Botanical Gardens

Gloria Cox may be a grandmother, but she's grinning like a little kid as she slips into a shady nook formed by twining juniper branches in the Japanese Garden at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens. Cox, a veteran Huntington docent, says she has missed visiting "my favorite spot" - which she discovered with her grandsons - and the rest of the garden, which closed for renovation last April and is reopening Wednesday in time for its centennial. The Japanese Garden is welcoming back old friends like Cox and hoping to attract new ones with $6.8 million in improvements that include the installation of a ceremonial teahouse and tea garden and restoration of the late 19th century-style Japanese House.

A garden-variety garden inspires adjectives like lush, fertile and verdant. That's fine, but it's not good enough for Ken Smith. The new director of Los Angeles County Arboreta and Botanic Gardens wants the county's four public gardens to be more intriguing. Or exciting. Or even . . . compelling? "That's one of the problems with botanic gardens--there is no sense of urgency to visit them today, tomorrow or the next day.

Like a battlefield surgeon, Debra Folsom trudged along damp, muddy grounds, surveying the dead and the dying. "You can see these jades were absolutely devastated," said Folsom, research botanist at the Huntington Botanical Gardens, as she passed through the San Marino estate's desert garden earlier this week. Later, she approached a dead hibiscus and dead bougainvillea at the garden's entrance. "This," she said, "is most disturbing."

James Folsom runs his fingers across a piece of fine lumber--western red cedar from a Canadian forest. The wood, cradled on an outdoor workbench, seems as alive as any of the amazing collection of 75,000 individual plants and trees that Folsom oversees as director of the botanical gardens of The Huntington. Soon, it will be a fence post. An artisan is cutting 18 intricate joints into it by hand to make part of a new entrance gate and fence for The Huntington's Japanese gardens.

Many of the world's rarest desert plants and animals, the geology of the San Andreas Fault and examples of Native American culture can be examined at Palm Desert's Living Desert complex this fall and winter. The wildlife and botanical park, recently opened for the 1990-91 season, offers a comprehensive introduction to desert life and ecosystems.

This is the second spring for the remodeled rose garden at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, and the flowering is so profuse that one cannot tell the old from the new. Indeed, Ann Christoph, who did the plans, has handled the space so deftly that the inherent aberrations add to the charm. "All are at different angles," she commented, talking about the rose garden itself and the surrounding Shakespeare Garden, the former residence of Henry E. Huntington that now serves as art gallery, the rose arbor and the patio restaurant that was Huntington's pool and billiard room.

Ned KAHN says some pretty strange things for a man who has spent the last six years helping to design the brand new, $2-million Helen and Peter Bing Children's Garden, which opens Saturday at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens. Things like, he doesn't much believe in the concept of children's exhibits or children's museums, and he's not really crazy about the term "educational" either. "I think that if you build good things, everyone will be into it," Kahn says.

A garden-variety garden inspires adjectives like lush, fertile and verdant. That's fine, but it's not good enough for Ken Smith. The new director of Los Angeles County Arboreta and Botanic Gardens wants the county's four public gardens to be more intriguing. Or exciting. Or, even . . . compelling? "That's one of the problems with botanic gardens--there is no sense of urgency to visit them today, tomorrow or the next day.

A garden-variety garden inspires adjectives like lush, fertile and verdant. That's fine, but it's not good enough for Ken Smith. The new director of Los Angeles County Arboreta and Botanic Gardens wants the county's four public gardens to be more intriguing. Or exciting. Or, even . . . compelling? "That's one of the problems with botanic gardens--there is no sense of urgency to visit them today, tomorrow or the next day.

A1991 photograph by John Humble shows Selma Avenue at Vine Street as a jumbled, architecturally constructed Hollywood landscape of office buildings, stores, asphalt and advertising billboards. Dominating the center is Angelyne, the cosmetically manufactured "human Barbie doll," who adorns one enormous sign. Radio host Rick Dees, then an eternally adolescent 41-year-old, graces a KIIS sign just above her bleached-blond head. Neutered Ken to Angelyne's pneumatic Barbie, he's the benign Adam to her wicked Eve in Hollywood's media-made Garden of Eden.