Walkabout: L.A. County Arboretum
Michael Sedano
I began walking regularly for health benefits in 2010 after gut surgery and, not long after, diabetes. I healed, lost weight, controlled that A1C. Walking in gardens, defining my world as what I see in the camera viewfinder, provided respite hours during the years from 2018 to 2023 I lived with Alzheimer’s dementia as my wife’s caregiver.
I walk with my camera, choosing lenses for the walkabout’s objective. If I seek butterflies and insects I bring the 100mm macro lens. When I seek hummingbirds and other souls with wings in the air, I mount the 300mm lens, with and without an extender. Walking makes people healthy, it’s the “exercise” part of “diet and exercise”. Nature makes people happy, seeing with one's own eyes, and sharing fotos of wonder.
My parents would bring me to the Arcadia Arboretum (link), we called it, with some regularity. The Los Angeles County Arboretum, and the California Botanic Garden in Claremont (when it was named the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden - link), offered a road trip on Route 66; Redlands to Berdoo, Berdoo along the 66 past sleep in a wigwam motel not too distant from Mt. Vernon Street where Rte 66 begins, upwind of Kaiser Steel where I'd one day work, cruise through the muscatel vineyards of Cucamonga where Mom had picked uva as a girl, through the orange grove-lined stretches of Montclair and Upland whose reputation as racist hotbeds kept my head below the windows, first a Plymouth, then a Ford.
For a kid who grew up around orange and apricot groves, Arcadia comes as a new world, the gift of a couple hours exploring and studying trees and plants, reading and making mental notes, enjoying the specificity of taxonomic names to separate the trees from the forest, sabes? Then, as now, the Arboretum lacks fences and stringent borders, allowing gente free roaming through the grounds.
Several water features make an Arboretum visit a mix of plants, birds, fish, terrapins, crustaceans, insects, and tourists. Excited groups walk speaking Spanish and Mandarin (I suppose). Any visit adds polyglot aural enjoyment. I enjoy good conversations with raza gardeners and, in English, various volunteers. Metiche me, I tell passers-by about that heron pa'lla, check it out and have a great day.
It should be common sense not to harvest fruit nor steal easily-separated cuttings. No fruit hangs within reach at the Calamondin orange trees bordering the main road to the knoll. The avocado grove hangs lots of young fruit. Torongas overipe litter the ground. The Caper bushes are budding. Today, Lake Baldwin's green algae surface prompts signs in Spanish and English, but not Mandarin, reading "do not walk on the lake".
After our Arboretum hours, Mom had to visit south Lake Street in Pasadena where Bullock's department store displayed treasures and luxuries my family owned only with our eyes in those passing minutes on the showroom floor.
Nowadays, my walking companion, Thelma Reyna, and I make regular walkabout journeys from our homes in Pasadena to Arcadia and the Arboretum. We alternate between here, San Marino's The Huntington (link opens new window). and La Cañada Flintridge for Descanso Gardens (link).
We walked the Huntington yesterday and today we trek to Arcadia intent on climbing to Tallac Knoll, at 583 feet, the highest place in this part of the San Gabriel Valley. I've brought the 300mm lens hoping for water birds and brilliant colors in hummingbird gorgets.
We've arrived with good energy and make the steep uphill walk with poco stress. Our regular distance takes us a mile and a half and today's route will account for two plus miles with a lengthy uphill trek followed by a steep set of downhill steps to flatland before a culminating incline across deep lawn to the exit. We are good and tired by that last leg of the walkabout.
The prize of the day is a Queen butterfly. A first for my eyes and Thelma's. Our most arresting views are two encounters with a Blue Heron that, on first sight, flies away to lowland waters. We don't see it at the hoped-for pond and move along. Seeing the heron fly overhead toward where we'd been disappointed, we execute an about face to return for some arresting close-ups of the cooperative photogenic creature and the satisfaction of having gone there, and back again.
