Before heading to California in late March, we contacted a Los Angeles friend to arrange to have dinner together on our only night in LA, before driving north to Santa Barbara.

“By the way,” she said. “A neighbour is having a garden party Sunday afternoon. Would you like to be our guests?  She grows beautiful tulips.”

Uh… Beverly Hills? Tulips? Garden party?  Yes, thank you!

So it was that I wandered off the plane, into the washroom at LAX where I changed into garden party-ish attire, into the rental car, and just 6 hours after leaving wintery, ice-shrouded Toronto, onto a flower-filled patio a few blocks from Wilshire Boulevard.  The bartender (a handsome, ponytailed dancer who’d done some hip-hop in Toronto), poured me a glass of white wine and I wandered out onto the patio, where I was relieved to note that the beautiful California people all wore sensible walking shoes and looked like us.  

The flowers were lovely – spring bulbs and early perennials filling myriad terracotta pots on the patio, and purple and mauve cineraria in the raised beds that surrounded it. 

The hostess apologized, mentioning the 90-degree heat wave the previous week that caused the tulips to open too quickly.  I didn’t mind – it felt lovely just being outdoors in the sunshine after four months of the hardest winter in decades. And I could smell the sweet perfume of the daffodils sitting on a side table.  

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Our hostess was an enthusiastic, long-time gardener, and this event was an annual fundraiser that raised money for a family cause near and dear to her heart.  On the dining room table around a tureen filled with flowers, she had arranged several delicious, homemade cakes.  I had three kinds.  It was lunchtime in California, after all.

I wandered amongst the chatting guests in the house and past a vignette in the hallway that recalled a visit I’d made to California in November 2008.  It was the very night that Obama became president, and I fell asleep in my San Francisco hotel room to the sound of young people walking below my window chanting “O-BA-MA, O-BA-MA!”  It seemed like such a long time ago. 

Back out on the patio I found my first honey bees of the year nectaring in the purple    Canterbury bells.  What a thrill it was to watch them buzzing contentedly – I hadn’t seen honey bees since October when they visited my autumn monkshoods.

As I was following the bees from flower to flower snapping photos, a man came up beside me and we began chatting.  I learned that he was the hostess’s garden designer, Jon Shepodd, Seattle-based, but with a Los Angeles client list. In the small world department we compared notes and found we knew some of the same garden industry people.

Soon it was time to leave; I’d been awake since before dawn and the hotel beckoned for an afternoon nap. But the best part?  I’d spent my first afternoon in California in an actual garden, tended lovingly by an actual gardener.  It was going to be a great garden-touring trip, I could feel it.