My stay in the Coachella Valley has approached its end. There was a bunch of stuff I did where I couldn’t really justify writing an entire blog post about it, and I might include some of it in a round-up or photo dump post at some point, but I do have one more dedicated post from the Moorten Botanical Garden in Palm Springs, California.
Admission was US$5.00, which I thought was a fair price relative to the size of the garden. There was a main outdoor garden, a cactarium, an event area, a shop with cacti and other goods for sale, a small collection of historical artifacts, and a bird cage.
The outdoor area of this botanical garden is fairly dense. I like getting nice photographs from optimal angles so I was orienting my body in peculiar ways, and I apparently managed to back my arm into one of the cacti and get thorned through my shirt. The worst part is that I didn’t even notice it had happened until I was prepared to leave the botanical garden, so I’m actually very curious how long I spent with a small set of cactus spines sticking out of my arm while walking through the garden.
It was extremely hot and sunny when I went. I’ve been waking up fairly late lately and the garden closes at 4 PM, so I ended up going in the afternoon when it was around the hottest time of day, before the sun set and the air temperature cooled down. There are a few small shaded areas and the cactarium is fully enclosed, so those were some nice spots to try and stabilize my body temperature before venturing back out into the sun.
There were two notable things that stood out to me. First was the fact that this was a very unique botanical garden due to its desert nature. When you think of botanical gardens, you usually think of fields layered with colorful flowers, but seeing everything layered with harsh, spiky cacti was an interesting sight. With that being said, cacti also bloom flowers, but in smaller quantities, so the fact that they were rarer and more sparse made the flowers even more appealing.
The second thing I liked was the contrast between the natural desert landscaping of the botanical garden, and the manually-introduced tropical palm trees along South Palm Canyon Drive and the luxury real estate surrounding the botanical garden visible in the distance. Seeing that I am a resident of Las Vegas and consider it to be my favorite city, I think it is unsurprising that I like strange things that seem a bit out of place, and having two opposite biomes right next to each other in parallel eyeshot of each other is definitely a very strange sight to see.
Below are some photographs taken all throughout the botanical garden that I thought turned out the best.