Through A Lens, Brightly
Canon EOS 6D Mark II. ISO4000. 1/4000s, various apertures. Canon EF 300mm f/4L IS USM with EF12 extension tube.
Goldfinch wing with Goldfinch.
The goldfinch perches momentarily. I point the 300mm lens. The goldfinch comets away testing my reaction time. I desperately push the button. Just in time.
Bird. Movement (or none). Eye. Brain. Finger. Camera. Lens.
iso4000, 1/4000s, f/4
Spathodea Campanulata and Colibrí Allen’s.
A spectacular flaming-orange flower whose gold-trimmed petals open in bountiful clusters draws undoubtedly happy hummingbirds to nectar in unthreatened leisure high in the canopy of the Arboretum’s African Tulip tree forest atop the Arboretum’s Tallac Knoll.
The tree has bad press as a weed because its delicate seeds float on winds to germinate across nearby untreed tierra. I’ve managed to gather seed but never had one germinate in a greenhouse.
iso4000, 1/4000s, f/8
Blue Heron’s Yellow Eye
Tallac Knoll includes a water garden to walk around on the winding path down to the waterfall. Thelma and I sit on the bench to watch a hummingbird nectaring at Russelia flowers. I stand to peer over the thicket of red flowers and I come eye to eye with a wondrous being—Blue Heron.
The small pond makes for close quarters and wonderfully detailed fotos. This is uncropped at 300mm and five feet distance. The bird moves confidently with water between me and it.
I watch it lift and fly directly away, my reaction time good enough to frame the bird but the autofocus can’t find the bird on the wing.
The Blue glides out of sight through the tree canopy vectoring toward one of two water features below Tallac Knoll, Baldwin Lake or the Turtle Ponds. I plan on seeing it there, I hope serendipity will be on my side.
iso4000, 1/4000s, f/7
Queen Butterfly
Here is a lifer for me.
I’ve read about the Queen Butterfly. I’ve seen fotos of Queen Butterflies. Until today’s stroll into the Herb Garden where the Duranta Tree lures colibríes and mariposas galore, I’d not seen one on the wing.
Floating in from the Desert Willow tree and red Salvia thicket comes a bright orange soul. Not a Monarca though the black and orange colors call that name. But my eye notes something’s different about this monarch—not stained glass leading but dots. Spots. My heart leaps, my reward for remembering a picture.
Now I’ve seen you.
Órale.
iso4000, 1/4000s, f/4.5
Anise Swallowtail and Duranta Flowers.
It’s 1124. Sun casts unfiltered light onto Duranta’s profusion of blue flowers and through the mariposa’s beautifully colored translucent wings.
For its part, the mariposa flies with proboscis at the ready. It aims with unerring accuracy at the blossom’s yellow target to sip Duranta’s flowery nectar, undeterred by the happy photographer looking up from only eight feet.
This is its world, flight and sip, invisible zephyrs carry the butterfly aloft until a wing twist gives it purposive direction.
iso4000, 1/4000s, f/4.5
Blue Heron Met Again.
Thelma and I make our way down from Tallac Knoll to the herb garden then to the Arboretum’s Turtle Pond. This is a permanent water feature where finding an Egret or Heron happens often enough that I always approach it with warm expectation. Today, I’m encouraged when we see a magnificent sight, the blue heron appears from the rushes concealing Baldwin Lake. It’s flying toward the Turtle Pond. Thelma and I, already challenged by our walk, turn around and go find a cooperative bird, confident as always that four feet of water between it and that guy means he’s a minor distraction. Is that food?
This is not the reflecting pool at the national mall in D.C. The yellow splots come of reflected light off muddy water, not blue paint and algae.
iso4000, 1/4000s, f/7
Technical Note: Most of these fotos are possible with a smart phone. In all instances, the subjects are only a few feet from the lens. Digital photography with quality equipment--I buy only used equipment-- produces a large file that can be enlarged to enormous proportion to sell or hang on a wall.
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