109-year-old grandmother has been building a succulent forest for 40 years and has become a global Internet celebrity!

This succulent garden covers an area of ​​more than 10,000 square meters and is planted with more than 2,000 kinds of succulents, such as cacti, succulents, palm trees, etc. in various shapes.

The owner of this spectacular succulent garden is 109-year-old Mrs. Ruth Bancroft (who died in November 2017), who spent 40 years creating this oasis in the desert.

Ruth has loved flowers and plants since she was a child, but her love for succulents began in the 1950s. At that time, she bought her first pot of succulents in her life, and since then she has been obsessed with succulents and cannot stop.

Initially, the purchased succulents were placed in greenhouses and toilets around the house. Later, I bought more and more succulents and there was no room for them at home. In 1971, her husband gave her three acres of their family land to grow succulents.

Looking at the empty land, Ruth, who is nearly 70 years old, came up with the idea of ​​building a desert succulent garden. She wanted to try to create a green miracle on this barren land.

From early morning to sunset, she spends nearly 10 hours a day in this yard, and planning, designing, planting and watering are almost all done by her alone.

But things were not always smooth sailing, and in the second year of construction, Ruth's garden encountered its greatest difficulties. The winter of that year was unusually cold, and almost all the delicate succulents in the garden were frozen to death.

But she didn't give up and started over again in the spring. In order to prevent the succulents from being frozen to death again, she asked someone to customize freeze-proof wooden boxes, and later built a special greenhouse.

Because she didn't understand the habits of all succulents, she had to read many books before planting each new variety. After planting, she would take notes every day to record the growth of the succulents.

Ruth studied architecture in college, and the knowledge she learned played a significant role in the process of building the succulent garden.

In order to break up the flat landscape in the yard and make the garden more layered, she added some undulating mounds in the garden.

The garden would have seemed monotonous had it only been planted with succulents, so she built a central pond in the garden.

But I didn’t expect that this pond would later become a habitat for birds.

She also has her own ideas about the combination of succulent plantings. Some brightly colored, small-sized succulents are laid on both sides of the gravel path, while larger succulents are planted on the higher slopes in an orderly manner.

Later, Ruth Garden attracted the attention of relevant organizations in the United States because its idea of ​​a desert garden was very instructive. In 1989, Ruth Garden became the first private garden in the United States protected by a garden organization.

In 2011, it was rated by Pacific Horticulture Magazine as "the most significant private garden on the West Coast of the United States."

Ruth herself did not expect that such a small idea would have such a huge social impact.

In addition to being a place for tourists to visit, this place has also become a holy place for weddings, and more and more young couples choose to come here to take wedding photos. The succulent garden is full of romance~

Mrs. Ruth devoted the rest of her life to this succulent garden. In the last few years of her life, she could not stay in the garden every day, but she would go there whenever she had the chance.