May 2026 MGOC Garden Tour

My mom remarried in the mid-1970’s, to an eccentric retired gentleman of means who enjoyed spending his excess income at estate auctions, buying entire lots of jewelry, old knives, paintings, sculptures, bronzes, rock collections, just about anything.

He heard that a natural history museum in Oklahoma was shutting down and selling everything, including a very large collection of petrified wood logs, slabs, and pieces. He bought it all and brought it out to California on a flatbed truck. He had some of the logs cut into more slabs, some of which are here in the garden. He placed the logs in his landscape in Corona del Mar, and there they stayed. After he and Mom passed, I became the trust executor and immediately had the logs moved off the property, which would be quickly sold. Most of the logs, along with about 1000 pounds of pieces, were donated to the Orange Coast College Horticulture department, Geology Department and the Planetarium. Two of the logs are here in the front yard. I spent ten hours with a wet polisher to give the dark one a mirror finish. Many more slabs can be found by the raised beds in the back yard.

The rock is from Arizona, collected on BLM land. In the 1950’s when the museum obtained the logs, it was still legal to collect them.  The tree that is most commonly associated with Arizona petrified wood is Araucarioxylon arizonicum. By far the most common species identified, this extinct conifer is the Arizona state fossil. It was a massive tree that could grow up to 200 feet tall with trunks up to 5 feet in diameter. It is often described as resembling modern pines but was more closely related to modern Araucarian pines (like the Monkey Puzzle tree or Norfolk Island Pine) found today in the Southern Hemisphere.

This petrified wood is well over 200 million years old, preceding even the dinosaurs. The wood has been completely replaced with quartz and other trace minerals that give color.

Interesting side note: the cycads in this garden represent a gymnosperm family of plants that go back another 100 million years earlier, in the age of Pangaea, and among the first to dominate the planet during the Mesozoic era. A piece of petrified cycad, picked up at Quartzite, and at least 250 million years old, is on a table on the deck.