Walt Disney Concert Hall Garden

Frank Gehry Designed Concert Hall Has Flowering Trees in Hidden Roof Garden

Feb 19, 2007

Visit the hidden roof garden at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. It's free and open to the public every day. Wonderful flowers, shrubs and trees.

Today I visited the rooftop or building side garden -- it's hard to say quite where this garden is perched on this crazy Frank Gehry designed metallic wonder (you've seen photos of this building for sure, it's all shiny and curvy and weird looking and wonderful) -- hidden garden at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles to see what was in bloom in mid February.

This garden is hidden, you would never know it exists from looking at the building from the street. To get to it, you have to walk up several flights of twisting exterior stairs (or use an interior elevator.) The exterior feels like a maze. Once you find the garden by following your nose, the garden winds and twines along through planting beds filled with flowering trees. The pathways lead you to delightful cafe style or bistro style seating patios. The trees are underplanted with an array of smaller flowering shrubs (for example Abutilons in bloom now) and perennials.

Besides sages, today in the garden I saw pulmonaria "Raspberry Splash" in bloom along with the blue flowered perennial geranium "Rozanne" and a fragrant white Heliotropum. Large patches of deep blue/purple flowered Trachelium (aka Throatwort) lead me to believe this plant grows as a perennial here in Los Angeles. I have never lived anywhere it would thrive before as an annual let alone perennial. I didn't make an exact list of all the flowers I saw, but those stuck in my mind.

Actually, I got so excited about a tree I sort of skimmed over the flowers. The star of the show has to be the pink ball tree as the label called it, or Dombeya, a flowering tree from Madagascar. To me, it looks like a pink hydrangea tree with perfectly rounded pink hydrangea blooms hanging down from it. Gorgeous.

I did not have my camera with me today but I found a superb closeup of the bloom at flickr. Dombeya flower. Don't you agree it looks like a hydrangea?

And here's a little overview piece on the garden at the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

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