Mom and I went to The Huntington today, after not having been there in approximately 15 years. It’s still just as amazing as I’d remembered it, even though we didn’t even get around to seeing any of the art. We started with drinks (tea for Mom, cherry Coke for me) and finger sammiches in the Rose Garden Tea Room — which is exactly what the name says: A tea room that overlooks three acres of roses — and walked around outside. We started in the rose garden, continued through the Japanese Garden, then ended up who-knows-where, we sort of lost track of where we were because the place is gigantic. But we walked around a whole bunch, enjoying everything while swearing about the humidity and telling lizards to move out of our path so we don’t smoosh them. We’d wait for the lizard to move, of course, though we eventually came upon a female mallard with some ducklings and they totally wouldn’t get out of our way. I figure they had no idea what to do because we were also in their way, they eventually moved to the side and we passed them.
Mom was really excited to see the Japanese Garden, it’s one of her favorite areas. We haven’t been in a long time anyway but it was just reopened after being closed for a year, we’d thought maybe they renovated but everything looks the same, so they must’ve done some landscaping and maybe took care of an infestation of some sort, we’d found a couple trees that looked on the verge of death and should probably be filled with cement to prevent further decay. We found another tree we had to do a double-take with, it’s a Japanese Maple but I’m sure you can figure out why we first thought a gardener snuck something illegal in:
I know that leaf shape is pretty common with plantlife but come on, that totally looks like cannabis. I’m really glad I thought of taking a photo of the leaves and the seed pod, Googling “tree that looks like marijuana plant” is surprisingly unhelpful. I know that’s not how cannabis grows, it’s not called “weed” because it’s a tree, but I can’t identify trees so I still wanted to know what it was.
We saw Canada geese too, though I didn’t (couldn’t) take pictures of those because we were too far from them, and at that point, too overheated to care enough to backtrack the trail to get closer. Evidently I’ve developed the superpower to make Canada geese appear anywhere.
We’re hoping to go again soon (or rather, sooner than another 15 years) so we can see the art and maybe more of the grounds, it was just so hot and humid today that we didn’t have much energy after the gardens. And hopefully on our next visit, even more of the plants will be in bloom!
