The Botanical Gardens at the Huntington

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This lavishly illustrated volume presents the first-ever definitive look at the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino. Growing out of Southern California's golden age of horticulture from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s, they flourish today as one of the grand garden achievements of that glorious, optimistic era. Railroad and real estate developer Henry Edwards Huntington was a collector without equal who assembled world-class collections of rare books and manuscripts, works of art, and plants. For the plants, he found a kindred spirit in his landscape gardener, William Hertrich; together they experimented with plants from all over the world in search of ones that would grow well in Southern California's subtropical climate. Today the 206-acre estate has fifteen theme gardens filled with twenty thousand different kinds of plants with as many as eighteen hundred rose species and cultivars, twelve hundred camellia cultivars, and five thousand cacti and succulents. Among the specialized gardens are ones for roses, camellias, subtropical, Australian, and jungle plants as well as palms, bamboo, and water lilies. Especially popular with visitors are the desert and Japanese gardens.