A few things around town that have caught my eye…

Originally I planned to call this post “an opuntia named Harold” but decided that wasn’t fair to all the other plants I have pictures of. Harold and his friends occupy a rather overgrown hell-strip in SE Portland.

They suffer the indignities of being held up by tomato cages…

And being buried under misbehaving neighbors.

I wonder what Harold and his friends would do if they were transplanted here? To what is perhaps the smallest hell-strip in all of Portland…

Here we have a hell-strip full of Bergenia and cloud pruning.

I wonder, is this style of driveway strictly a Portland thing? I’ve never seen it anywhere else, at least not that I can remember.

While house hunting we looked at a few homes with driveways like this and the thought of pulling into one gave me shivers.

Did you notice the extreme planting in the first driveway example? Here’s another version.

I could almost hear the little Arum italicum leaves “must grow...must reach the sunshine”

Yes those really are rocks.

And yes they felt just like you think they would.

Loved this combo of colors and textures.

And the same here. The green-ness of it all along with the texture of the rocks and the climber…I stared at it for far too long.

This looks almost like an opunita farming operation!

Although they needed to do a little weeding, carefully.

Moss on opunita, that’s not something you see every day.

It really was quite beautiful, with the pink fruits and blue green pads.

Just down the street I discovered the largest weeping Blue Atlas Cedar I’ve ever seen. It was horrifying, these plants really give me the creeps and this one was HUGE! It started on the north end of the property at the sidewalk and continued back to the house, along the entire length of the house, the garage, and then back to the sidewalk on the south end of the property. How long did that take?

Someone with a sense of humor lives here though…

And they like euphorbia…

That is a sexy cone.

Finally I end with another opuntia farm.

It’s interesting that both of the houses with huge opuntia plantings don’t really have much in the way of other landscaping/plantings.

There must be an interesting story here; I just wish I knew it.

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