“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 »

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: • • • • • • | 11 Comments »

the huntington’s japanese garden

After vis­it­ing the dense and some­what fre­netic new Chi­nese Gar­den at the Hunt­ing­ton I was feel­ing like I needed to unwind a bit. For­tu­nately a short walk at the Hunt­ing­ton deliv­ers you from the Chi­nese Gar­den to the Japan­ese Gar­den.

Along the way, before you get to the gar­den itself, as if in a cal­cu­lated attempt to tran­si­tion the viewer from one gar­den to the next, you pass a cou­ple bloom­ing plants that have “Japan” in their species name. Although most of the camel­lias in bloom were the sansan­quas, a few of the Camel­lia japon­ica plants were start­ing their bloom.

And there was this perky yel­low species, Far­lugium japon­icum–with a plant label (Thank you!–I love my plant labels).

One of the first details that I noticed in the Japan­ese Gar­den was this walk­way edge detail con­sist­ing of lit­tle loops of thin bamboo.

Whereas many of the hard­scape ele­ments in the Chi­nese Gar­den seemed to be built to last for the centuries–this photo shows one of the edg­ing details there–the frag­ile lit­tle detail in the Japan­ese Gar­den appeared to be set up to cel­e­brate the ephemeral.

All the approaches to the gar­den deliver the vis­i­tor to high van­tage points over­look­ing plant­i­ngs around a small pond. A moon bridge pro­vides a focal point.

A recre­ated tra­di­tional upper-class Japan­ese home occu­pies the high­est spot in the garden.

Its doors slide open so that the view from the house is of this gar­den. Stand­ing out­side, you can peer in and get a sense of how life indoors would look like and feel. This struc­ture was moved to this site in 1912, so it and the gar­dens have been around many more years than the Chi­nese Gar­den next door.

Steps from the home lead down and then back up to a walled garden.

A broad walk­way divides the gar­den into two parts. To one side is a sym­bolic gar­den of stones and raked gravel, or Kare­san­sui.

To the other side is a sim­ple plant­ing of clipped aza­leas, ginkgo trees and what I’m guess­ing is lawn. The lawn and the tops of the aza­leas mounds, how­ever, were cov­ered with fallen leaves off the ginkgo trees. I loved this space in its sim­plic­ity and could have spent hours there.

A very few of the ginkgo trees still held on to their star­tling yel­low leaves.

But most of the leaves on the ground were pro­gress­ing from bright yel­low to tan to brown.

Here’s a sug­ges­tion for the Hunt­ing­ton: How about set­ting up a ginkko hot­line or RSS or Twit­ter feed? Desert parks com­monly offer wild­flower hot­lines to alert you of peak flow­er­ing. Some­thing sim­i­lar to let you know when the falling leaves would be at their most spec­tac­u­lar would be great too. Still, it was a gor­geous effect, and it high­lighted the nat­ural process of bright yel­low leaves aging into less col­or­ful ones.


After the walled gar­den is a bon­sai court con­tain­ing some spec­tac­u­lar spec­i­mens in a sim­ple, rus­tic set­ting. The Hunt­ing­ton is in the process of enlarg­ing the dis­play area to make room for more bon­sai.

My last shots from the Japan­ese Gar­den are of two gor­geous stands of bam­boo. A small grove adja­cent to the “model home” has a small wooden path­way through it.

A more mas­sive stand occu­pies a spot at the edge of the gar­den.

Inside the dark thicket Camel­lia sasan­qua blooms.

What is it about a grove of bam­boo that dri­ves vis­i­tors to carve their ini­tials into the culms? Grrrrrrr.

A final look at the rhythms and con­tra­pun­tal inter­play in the bamboo…

December 30 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: • • • • • • | 9 Comments »

framing the garden view

Here are just a few more pho­tos left over from my post yes­ter­day on the Huntington’s recently-opened Chi­nese Garden.

I men­tioned how there were many lay­ers to the spaces there. The fol­low­ing are some of the doors and win­dows in the gar­den that help to frame the views and con­tribute to the sense of layering.

Leaf-shaped win­dow near the Stu­dio of Pure Scents.

Stacked por­tals of the Ter­race of the Jade Mirror.

These last two win­dows in the out­side wall, the Wall of the Col­or­ful Clouds, are inter­est­ing in that they’re not per­fect squares. The top, left and right sides form part of a square, but their bot­tom sides par­al­lel the con­tours of rolling ground where the wall is sited. Even though you’re look­ing at an ele­ment in the human-created hard­scape, this tech­nique acknowl­edges the earth where the wall stands.

Yet to come: posts on the Huntington’s Japan­ese Gar­den, Con­ser­va­tory and Desert Gar­den.

December 29 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: • • • • | 5 Comments »

new huntington chinese garden

On the way up to Los Ange­les we had a chance to make a quick stop at the Hunt­ing­ton Library, Art Col­lec­tion and Botan­i­cal Gar­dens in San Marino. Their Chi­nese gar­den, Liu Fang Yuan, the Gar­den of Flow­ing Fra­grance, opened to the pub­lic just last year. Fund-raising is ongo­ing for a sec­ond phase of con­struc­tion, and the plants that are there are still on the young side. Still, it’s not too early to take a look at what’s being billed as the largest gar­den of its kind out­side of China.

Two stone lions guard one of the alter­nate entrances into the garden.

Hand-carved stonework and elab­o­rate hard­scape details fig­ure promi­nently in the garden’s design. It’s worth tak­ing your time to appre­ci­ate the details close up.

This walk­way resolves to the adja­cent plant­ing in swoop­ing tiled edges.

Pat­terns made from peb­bles fixed in cement take sev­eral forms. Here’s one design.

…And a detail of another designs…

…And an overview of yet another of the pat­terns using pebbles.

These hard­scape details are dense and busy. Plant­i­ngs are also fairly dense, with many kinds of plants used in a small space. Move a few feet in any direc­tion and your view of the gar­den changes radically.

The over­all effect is kalei­do­scopic, and the gar­den encour­ages active engage­ment with the space.
con­tinue reading »

December 28 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: • • | 11 Comments »