Vallejo Street Steps

Vallejo between Montgomery and Kearny is too steep for cars, so it has stairs instead of street. And, guess what, you guys? The stairs have been planted.

My office is about 6 blocks south of here, and I frequently pass this way at lunch. 

Today I brought my camera. 

For you.

Would be great to have a big hydrangea garden, for cuttings. (Unless you're Madonna, of course. She absolutely loathes hydrangeas.)

Maybe she's in to succulents. Succulents are the hip thing now.

I'm just more in to flowers. 

Oh, hey. Those leafy gray spikes on the left? Echium wildprettii. It seemed like the it-plant while I was in grad school. I saw it everywhere. It was the it-plant in my garden back in spring 2008. 

Anyway, check this out:

There's at least 3 volunteers in that little clump. I wonder how that's going to work out!

The view near the top of the garden. 

Cool, overcast, and breezy today. But I'm sweating like a dog climbing all these hills and stairs. 

No, dogs sweat with their tongues. "Their tongue"? No, I wasn't sweating like that. I was sweating like a horse.

The older I get, the more I sweat.

I'm not in to it at all.

Looks like you missed your chance to buy this fixer-upper...

Could you live in a house without a street in front of it? Or, do you already? 

Anyway, I need to wrap this up. 

Time to get back to work. 

(No, I do not work at the Federal Reserve.)

Moraga Tiled Steps, Golden Gate Heights, and Grandview Park

I got up earrrrly this morning for one of my favorite stairway walks. Maybe you remember it from the last time.

163 steps!







They call these the '16th Avenue Tiled Steps', but I prefer to call them the 'Moraga Tiled Steps'. And so I will!





There is some lovely gardening along the sides; a mix of natives, succulents and other workhorses. You'll find big drifts of black aeonium, mixed with green here.





The steps take you toward Grandview Park, a chert outcrop dressed in wind-blown sand.



We'll go there later. In the meantime, we'll see a bit of the neighborhood.









This big gray ball is Helichrysum petiolare which garden books call a trailing perennial 1-3 feet high. Only when it's young. After that it mounds. This one has been pruned I think, but I can show you many, many big-balled specimens like this (heh heh). No frost for this plant.



The far end of this walk (walk #11 in the book every San Franciscan should own) takes you to Golden Gate Heights Park, always drenched in fog and mystery.





Golden Gate Heights, like Bernal Heights, has several big chert outcroppings.





But a lot more hydrangeas. Hydrangeas everywhere here.





Houses that are all garage kind up front kind of fascinate me. It's like, where's the house?







The sun began to come out by the time we got back to Grandview.



It's supposed to be very hot in the Central Valley this weekend. I saw 105's predicted for Sacramento. That could mean cold, thick, soaking fog on the coast. Right now we're expecting lows in the mid-50s, with a chance of precipitation. By precipitation, I think they mean fog.



This neighborhood is called the Outer Sunset. It's far more monochrome in the aggregate than it is on the street level.









Turning north and looking at the Marin Headlands in the distance.







The copper-clad tower of the DeYoung Museum



It's hard to imagine San Francisco before all the people moved in. Sand dunes for miles, rock outcrops, steep cliffs.



Mostly remnants in evidence now.