This Sale’s Nothing Short of Succulent
Railroad magnate Henry Huntington would be pleased with the gardens he began planting in 1903 on what he called “the ranch.” As the gardens at Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino prepare to celebrate their 100th anniversary, the historical, older sections are being dusted off and restored, including a 3-acre chunk of the venerable desert garden, closed since the Depression.
A dramatic new 16,000-square-foot glass conservatory--patterned after an elaborate lath house from Huntington’s time--now rises to 38 feet as it becomes the latest addition to the year-old botanical center with its children’s garden, teaching greenhouses, research areas and botanical library. The conservatory, still under construction, won’t open for another year and a half.
The ambitious 12-acre Chinese garden begins construction this summer with the digging of a new lake. Just north of the Japanese garden, it’s not slated to be finished until 2004.
There’s even a spacious new growing area in a distant corner of the gardens for plants raised for the Huntington’s various plant sales. The new home is behind the botanical center, “just before the coyotes bite you,” as Shirley Kerins put it. She organizes all of the sales, including the big annual May benefit event, which returns Sunday after a year’s hiatus. For many avid gardeners, this may be the best news of all.
From its humble beginnings in the early 1970s, when a few extra plants were sold each year from card tables near the entrance, the event has become almost legendary and it could be said the sales have shaped the course of gardening in Southern California. Countless plants that are today common were first seen by many at past sales. Many gardeners can point to favorite plants in their gardens that were discovered at this spring sale, including dozens in my garden.
Kerins and her volunteer crew scour the state for interesting and unusual plants. This year, they found plants from Northern California all the way down to San Diego County. In addition, the sale includes plants grown in the greenhouses and others dug up, when clumps grow too large, from the Huntington’s grounds.
Shoppers bring wagons and carts to the sale, which they use to haul plants to the checkout area, a practice that is highly recommended since it’s difficult to carry more than a few without one. There are volunteer experts to help answer questions about plants and this year’s checkout will be able to take credit cards (they finally have electricity), which might worry a few spouses (including mine). Some shoppers have been known to pay $60 to join the Huntington just so they can get in a day early to the members-only sale, held on Saturday this year. (They’ll let you join at the sale entrance on that day--clever, huh?) The sale is being held at its traditional location in the partially covered employee parking lot next to the main lot. There is no entrance fee since it is held outside the admission area. Sale proceeds benefit the garden.
People begin arriving early. While waiting in line for the opening bell, clever shoppers study the maps of the sale that are posted nearby, so they can zoom in and load up on favorites. Certain collectible plants get their own areas while most landscape plants are arranged in a color wheel with banners that designate the flower or leaf color--an orange flag for orange flowers, for instance, silver for silver foliage.
Since Kerins took over the sale in the early 1980s, there has always been a theme. This year’s “Weird and Wonderful Magical and Mystical Plants,” sounds suspiciously like an old Beatles album but pays homage to recent movies about magic and fantasy. Nearly 10,000 plants will be available, but there are seldom more than 20 of any one plant. “We don’t have a lot of any one thing,” Kerins said. She is more interested in providing variety. “We really want people to learn more about plants and their amazing diversity,” she added.
The theme plants are grouped together so they are easy to find. There will be all sorts of plants with magical pasts or that are “weird, twisted or curly,” said Kerins, from voodoo lilies, eerily black callas and corkscrew camellias to carrion flowers that smell as bad as the Huntington’s notoriously newsworthy Amorphophallus titanum. In fact, you’ll be able to buy a smaller version of amorphophallus named ‘Konjac’--suitable for pot culture--which, when it flowers, will presumably be just as stinky. In the meantime it has handsomely spotted stems and very tropical leaves. Quite a few tropical-looking plants will be at the sale, from bananas to bamboo.
In the large succulent and cactus area, overseen by curator John Trager, there is a selection of jade plant, named Crassula ovata ‘Gollum’ (for the character in the “Lord of the Rings” tales), with strangely quilled leaves that resemble frog toes, as well as many other fascinating collectibles, such as the snaky and spinney Cleistocactus paraguariensis, which has orange flowers followed by bright magenta fruit, or the remarkably hairy woolly torch cactus (Pilosocereus). There will also be landscape-size specimens of succulent plants dug up and brought in from Arizona.
One strange plant is called the ant plant because in its native Africa certain kinds of ants live in its fat, foot-wide, swollen base. A mature plant can be admired but baby ant plants, with bases the size of marbles, will be sold.
On the magical side will be dragon trees (Dracaena draco) and even dried leaves from this strange plant that has a resinous sap the color of blood. Dragon trees, thought in ancient times to be the largest plants on Earth, are steeped in myth and legend. A new addition to the sale is an area called “dried plants parts,” which will feature stems, fruits and inflorescences (flowers complete with stem) suitable for arrangements.
There are many more plants for shady gardens this year since “we keep hearing people say that their gardens are getting shadier and shadier,” said Kerins. Dick Malott, a retired Van Nuys English teacher, has put together an amazing selection of his new passion, shade-loving begonias, and can--naturally--wax poetic on the subject. “There’s nothing like the enthusiasm of a new convert,” Kerins said with a smile.
One of the largest groups of theme plants are those with black flowers or foliage, which are not truly black but extremely dark shades of purple or maroon. Kerins and crew have found quite a selection and she is particularly enamored of these plants because she finds them so dramatic in the landscape. “By themselves, they are simply interesting,” said Kerins, who is also a landscape architect. But combine and contrast them with other colors “and they make a garden really special.”
One of her favorites is the black-flowered hollyhock but she also likes the dark little ajuga called ‘Chocolate Chip.’ She has many black plants for the perennial garden, from a dianthus named ‘Sooty’ to a corydalis with dark purple leaves to an odd columbine named ‘Chocolate Soldier.’ One of the most dramatic is Salvia discolor, which contrasts black tubular flowers against a silvery calyx and foliage. While one or two of these plants may be most dramatic, it is tempting to plant an entire garden of dark flowers or foliage, starting with camellia ‘Midnight Magic’ and working down to black mondo grass. An impressive list of sample sale plants is on the Huntington Web site, www.hun tington.org.
Annual plant sale 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino. Members-only sale Saturday. Call (626) 405-2100.
Robert Smaus can be reached at bob@bobsgardenpath.com.
