The Huntington

Last weekend Sean and I flew to California to visit my Aunt Carmen and her family. The highlight of the trip was our tour of the Huntington Botanical Gardens and museum. Our second day in L.A., we borrowed my aunt's car and drove out to Pasadena. I had been there once when I was about 14 and remembered very little; my overall impression was of the cool, drizzly spring day and the expansive, manicured grounds. We had only spent a couple of hours, but the experience remained with me. So much so that when we decided to do this trip, my first thought was that we had to see the gardens. Sean, the eternal plant fanatic, was immediately sold on the idea.

The cool thing about the Huntington is that because of its location in temperate southern California they can grow just about everything, from cactus to tropical plants. Among other things, there is a Japanese garden, a huge rose garden, an herb garden, and a rain forest greenhouse. They also have eleven gorgeous acres of cactus and succulents that made Sean's face light up like a kid in a candy shop. (And if you know Sean at all, you know the truth in that comparison.)

A (bell?) pepper from the herb garden

There were thousands of varieties of roses, in every color imaginable. It kind of renewed my love of a flower that is usually dismissed as cliche.

Of all the new plants I learned that day, this was my favorite: The dragon tree. It's incredible. It's a little hard to tell in the picture, but it's huge, and the canopy of the tree is composed of hundreds of agave-like clumps at the end of rounded arms. The most notable aspect of the tree is the sap, which bleeds red from the tree. That's right. Red.

In the rose garden