Portland: John Kuzma garden (part 2, up close)

Yesterday I showed you John Kuzma's garden from a rainy day last month in Portland. Today, you see the same wet garden up close. It's the details that make a garden special for me: the texture of the plants, the rocks, sculpture, etc. If you're not getting your face and eyes deep into a garden, you're missing half of the experience (at least)!

You got a small taste of this in the last post with some macro shots of the huge gunnera, from right up in the plant -- well, under it mostly. I'll start again from there...

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If you were a Flinger visiting this garden and you didn't climb under the gigantic rough leaves, you probably didn't see this:

What texture! How can you not love this foliage?

Speaking of foliage, and texture, and wet (remember it had just stopped raining), let's just enjoy...

What is this plant? Looks like Dr. Seuss character hands!

Okay, hold on a second. I want to talk about that last photo. This tree, this wonderful blue, purply, gray, misty beauty...

This is not a tree that we're familiar with in the midwest, but if I remember correctly it was identified to me as an acacia -- maybe some improved version of purple-leaf acacia? (Acacia baileyana 'Purpurea')

Sited to one side of the patio where we kept out of the rain, my view of it was blocked by lots of other people, so I didn't really see it until I had made my way through the entire garden and was coming back to the house. It was just stunning though, one of my favorite plants in this entire garden!

I'm not really sure why I didn't take any photos in the front garden -- maybe I was all snapped out.


I hope these two posts have given you a good sense of this garden, and I'm looking forward to seeing photos of it over the next couple of years as the newer sections of it mature!

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