You Don't Go To Southern California For The Garden Shows

 Should I wear this outfit to the garden show?  

Or is this more my style?

 Nah, just the usual shorts, tee shirt, and dirt-encrusted shoes.  I arrived at our local garden show early and took photos of all the demonstration gardens--uhh--I mean sitting areas.  Ironic, isn't it, that gardeners love sitting areas in their gardens, and never sit down in them?  
Sit with your vegetables sometime. 

 This one is mostly furniture, but the horizontal slats offset to make an interesting pattern is kind of cool. 

Every demonstration sitting area except one had some sort of open structure pergola type of thing.  This demonstration sitting area had more plants than the other sitting areas, I'll give it that. 

 This one had some good trendy style to it.  Sleek.  A burgundy-flowered grass mixed with burgundy Cordyline was a fine combination. 

 This one was the only one without a pergola type thing.  (The pergola in the background was a different demonstration sitting area.)  This one had an aviary instead.  The birds got the shelter instead of the humans.  It had bottles of booze, too.  

Drink with your chickens, much?

 I took a photo of the Apple store because I thought Steve Jobs would be furious about ladders sitting visible in one of his stores, even if the store wasn't open yet.  Don't you think he'd be irked?  
But...no place to sit!

 This one looked very...well, my first thought was "who decided hydrangeas should be gaudy?" 

 On the other side of the screen was a bar instead of a sofa.  It is not apparent from the photo, but the pink fabric balloons on the bar stools lit up.  The bar lit up too, and...

...changed colors!  

 Instead of drinking with your chickens, you could drink with your back to a glass fountain shaped like a lotus blossom and more hydrangeas of a color trying to compete with the light-up-color-changing bar. 

 At the next sitting area, very cool containers called Point Pots, designed by Dustin Gimbel.  

 A quartet of silver dollar Eucs.   Hefty barbecue.  Seats.

 This was the canine companion of the two fancy ladies seen in the first photos of this post.  Best use of Pampas grass seed heads I've ever seen.  Better than letting the Pampas grass reseed all over. 

 Bear with me, we're almost done.  I'm getting tired, too.  This one had nice colors.  Grey, black, white, with green-grey foliage plants.   I don't know what the CBLA means.  I don't care.  Olive trees, I like olive trees.  Don't plant them this close together.    

 I saved the worst for last.  Why does kid-oriented stuff have to be so gawdawful ugly?  Kids appreciate beauty too, don't they?  Seems to me I did.

 Turn um into good little consumers ASAP.  Kid, someday you'll have clean out Mom and Dad's garage that is stuffed full of all the stuff you never wanted to play with that they couldn't bear to throw out. 

 I should talk consumerism--I bought a plant.  Sellers of orchids and common succulents in 2 inch pots were plentiful.  The guy with the vase that was made up of a bunch of little vases glued together who has been there every year for years wasn't there this year.  No lilys.  No geranium-and-iris seller from Ventura County that has been there every year for years.

I went straight to Rainbow Valley Protea.  They mostly had flower bouquets for sale, but had a few plants as well.  I got Protea 'Brenda'.  
Say hello, 'Brenda'.  

Then I went home, and went into the garden and did a whole bunch of stuff--spot watering, weeding, dead heading, clean up, deciding where to plant 'Brenda'--without ever once sitting down.