follows in Los Angeles are all three named Rolling Greens. They are well into doing it the way Mimi strives to achieve. All three were distinctly different from the others. One was very boutique and had great plants for people with small yards but great patio space. The evenings in LA are very conducive for congregating outside so they do a tremendous business in pottery, fountains, illumination and plants that can fit into small spaces. One of the centers was a multi level property. Every level was about something specific like just pots and plants that do well in pots. The next level was about landscape plants for outside then one stairwell up led to the plants for indoors and patios. I had to remind myself that it doesn’t ever get very cold there so anything goes. That is anything but plants that require a lot of water.

You know that thing about that dry heat? The heat was unbelievable, and, yep it was dry. We saw 115 degrees while we were at the Huntington Botanical Garden, we also found the shade. Luckily, we got there early that day since the area we were most interested in was the cactus area. This was by far the most interesting botanical garden we’ve visited yet mainly because the area that their collection of both Australian and American agaves and succulents and cactuses was like being on another planet. I have never seen anything like these well established cactus. There were Saguaro Cactus’s with 3 or 4 arms. It takes one of those around 100 years to grow an arm. They stay 2 or 3 feet tall for about a decade then they have a growth spurt if they haven’t been trampled upon by something like a stagecoach, over a 250 year life span what are the odds of something surviving under these conditions?

We wound up in the Japanese Gardens later in the morning where there was some shade. We found a great spot near some water and had lunch, it was so beautiful in every direction. We had seen what we wanted to see by the time it got not fun anymore hot. We decide to finish that day off with a visit to the LA Flora Grubbs garden center. Again, more than we wished for. I definitely saw some spokes turning in Mimi’s head. She was making a list and checking it twice! The lay out in that dessert scenario is just hard to beat. The paths were a reddish hew, the color of the ground there. The heavy, chunky pieces that Flora displays on are just perfect. I believe I saw Mimi looking up big, chunky pieces of furniture. I believe we have a trip in a truck in our near future. Here we go again! It is fun to check out and get inspired so we can come back to our business with a clear vision and a fresh view in the direction we are trying to get, not find.

We drove down Rodeo drive and spent some time at Venice beach and stayed near the iconic film studios in Culver City. I feel like we did the stuff you do when you go to LA. We spent our evenings on the rooftop of the place Mimi found for us. It was a little community in itself with a great market and restaurant with anything we needed including late night ice cream. With the flags blowing in the breeze and the cafe lights strung out everywhere it made for some great sunset chats and wine until we couldn’t take it anymore. We were both surprised how much we loved visiting Los Angeles, I always guessed it wouldn’t be for me, even just to visit. Turns out its a new favorite.

Our next move was to drive east towards Phoenix to stop off at a town called Carefree, Arizona. There is a big wellness thing going on in this region and we picked one of the wellness retreats to be our place to celebrate our life and our season and our kids, each other. The place was just other worldly with the desert as the backdrop. We stretched and got all bent out of shape on some aerial yoga and got put back together again for three days we relaxed like we’ve never relaxed before. That was a new experience for us and may just have to cap off all subsequent trips. The grounds were landscaped or really land raked so minimally that we began to see that the daytime hours had a beauty of its own but at night with the lights on the plants with the cream colored adobe walls behind them it became a work of art. I think when you live in a place that is that repressively hot you find yourself outside more like when the climate suits your clothes, in the evenings. We had some nice drives, great walks in wonderful vistas, great chats, stressful bus moments after the shows, tough hikes in San Francisco and some very restful moments. These are the kinds of moments that keep us moving forward and the kind that create lasting memories. Like the Dead say “sometimes you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right”.