I was whisked away to a garden in a Beverly Hills backyard yesterday. It’s part of my Los Angeles education program, which so far includes writing classes, art classes, driving lessons and garden-hopping. Above is a collage of the photos that nearly took out my Blackberry when I tried to email them to friends!

The pictures are a motley assortment of the vegetation growing all over the extensive gardens, which I was told were 25 years in the making and are maintained by a full-time staff that includes a UCLA professor. Along with tomato trees, I photographed some fresh basil, grapes, flowers, oranges, lemons and yummy scallions.

This is a long, long way from asphalt backyards in the Bronx. And the fruit picked from the various trees by our gracious hosts, which included oranges, plums, pears, peaches, nectarines and more, was infinitely more delicious than the raspberries we used to pick off a wild tree on Ft. George Hill in Washington Heights.