Yeah, but they aren't chapparel (and I know what it looks like--I can look out my window and see a bunch of it on the hills around my house). Chapparel is native to So Cal and like ALL native plants have small leaves. Native plants have small leaves--often very slender, generally some shade of grayish-green in color. Not a rich, dark green like most of the plants outside the TOT at MGM. This is a Mediterranean climate--long, hot, dry summer, mild rainy winter (and Hollywood might get 10 inches or less in the short 3-4 month rainy season) and small leaf plants do best because they don't lose as much moisture during the hot, dry months and during the super dry winds we get during the fall and winter. Even overgrowth here doesn't neccessarily look "lush" besause the plants are all very scaly looking--and by early summer should have a half-dead look and look really bad by late summer. BTW--even the palm trees wouldn't make it w/o being tended to--palm trees aren't native to CA either and require a lot of care to be here. One of my thoughts when I was in line for the TOT at MGM was "this just doesn't look like CA," which the park is "supposed" to represent--at least as the "Hollywood that never was and always will be."
