University of California, Davis Arboretum

California

One tree here started as a seed taken from the largest Montezuma bald cypress in Mexico.

naturalroadside

One tree in this hundred-acre garden began as a seed collected from the largest Montezuma bald cypress in Mexico. It grows in the collection of Mexican and southwestern plants, along a paved loop of about three and a half miles that follows the old north channel of Putah Creek. Around it are roughly twenty-two thousand trees and plants, all chosen because they can live with a Mediterranean climate. There is a grove of coast redwoods that ranks among the largest collections of redwood trees anywhere outside the range where they grow naturally. There is an oak grove holding more than eighty kinds of oak, some of them rare. Another stretch keeps valley oaks two centuries old. Fifty species of acacia stand in a single grove. The gardens were founded in nineteen thirty-six, they cost nothing to enter, and the gates never close, any hour, any day of the year.

Wayside reads this to you as you drive past, timed to arrive before the place does. Plan a route through here.

What this was written from
the Montezuma bald cypress in this collection was grown from seed from the largest specimen in Mexico

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Nearby, on the same roads

  • Dixon, California 7 mi Dixon got its name from a mislabeled freight shipment, and nobody ever bothered to correct it.
  • Putah Creek 9 mi The Creedence Clearwater Revival song "Green River" is about this creek.
  • American River 14 mi In 1862 the American River flooded so badly that California's new governor had to row to his own inauguration.
  • California State University, Sacramento 17.9 mi The first graduating class at Sacramento State was one student.
  • Peña Adobe Park 19.6 mi A graveyard here was left to sheep, with nearly four hundred wooden grave markers still standing.
  • Disappearance of Amanda Campbell 25.5 mi A four-year-old rode her bike a block from home in Fairfield and was never seen again, and the man police called their prime suspect later sued the city and won.