I found myself in downtown Ventura with some time to spare, so I popped into the Museum (“FREE ENTRY ALL MONTH!”) for a quick peruse. I was drawn to a collection of hundred-year-old bottles of photo retouching ink. As I copied the gorgeous typography, I was well aware that another person had hand-lettered this very artwork some time prior to 1911. Thank you, whoever you were, for creating an object of beauty I can admire and copy a century later.
And then there were the bryophytes. So delightful.
I went for a hike and got completely distracted by dual organisms consisting of a fungus and an alga or a cyanobacterium. Look! So many pretty colours!
This month, I’m focusing on hiking more of the local trails. Bodie and I explored Sisar Canyon, and wow, it’s beautiful! We rested at the second creek crossing before heading back to the car, but I definitely want to return and hike further up the trail.
Ventura Botanic Garden is free on Fridays. And you can take your dog on Wednesdays and Fridays. It’s a very steep site with ocean views all the way up. Definitely a place to return to in spring.
Ventura County has nearly 40 museums; maybe I’ll get around to visiting (and sketching at) all of them. The closest one is right here in town, and it’s quite charming, with a mixture of history and contemporary art.
It’s time to move on to our next temporary lodging. We’ll be bouncing around a bit for the rest of the month.
Playing tourist in my (temporary) town.
After our meal at a Ventura restaurant called Two Trees, we asked the waiter about the name. He told us the story of two oak trees high on the hills behind Ventura, an iconic landmark that could be seen from the harbour. He said the trees burned in the Thomas Fire of December 2017, but that the community raised the funds to replant them. I asked what kind of oaks they were, but he didn’t know.
I did some googling when I got home. Turns out the story is slightly more convoluted. For starters, they were blue gum eucalypts, not native oaks, originally planted in 1898 along with 11 others. Several months before the Thomas Fire, one of the last two trees was felled by strong winds (it was already dead at the time). So then it was just Lone Tree. And maybe a recently planted sapling (sources vary, reported timelines are inconsistent). It seems that the trees have been replanted multiple times over the decades, perhaps most recently in 2018. Venturans consider the trees iconic, and want to protect, nurture and, yes, replace them as needed.
Now I need to look out for this landmark, which I confess I’ve never noticed.
hashiworks 