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The Huntington Galleries

Overview - Huntington Library : The Huntington, situated in San Marino, California (next to Pasadena,) is a research and educational center set amidst 120 acres of beautiful gardens. Three art galleries and a library showcase magnificent collections of paintings, sculptures, rare books, manuscripts, and decorative arts. The botanical collection features over 14,000 different species of plants. The Huntington was founded in 1919 by railroad and real estate developer Henry Edwards Huntington and opened to the public in 1928. Highlights of the collection include the Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (c.1410), a Gutenberg Bible (c.1455), Thomas Gainsborough's masterpiece The Blue Boy (c. 1770), Sir Thomas Lawrence's Pinkie (1794), Edward Hopper's The Long Leg, Rogier van der Weyden's Madonna and Child (15th century), the 12-acre desert garden, the Japanese garden, the camellia gardens, and much more. It is about an hour from my house and just became an annual member: http://www.huntington.org/

Overview - Huntington Library

Japanese Garden : Occupying nine acres on the slopes of a canyon, this is one of America’s oldest, most elaborate, and gracefully matured Japanese gardens. A five-room house, pagodas and lanterns, and many mature plants were moved to the site from a commercial tea garden in Pasadena in 1912. A walled courtyard containing a rock and sand garden and a bonsai exhibition area was added in 1968. The garden boasts several beautiful forms of Japanese red pine, handsome spreading junipers, large cycads, arbors of wisteria, and thirty-foot-high sweet olives. (To be revisited many times.)

Japanese Garden

Chinese Garden :

Desert Garden : The Huntington Desert Garden is one of the largest and oldest assemblages of cacti and other succulents in the world. Nearly 100 years old, it has grown from a small area on the Raymond fault scarp when in 1907-1908 William Hertrich brought in plants from local nurseries, private residences, public parks, and from collection trips to the Southwest and Mexican deserts. Today the two dozen families of succulents and other arid adapted plants have developed into a 10-acre garden display, the Huntington’s most important conservation collection, a most important mission and challenge.

Rose Garden : The three and a half acre rose garden was designed by Myron Hunt and first planted by William Hertrich as a display garden in 1908. In the 1970s, the garden was reorganized as a “collection garden” with more than 1,200 cultivars (approx 4,000 individual plants) arranged historically to trace the development of roses from ancient to modern times beginning with the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans.

Sub-Tropical Garden : Plants that can tolerate occasional mild frost grow in this four-acre hillside garden on the scarp of the Raymond Hill earthquake fault. The south-facing slope is one of the warmest areas of the gardens, providing a nurturing home for plants from areas of the world with mild climates and winter rainfall similar to Southern California’s and other subtropical climates with summer rainfall. Plantings are constantly changing in order to determine the ornamental plants best suited to the growing conditions here.

Sub-Tropical Garden

Huntington Art Gallery : Once the house of Henry E. Huntington (1850–1927) and his second wife, Arabella (1850–1924), the Huntington Art Gallery opened in 1928 displaying what was then the greatest collection of 18th-century British art in the country, including the celebrated Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough and Pinkie by Thomas Lawrence. Since then the collections have grown enormously and now contain many great works of art of the Italian, French and Netherlandish schools, as well as a much broader range of British art and design from the 17th to the early 20th century.

Huntington Art Gallery

Huntington Library : I took my new Zeiss Planar f/1.4 for a test ride on 07-18-09, Saturday. I have gotten into this nasty habit on focusing on the background and not the foreground of the photo. I know that when I do that, the photo seems to be out of focus, but somehow I cannot help it. Someday I will learn. I took a lot of photos @ f/1.4 but did not keep many of them – they seemed to be out of focus. It could be the problem of focus shift with the lens @ f/1.4, a known problem. However, it has to do, imho, of my nasty habit of focusing on the background, which is more critical than @ f/2.

Huntington Library

Thanks For Stopping By