Garden club tour

We're planning to make the trek to Los Angeles tomorrow, so today we stayed in Ridgecrest and partook of the local offerings, specifically the 48th annual garden club tour.

We went on the 47th annual tour last year and enjoyed it, so I was pleased when I saw the ad for this year's tour. I completely adore this sort of thing -- house tours, garden tours -- the chance to poke around in someone else's home, someone else's life. In Boulder around Halloween they used to have the Ghost Walk, which was essentially a house tour except that at each house, while you admired the lavender walls and granite countertops, a psychic told you about the ghosts that lived there.

That would probably be a bit much for Ridgecrest.

I bought our tickets ahead of time, and Friday night I read through the descriptions of the gardens, planning our route. Last year several gardens on the tour were within walking distance of each other, so we pushed the stroller from house to house. This year, unfortunately, almost none of the 9 gardens on the tour were close together. I mapquested it, and we COULD have walked from our house to 4 of the gardens and back again, but it would have been 6.5 miles. A bit much for us in our current out of shape state, and a whole lot too much for the young gentlemen who would have been sitting in the stroller.

So we had to drive. Oh well.

The garden description that really caught my eye was for a house on Wildflower Street. In bold letters it read: "Please be sure to close gates so the dogs and tortoises do not get out." Naturally that was our first stop. It was way out to the west of us, on an unpaved road. We parked in the dirt, got out of the car, and walked to the house. Opened the garden gate, went in, CLOSED the gate so no tortoises could get out, started walking around the house. No tortoises. Looked politely at the plantings and the rocks (rocks are important in desert gardens), walked further around the house. No tortoises.

Finally we got all the way around to the other side of the house, met the very pleasant owners and their two dogs, and Rocket Boy got up the courage to ask "Were there any tortoises here?" "Oh yes," said the man, "there are three of them. I saw Mojo out here earlier, now where is he?" We all looked for Mojo. And suddenly I saw him, walking across the patio. He was enormous! Twice, maybe three times the size of the desert tortoise I grew up with.

Nothing improves a garden like a desert tortoise.

A few gardens later we found ourselves on Willow Street. The house was modest, with an enormous garden. Toward the back of the yard was a big pond, and as we looked into it, we realized it was full of tadpoles. RB asked the owner about them. "Those Mojave toads just come right out of the desert if you put a pond in," he told us. In the summer, he said, the full-grown toads hide in the bushes and come out in the evenings to frolic on the lawn and in the pond. (OK, he didn't say frolic, but that was the general idea.) There were hundreds of tadpoles in the pond, but he said the birds would eat most of them -- maybe 50 would survive to frolic in the garden.

I wonder. If we put a pond in our yard, could we attract some of those desert toads?

It was about 80 degrees today, bright sunshine. All the gardens we saw were idyllic and tempting -- they made the desert seem very appealing. Almost made me want to settle down in Ridgecrest permanently.

Then I think of July, day after day over 110 degrees. Even the image of 50 desert toads coming out to frolic in the evenings can't quite fix that picture. And the tortoises would be estivating.