My guides to what to grow out here tell me Los Angeles has, officially, a Mediterranean climate – much like the south of France, coastal Western Australia and South Australia, the Chilean coast and the Cape Town region of South Africa.  Hot, dry summers and cool, rainy winters – and lots of scrub (chaparral) that goes dormant in the hot rainless summers, and then come to life in the fall and winter, when everything grows like mad.  The Pacific on one edge tempers things, and the mountains on the other walls us off from the Mojave Desert.  But the Pacific marine layer does not get up to the top of the Hollywood Hills.

So in mid-May?  Cacti in bloom…