Look closely. There is beauty even in the most tangled thicket. I

was strolling around University of California Los Angeles last week, awestruck by the clear blue sky and cool breeze, marveling at early white magnolia blossoms lazing against the particular red-brown brick that sets the formal architectural rhythm of the campus.

I walked, perhaps too quickly, past vast lawns and along sidewalks guarded by armies of trees that had only just begun to leaf out, not realizing that the landscape is as intentional as the buildings, designed by landscape architect Ralph Cornell to create the sense of a “college in a garden.”

Around a bend in the road that loops near the edge of campus, an arroyo drops behind buildings with famous names and life-saving missions into the Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden, a forest of extraordinary trees and plants. The steep paths winding through this garden within a garden force you to slow down and observe — the clatter of dry bamboo stems in the wind, the splash of a red-eared turtle pushing off into the stream, the sound of tiny birds zooming between dry branches to snatch an insect in flight.

I appreciated the help braking after a week that had been too busy and too emotionally fraught and began to take notice. There was a ruddy resin oozing from the impossibly tangled stems of a dragon tree, labeled for its ability to strengthen gums and heal ulcers, and massive gum trees, shedding their bark, their smooth white trunks scoring the sky. I put my nose to the bark of huge eucalyptus trees and stood in awe under an ancient dawn redwood, the only of its species to change color and shed its needles in fall.

And near the end of the trail, I peered closely at a cactus-like spire rising toward the canopy of trees, spooked at first by huge white spikes, but drawn in again by tender rosettes of leaves emerging from the armor. I breathed and remembered that even in the stickiest moments, beautiful things are happening around me.