Explore one of the world’s largest collections of cacti, visit an authentic Japanese teahouse and see a corpse flower, a plant named after its terrible odour! These are just some of the hundreds of attractions at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, a collections-based research and educational institution that around 750,000 people visit every year.
The Huntington Gardens in San Marino, California
Research and education
Situated on more than two hundred acres in San Marino, California, twelve miles from Downtown Los Angeles, The Huntington was founded in 1919 by railroad magnate and art collector Henry E. Huntington and his wife, the philanthropist Arabella Huntington. It is, according to its website, “an institution that supports and promotes the appreciation of, as well as research and education, in the humanities, the arts and botanical science.”
From china to the desert
One of The Huntington’s biggest attractions is its botanical gardens, an area of 120 acres that has natural wonders from around the world. It includes the Japanese Garden, where you’ll find the authentic ceremonial teahouse Seifu-an, as well as a beautiful Zen Garden, a koi pond and a collection of bonsai trees. Another popular attraction is the Chinese Garden, which is the largest outside of China and has incredible artificial lakes. The Desert Garden is notable for having one of the world’s biggest and oldest outdoor collections of cacti and succulents. In fact, many of the five thousand species you can see there were collected by founder Henry E. Huntington himself.
100th anniversary
Also on the Huntington property are one of the world’s greatest libraries of historical and literary archives, art galleries dedicated to European and American art, an academic research centre, a tea room, restaurants and cafes.
AMERICAN BEAUTY
The Huntington is an educational and research institution library, art museum and botanical gardens located just twenty minutes by road from Downtown LA. Open to the general public, it hosts more than 15,000 different kinds of plants in more than a dozen principal garden areas, among them an Australian, a Chinese, a Japanese, a Subtropical, a Desert, and a Palm garden. There is even a Shakespeare garden that is dedicated to plants and flowers mentioned by the English playwright. Tom Carruth is the curator of The Huntington’s stunning rose collection. We began by asking him what other parts of the expansive gardens he recommended.
Tom Carruth (American accent): The Desert Garden, number one. That’s a fantastic collection because Mr. Huntington loved cacti and succulents so that’s one of our oldest gardens, and there are specimens in there that are well over hundred years old. It’s not just like looking at a few potted cactus, it’s like being dropped into a moonscape... It’s already the largest Chinese garden outside of China and with this addition, it will have areas for viewing penjing. Penjing is the Chinese form of bonsai. So that’s going to be really swell to show that collection, which we’ve had for many years.
A history of roses
Carruth dedicates his working day to the Rose Garden, where over 1292 varieties of rose grow and 2,500 other plants are cared for. We asked him to tell us more about it.
Tom Carruth: Mrs. Huntington’s favourite flowers were roses and camellias, so the Rose Garden was a hundred years old in 2008. It originally was a cutting garden for Mrs. Huntington. She had some vision problems and she loved big bouquets in the house, so as many as nine thousand roses were cut out of this garden in any one year just to go into bouquets in the house. Now when they both passed, the garden kind of became a display garden and a test garden, but it was in the 70s that the entire garden was replanted to represent the history of the rose. And it’s a three-acre garden, and despite having that much room, the history of the rose is so intense and deep, we really couldn’t represent it all. Now over time, some of those plantings have been lost, but we do have a couple of areas which are still part of that very important history of the rose.
In bloom
Seasonal visitors can be blown away by their experience, as Carruth explained.
Tom Carruth: When we’re in spring bloom and the boughs are heavy with color and all the plants are blasting out their first blossom, people come into the garden and they don’t leave. They begin to spin and in fact, after a while, we kind of have to direct them out eventually. But it’s one of the favourite places. We’ll have people calling us as early as February to say ‘When are they blooming?, When are they blooming?’
Good for the soul
And the gardens offer an antidote to the multiple stresses of modern life, said Carruth.
Tom Carruth: The Huntington is a special place, not only because of its vast collections but because you don’t feel like you’re in Los Angeles anymore. You completely escape from the metropolis of it all. You can hear the birds in the background, you can see people enjoying the gardens, you can sit quietly and contemplate in the Palm Garden or find a shady spot and just fit for a moment. You can enjoy, you can smell, you can see. It’s just a place for all types of pleasure that really calms the soul.
A strange smell
We then asked Carruth to tell us more about the unusual corpse flower.
Tom Carruth: It smells of rotten meat because it is pollinated by flies. So there are another whole group of plants that have the same characteristics of smelling of rotten meat because fly pollination is their method of producing their seed. So it all makes sense in the natural cycle, except it’s kind of stinky. There are different times in the fourteen-hour cycle where it’s really much stronger, it’s sort of like you’ve been in a locked room with a lot of flies for a while.