“plants are up to something”">“plants are up to something”

I loved this ban­ner at the Hunt­ing­ton. Hang­ing out­side the instution’s con­ser­va­tory build­ing, it announces that the exhibits inside might be more ori­ented towards edu­ca­tion than the gar­dens that make up the rest of the grounds. The con­ser­va­tory also houses plants that might have spe­cial needs beyond the “just add water” plant­i­ngs located in the sub­trop­ics outdoors.

Pass through the front doors and you step into a green­house space con­tain­ing a minia­ture trop­i­cal rain­for­est, a cloud for­est and a bog gar­den, along with lots of edu­ca­tional signs and inter­ac­tive exhibits scat­tered through­out the space.

For me most green­houses and con­ser­va­tory gar­dens suf­fer from being exam­ples of nature-in-a-can, and to me they tend to look and smell and feel very sim­i­lar in their her­met­i­cally sealed spaces. If only the Hunt­ing­ton were located on some bar­ren snowy tun­dra plain, where enter­ing a trop­i­cal rain­for­est on a cold win­ter day might be a stun­ning revelation.

Even on this cool Decem­ber South­ern Cal­i­for­nia after­noon, the tem­per­a­ture dif­fer­ences between inside and out weren’t that pro­nounced. And the lush plant­i­ngs out­side the front door seemed to mir­ror the lushly planted indoors. Still, lack­ing the stun­ning con­trasts that might help to set the con­ser­va­tory apart from the out­doors, it was a fun place to con­nect with a lot of cool plants. When the Huntington’s giant corpse-flower (Amor­phophal­lus titanum) blooms, there is where you’ll find it. It wasn’t bloom­ing, but there were lots of other inter­est­ing things inside.

The bright red-orange trunks of the sealing-wax palm, Cyr­tosstachys renda were pretty amazing.

My visit was two days before Christ­mas, so there were this hol­i­day dis­play of poin­set­tias and amaryl­lis. At first they seemed like gra­tu­itous hol­i­day dec­o­ra­tions but then the aha moment struck me that these plants orig­i­nate in the trop­i­cal and sub­trop­i­cal belt of the Americas.

Flo­ral parts of a large anthurium species…

This car­niv­o­rous Asian pitcher plant (a species of Nepenthes) greeted vis­i­tors as they entered the cloud for­est display.

And drop­ping down into the bog gar­den, Amer­i­can pitcher plants, Sar­race­nia, and sun­dews, Drosera sp., let view­ers see other ways plants have taken up car­niv­o­rous ways. (Do you detect a theme of the con­ser­va­tory play­ing up the idea of scary, creepy plants, going from these car­niv­o­rous species to the stink­ing giant corpse flower that lines up vis­i­tors by the hun­dreds when it does its thing?)

At this point the blog­ger ram­bles on a bit: These days it almost seems that every botan­i­cal col­lec­tion feels to have its very own giant corpse flower plant that will draw the vis­i­tors when it blooms, some­thing of the way medieval churches tried to draw pil­grims by hav­ing unique relics of saints, or how many tem­ples in Asia will claim to have pre­served hairs of the Bud­dha. So it seems that the giant corpse flow­ers has become a mod­ern sec­u­lar botan­i­cal relic. It’s a lit­tle odd, since you can occa­sion­ally find the plant for sale on eBay–granted for a good chunk of change–but still noth­ing much more than you’d pay for a pair of high-end jeans.

Okay, now back to the trip…

I’m com­ing to the real­iza­tion that green­houses always scare me a bit, like I’m enter­ing a world that’s on per­pet­ual life sup­port. Upon leav­ing the con­ser­va­tory I stepped out­side into the bright Decem­ber after­noon. Not far away a reader was seated in warm­ing sun­light on a Lutyens bench, enjoy­ing the moment. I’d had a good time on my visit to the syn­thetic trop­ics, but return­ing to the real sun­shine and real weather out­doors I sud­denly felt free.

January 04 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: • • • • • | 11 Comments »