Last night we went to a party on a hilltop near us. To the north of our hilltop are several other hilltops (we live in a very hilly area to the west of the serious mountains, but to the east of the flat plains that run out to the ocean). Tucked in between Hidden Meadows and the Lawrence Welk resort complex (that’s right, once owned by Mr. Bubbly himself), there is a relatively expensive gated community, appropriate called Rim Rock Estates. All the physical attributes that I enjoy about our hilltop, the scattered boulders spewed out millennia ago by some long since dormant volcano, the array of native California plants including a full panoply of succulents, and the glorious long distance views are almost identical on those hilltops. What differentiates that area from ours and what makes it wholly undesirable to me is the fact that it’s gated and therefore desirous of being exclusive and isolated from the world at large. There are few things I dislike more, both in actuality and symbolically, than walls and gates. That starts with my egalitarian instincts (admittedly flawed since I do not exactly live in a totally accessible community, but just not one that is physically gated) and runs to the pragmatic instinct that tells me that what gets gated gets coveted and explored/exploited. Our little community that sits to the north of Escondido, east of San Marcos and Vista, west of Valley Center and south of Bonsal and Fallbrook is clearly betwixt and between and is an unincorporated enclave that seems to like being more undefined than not…somewhat like I do.
Our social set includes Kim being a member of the Women’s Group and us both being members of the Hidden Meadows Garden Club (of which Kim is the reigning majordomo). Besides the good friends we have in our little unnamed sub-enclave, which I call High Vista Mountain (after the road than runs through most of it), the Garden Club is our biggest outreach effort and those people have become our community out here. The members range from those who are totally into gardening and are technically quite competent and those who are hackers like me who practice what I will call “chainsaw gardening” as a way to fill our retirement time gaps. People we might not otherwise know tend to know us by our property, which is considered one of the better planted ones with a wider variety of mature succulent plantings than almost any other. The touches of whimsy that I have added, like my bison statue and my Hobbit House, have only added to my property’s local notoriety.
The friends holding the Holiday party, Pat & Joe, are friends made through the Garden Club and in fact, Pat is the person we cajoled into co-presiding over the Garden Club with Kim to give her an eventual off-ramp. Joe is a scientist who is still in the venture capital game with his company, focused on no less than nuclear Fusion. I’m no rocket scientist, but I do know the key differences between nuclear Fission and Fusion. Nuclear Fission is the splitting of heavy atomic nuclei (typically uranium-235 or plutonium-239) into lighter nuclei, while nuclear fusion is the combining of light atomic nuclei (typically isotopes of hydrogen) into heavier ones. Fission releases energy by splitting heavy atoms, while Fusion releases energy by merging light atoms. Fission is well-established technology, where Fusion power remains experimental. Fission produces long-lived radioactive waste and requires careful containment, but Fusion produces minimal radioactive waste and cannot sustain a runaway reaction. Fusion occurs naturally in the sun’s core, while Fission doesn’t occur naturally on Earth except in rare circumstances. Needless to say, cracking the code on nuclear Fusion would be a very big deal, so that keeps Joe busy, I’m sure.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch on their hilltop, whatever we call a hilltop is far more severe in terms of verticality at their home. They literally live on a pinnacle with a switchback driveway and house perched high up on boulders so that the living level is a good thirty or fourty feet above the garage level. If succulents come in three forms, thrill (upward shooting), fill (outwards expanding) or spill (cascading), all of their succulents have no choice but to spill downhill. Their home is also in the unusual position of being inside the confines of the Rim Rock Estates gates, with those particular gates resting on land that belongs to Pat & Joe and which they have given an easement to the private homeowners’ association of Rim Rock, even though their property is not technically part of Rim Rock Estates. So, they live behind the gates, but are not part of the exclusive club. The combination of breaching the gates and climbing the hill makes party-going at Pat & Joe’s an interesting procedural challenge involving a golf cart and exclusive and limited “car-mudgeon” parking allotment at the top of their driveway. I negotiated one of those three hilltop parking spots and was told quite sternly by Joe that I was not to use up all three spots with my truck as I apparently had last year. It seems that factoid has been simmering in Joe’s craw all year like a bit of Plutonium-239 stuck between his teeth). Upon arrival, I made so sure to park my smaller Mercedes tight to one side that I was then accused of driving on his ornamental gravel. There is no winning with nuclear scientists busy trying to save the world.
Out on the deck of Pat & Joe’s home we faced the wide expanse of ocean that one can more easily see from their house than one can from ours. We are closer to the water and at almost exactly the same altitude, but they do not have the hills in front of them that we do. They look across the Bonsal flatlands and have a full view of Catalina where we only see a hint of that far-off Channel Island. While standing there admiring the sunset, we got introduced to a couple who own the best and largest succulent nurseries in the area. These are the nurseries that I frequent regularly, thinking they were independent mom & pop shops. When I mentioned that I shop at their nurseries for all my higher quality succulents and go to a smaller local nursery called Javier (a father/son operation) for the rest, the man was quick to pull out his cell phone to make notes. Since he said he also owns all the nurseries on nearby Buena Creek Road, I sensed that I was helping him complete his Monopoly Board sweep of the North County competitor nurseries.
I told him the story of my infamous $43,000 10’x20’ succulent garden proposal and he knew the woman horticulturalist involved quite well. I then mentioned my record-breaking Queensland Bottle Tree and he immediately asked the Latin name for the tree (Brachychiton Rupestris) and asked to see a picture of it. As I searched through my photos I sensed I was losing credibility with the guy until I found a picture. He then nodded his head and agreed that it was, indeed, an impressively large specimen that looked like one owned by some old friends of his. Those friends turned out to be the previous owners of our hilltop and he was suddenly impressed that we owned THIS house, which he admitted had an impressive succulent garden. It was about that time that the man’s wife could not stand all the references to them as the owners of those two aforementioned nurseries, so she blurted out to Kim that actually, they were the largest succulent supplier in the U.S. and that they fed succulents to all the Home Depot, Lowe’s and other big box stores in the land. We then learned that the Succulent King himself was at this party because he used to live in Rim Rock Estates, but that he had now moved to Rancho Santa Fe to a much larger estate. It was then that I recalled that I had mentioned that the $43,000 succulent landscaper was better off peddling her artistic and excessively-priced landscaping wares to the more-money-then-sense folks in Del Mar and Rancho Santa Fe. This all served to knock a few pegs out from under the Rim Rock crowd and puff up the Succulent King while we slid back brown the switchback driveway trying not to run over any succulent plantings as we went. Long live the Succulent King!