[ Lost in the Landscape ]

the huntington desert garden

The late-December light was fad­ing when I headed to the wild and won­der­ful plants that make up the Huntington’s Desert Gar­den. The gar­den dates back many decades and fea­tures some immense spec­i­mens the likes of which you’ll almost never see. But what I love most about the gar­den is that it incor­po­rates these great plants into land­scapes that both honor the plants and use them in strik­ing combinations.

Many aloes were bloom­ing with their dra­matic spikes of hot, bright col­ors. The the­atri­cal light­ing helped to make some of the scenes even more dramatic.

(Be sure to click onthe third image to enlarge it. In its unearthly weird­ness, it’s got to be one of my favorite gar­den pho­tos I’ve ever taken.)

One zone of the gar­den focuses on plants you’d find in Cal­i­for­nia. Here a cre­osote bush serves as a screen for a radi­ant gray-white agave.

And this scene employs the coastal and Chan­nel Island buck­wheat, Saint Catherine’s lace (Eri­o­gonum gigan­teum)–a plant that tech­ni­cally doesn’t come from a desert–with other dry­land plants. The gray-green foliage on all of them helps to unify this diverse planting.

The Hunt­ing­ton is in a warm sub­trop­i­cal area just east of Los Ange­les. That doesn’t mean that it’s warm enough for all of these plants. Patio heaters of the kind that you see out­doors at restau­rants keep plants warm at night in one area of the gar­den. (These are the frigid depths of Decem­ber, after all.)

Now, as much as I was try­ing to focus on the over­all land­scape, I have to share a few pho­tos of indi­vid­ual species that caught my eye.

Look­ing up at a very large Yucca fil­if­era from Mexico…

(There’s an extremely sim­i­lar shot of the exact same plant on the Germanatrix’s post on her visit to this same gar­den at the end of Novem­ber. Check it out: here.)

Two tall palms with immense tree aloes, Aloe bar­berae. At the Hunt­ing­ton the species is iden­ti­fied as A. baine­sii, but the tax­on­o­mists have had a change of heart. I have two of these in my lit­tle front yard, the tallest of them still under twenty feet but still impres­sive at that size. The writeup on this plant says it can hit fifty feet or more. The Hunt­ing­ton spec­i­mens are just about there, I’d guess.

A dynamic and lyri­cal tan­gle of leaves on sev­eral plants of the var­ie­gated form of Agave amer­i­cana… (Homage to some­body… later Willem de Koon­ing? Franz Kline?) Agaves with their per­fect rosettes seem to appeal to the part of our brains that appre­ci­ate sym­me­try and order. This plant­ing sub­verted the expected into a beau­ti­ful mess.

A tall, dense stand of Cleis­to­cac­tus straus­sii…

As we left the Hunt­ing­ton the light that had made the Desert Gar­den extra-interesting was col­or­ing up the flanks of Mount Wil­son and the the rest of the San Gabriels.

Not far away from the Hunt­ing­ton is Pasadena, the site of the annual New Year’s Rose Parade, which should be get­ting under way not long after this post hits the web. (Okay, it’s sort of a lame way to try to segue this post to the topic of New Year’s Day, but–hey!–I had to give it a try.)

Happy New Year’s to all of you, and best wishes for a healthy and pros­per­ous year filled with amaz­ing botan­i­cal highlights.

January 01 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: agaves • aloes • cacti • desert plants • Huntington Library Art Collections and Botanical Gardens • plant combinations • succulents | 11 Comments »