San Diego Botanical Gardens

  A First Visit to a Local Icon

Event Report 20180328

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The Experience

North of San Diego in Encinitas is a place that used to be called "Quail Gardens" and is now referred to as the San Diego Botanical Gardens.  The name is somewhat odd in that the gardens are quite aways from the city of San Diego, but within San Diego County.  But I digress.  I had heard that it was a nice place to visit and since it was springtime in SoCal, it seemed to be a good thing to do.

For this trip, we had several cameras along: a Fuji X Pro-2 with 35mm f/2 lens and a new Sony A7RM3 with a macro (close focus) 90mm lens. These 2 cameras have different capabilities and strengths.  The Fuji is compact and light but it produces great color rendition and has an APS-C sized sensor which creates a "crop factor" of 1.5.  The Sony is the most current model and is a full-sized sensor chip with a crop factor of 1.0 (that is, no crop).  For these photos, the crop factor plays into the look and feel of the final image.  The higher crop factor camera (Fuji) produce a deeper depth of field (DOF) than the no-crop Sony.  For close-up photos, like flowers, the shallow DOF produces a very narrow band of focus and sometimes actually works against you in obtaining a "good" photo.

The photos below are what we saw.



The parking lot was nicely done and surrounded by interesting plants.  The tree above the trashcan was in bloom.  We immediately started looking around at the cool plants.


This is likely a type of euphorbia, from Africa.  The bush has thorns but not at the same level as North American cactus spines.


A nice, healthy euphorbia bush.


A very large Dracaena Draco succulent.



All manner of thorny things, some from this continent, some from Africa and some from South America.


Past the Draco bush we could see the Pacific Ocean.


A cactus close to the Organ Pipe cactus.

Near the entrance, one of the barrel cactus was in bloom.  The flower was iridescence and it made it hard to get a reasonable photo of the interior of the flower.


This is an Owl's Eye Pincushion Cactus.


I did not catch the name of this gem, but it has hair and gnarly spines.

This plant is from Africa.


Spring has sprung and most of the flowers were in bloom.  Notice the center core of the flowers above.


Many of the flowers had been worked-over by the insects leaving traces of pollen where ever they walk.

I do not know the name of this flower, but there was plenty of structure in the central area and nice, distinctive patterns on the petals.


Complex internal structure in this bloom.


Some odd bush was blooming.


We saw trees similar to this at Iguazu Falls in Argentina.  I think this is some type of a fig tree.


More pollen drug around by insects.


The shade made getting a photo of this bright flower easier.


There were a number of statues being offered for sale in the gardens.  This, actually, is a sculpture and for about $10K it can be yours.  Contact the SDBG if interested.


Another sculpture for sale.


There were many flowers with vibrant colors.


I have never seen an insect like this.  I am sure it is common, but the tan color seemed unusual, and the spikey legs seemed odd.


I could not see the internal structure of the flower through the camera's viewfinder.  It only became visible when I could view it on a bigger screen.  Note the ant in the flower and the internal flute.


The light breeze was strong enough to make it hard to get a clear shot of the California Poppy blooms.


The poppy produces a flower that has a characteristic structure.

A complex bloom of an unknown flower.


White on white must confuse the insects.


The bright sunlight made getting this photo difficult.  In addition to spot metering to preserve the highlights it required some post processing to get the final photo above.


Many of the euphorbia bushes were in bloom.


This flower comes from a Lilly of the Nile.  Most of the blooms were red, this one was yellow.


This flower gets the reward for most colorful.


The walled garden had several anthurium plants (or at least I think this is an anthurium).  The bugs doing the pollination should have cleaned their feet before walking on the bright-white flower.



A nice stalk with baby blue flowers.

We climbed to the top of the hill and went up the lookout tower.  To our west we could see a house that had a HUGE tortoise in the backyard.  Look behind the new metal poles.  This boy is big, maybe 200 lbs, maybe more.


Cycad fruiting bodies producing pollen.

The San Diego Botanical Gardens was a very nice place and I am sure we will go again in the future.  Next time, though, I will bring some kind of sun shade to make the photos less contrasty.  Live and learn I guess


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