The Huntington: Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens
If you’re ever in or near Southern California and have the time, stop by and visit The Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino - they’re beautiful.
American railroad magnate, Henry E. Huntington, purchased the property in 1903. At the time, it was a working ranch with citrus groves, nut and fruit orchards, alfalfa crops, a small herd of cows, and poultry. Today, the estate is home to more than a dozen themed botanical collections from around the world spread across 120-acres. Among them - the Desert Garden, the Japanese Garden, and the Chinese Garden - all wonderfully planted and maintained by master gardeners, curatorial experts and volunteers.
I last visited The Huntington several years ago, and loved walking through its gardens. Earlier this month, my head gardener, Ryan McCallister, spent a couple hours there during his recent west coast vacation. Here are some of his photos - enjoy. And tune in to QVC today starting at 1pm ET - I'll be sharing spring pieces from my Gardening and Home Collections.
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- The California Garden is landscaped with nearly 50-thousand native and dry-climate plants, covering more than six-acres. This long, olive-lined allée leads through many of the garden spaces and buildings.
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- Callistemon ‘Little John’ is a beautiful dense, evergreen shrub grown for its dazzling blood red flowers. It is easy to grow in acidic, moist well-drained soils that are in full to light shade.
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- The Celebration Garden is the transition between the Mediterranean landscape of the center and the estate’s historic Gilded Age core. It is often used for receptions and other gatherings and features seasonal blooms and a stone-lined pool.
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- Adjacent to the center water feature is the Celebration Garden Meadow filled with aloes and various grasses and other specimens.
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- This is Agave attenuata ‘Boutin’s Blue’ – an evergreen succulent perennial, which produces elegant rosettes of wide, flexible, blue-green leaves. Each rosette may reach five-feet across. These mature plants also send up stunning flower stalks that can reach 10-feet in height.
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- These beautiful succulent clumps of Aeonium ‘Jack Catlin’ are about 18-inches tall with six to eight inch wide rosettes of leaves that are green towards the middle with reddish toward the tips of the slightly cupped leaves. This red gets even richer after new growth hardens off in late spring and holds the color until active growth appears again in winter.
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- Aloe petricola is a stemless solitary or sparsely-clustering aloe that grows 18 to 24 inches tall by two to three feet wide with broad-based narrow-tipped long blue-gray leaves that curve up and in, giving the plant a rounded form. This time of year, they show reddish orange in bud, opening to cream to pale yellow with faint green striped petals and dark brownish anthers, all densely stacked on the stems and opening from bottom to the top.
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- The Chorisia insignis tree has a bulbous trunk that becomes more bottle shaped as it ages. It is covered with stout spines and blooms with white to creamy yellow lily-like flowers.
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- Kalanchoe fedtschenkoi, or variegated lavender scallops are small shrubby succulents that grow up to two-feet tall with stems that spread out and root along the ground to form large colonies with thick and fleshy lavender gray-green leaves. They show ¾-inch long bell-shaped reddish-brown colored flowers that hang in loose clusters from upright stems – so pretty.
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- Aloe scorpioides is a shrubby forest aloe that stands up to four-feet tall, with rosettes of pale green to bright green, recurved leaves with large teeth. Its flowers are brilliant scarlet on tightly packed strongly conical racemes in winter.
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- On the left is Opuntia cactus, or prickly pears. They are identified by the wide, flat, branching pads, and are often called nopal cactus or paddle cactus. Yucca can be seen in the center with its evergreen, tough, sword-shaped leaves.
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- The Desert Garden features more than two-thousand species of succulents and desert plants in 60-landscaped beds. Echinocactus grusonii, or golden barrel cactus, is rare and endangered in the wild. The cactus grows in volcanic rock on slopes, at altitudes around four-thousand feet. It grows abundantly at The Huntington and is admired by all who pass its interesting formations. Agave parryi var. truncata is in the foreground.
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- Mammillaria compressa is an easy to grow cactus species that starts off as solitary plants and then expands to form massive clumps up to three-feet wide.
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- Huntington’s Desert Garden remains among the world’s finest, with more than five-thousand species. This interesting cactus formation is called Stenocereus alamosanus.
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- And this is Cleistocactus strausii, commonly known as the silver torch or wooly torch. It is a perennial cactus in the family Cactaceae and is native to high mountain regions of Bolivia and Argentina, above 9843 feet.
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- Cereus horribarbis from Brazil are shrubby or treelike, often growing quite tall. Most stems are angled or distinctly ribbed, with large areoles and spines.
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- Ryan also took a photo of this beautiful Aloe ‘Hercules’ – named for its impressive size and thick trunk. It is a vigorous, tree-type aloe that can exceed a height of 12 to 15 feet at maturity.
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- This flower stalk is rising from an Agave ‘Blue Flame’ – a beautiful succulent that forms clumps with rosettes that are two feet tall by three feet wide when mature. These flower stalks can grow up to 15-feet in height.
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- Agave mapisaga ‘Lisa’ is a large agave that grows up to six to eight feet tall by over 9 feet wide with thick gray-green six to nine foot long leaves that arch upwards.
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- Down low to the ground is this Cheiridopsis candidissima from South Africa. It is a ground cover succulent with smooth whitish-grey to turquoise foliage and these bright yellow and white flowers.
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- This is the entrance to Japanese Garden. For more than a century, the historic Japanese Garden has been one of the most beloved and iconic landscapes at The Huntington.
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- These are the seed pods of Brachychiton discolor, Queensland Lacebark – a rainforest tree of eastern Australia. The fruit is a hairy boat shaped follicle maturing from December to July containing up to 30 seeds.
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- This is the Japanese Garden canyon. The rock formation is called Cascade of Resonant Bamboo (Zhu Yun Quan).
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- The Chinese Garden sits within white walls. The garden features handmade bricks, tiles and wood structures – all with elaborate decorative details. In the garden, Chinese architecture and rocks from Lake Tai, are placed around the water’s edge. Here, you can see the Waveless Boat Pavilion on the left, and the Clear and Transcendent Pavilion in the center.
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- This is a patch of Eomecon chionantha. Eomecon is a genus of flowering plants in the poppy family. Its common names include snow-poppy and dawn-poppy and is native to China.
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- The Camellia Collection is recognized as an International Camellia Garden of Excellence. It includes nearly 80-different camellia species and about 1200 cultivated varieties, many of them rare and historic.
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- These snow camellias are compact and mounded with large, uniquely frilled double blooms.
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- And this is the Terrace of the Jade Mirror (Yu Jing Tai) in the Chinese Garden – a very tranquil space for visitors. Thanks for the photos, Ryan. For more information, click on the highlighted link above to The Huntington Gardens.
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