Weekend Re-Cap

This weekend I went up to Napa to hang out with Nick and get away from house stuff for a weekend since it feels it is all I have been thinking about for 2 months. On Saturday I drove up to Sonoma to visit a place called Cornerstone Gardens. It was beautiful and amazing landscape with a very artistic flair. Unfortunately I realized after I had gotten there that the battery in my camera had died so I had to result to taking pictures with my phone and they really don't do this place justice.

Cornerstone is an eclectic collection of shops, wineries and a gourmet cafe set amidst nine acres of garden installations created by the world's leading landscape architects. The exhibits featured typical landscapes and also quirky exhibits like the "The Usual Suspects" miniature golf course that paid homage to the the big names in landscape architecture.

This tree is dead, but instead of removing it they decorated it with strings of blue Christmas bulbs:


The bulbs had seen better days, there were a lot of broken ones and the blue had faded in the sun to an aqua color, but it was still beautiful and I loved that they made a dead tree a piece of art instead of just thrwoing it away.

All of the exhibits had greatly varied types of landscape from a pond with beautiful lily pads and lotus flowers to my favorite, the grasses and cactus/succulent native style landscape:


This exhibit had big boulders that had holes grinded out in them and had succulents planted in them:


They even used dead trees to grow succulents on them:


Some of the exhibits also had political messages such as this exhibit which highlighted issues of mexican american immigrants:



This is a very unique destination and I would encourage people to stop by next time you are in the area, I kinda want to be a landscape architect now. It is free admission and the grilled chicken avacado sandwch might just be the best I have ever had.