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Desert Garden Conservatory

Botanical gardens in CaliforniaBuildings and structures in CaliforniaCactus gardensGreenhouses in the United StatesHuntington Library
Parks in Los Angeles County, California
Flowering Aloe in the desert garden
Flowering Aloe in the desert garden

The Desert Garden Conservatory is a large botanical greenhouse and part of the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, in San Marino, California. It was constructed in 1985. The Desert Garden Conservatory is adjacent to the 10-acre (40,000 m2) Huntington Desert Garden itself. The garden houses one of the most important collections of cacti and other succulent plants in the world, including a large number of rare and endangered species. The 3,000-square-foot (280 m2) Desert Garden Conservatory serves The Huntington and public communities as a conservation facility, research resource and genetic diversity preserve. John N. Trager is the Desert Collection curator. There are an estimated 10,000 succulents worldwide, about 1,500 of them classified as cacti. The Huntington Desert Garden Conservatory now contains more than 2,200 accessions, representing more than 43 plant families, 1,261 different species and subspecies, and 246 genera. The plant collection contains examples from the world's major desert regions, including the southern United States, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Brazil, Canary Islands, Madagascar, Malawi, Mexico and South Africa. The Desert Collection plays a critical role as a repository of biodiversity, in addition to serving as an outreach and education center.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Desert Garden Conservatory (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Desert Garden Conservatory
Oxford Road,

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N 34.1272 ° E -118.11 °
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The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

Oxford Road 1151
91108
California, United States
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huntington.org

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Flowering Aloe in the desert garden
Flowering Aloe in the desert garden
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Huntington Desert Garden
Huntington Desert Garden

The Huntington Desert Garden is part of The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California. The Desert Garden is one of the world's largest and oldest collections of cacti, succulents and other desert plants, collected from throughout the world. It contains plants from extreme environments, many of which were acquired by Henry E. Huntington and William Hertrich (the first garden curator) in trips taken to several countries in North, Central and South America. One of the Huntington's most botanically important gardens, the Desert Garden brought together a group of plants largely unknown and unappreciated in the beginning of the 1900s. Containing a broad category of xerophytes (aridity-adapted plants), the Desert Garden grew to preeminence and remains today among the world's finest, with more than 5,000 species in the 10 acre (4 ha) garden.Mr. Huntington was not initially interested in establishing a Desert Garden. He did not like cacti at all, due to some unfortunate prickly pear encounters during railroad construction work. But Hertrich was persistent, and, once won over, Mr. Huntington built a railway spur to his garden, to bring in rock, soil and plants by the carload. As Gary Lyons, a later curator, remarked, it's very convenient to have a rail spur, and deep pockets, when you're building a big garden. A trip to Arizona in 1908 filled three railroad cars for the trip back to the garden. Famed Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx called the Huntington Desert Garden "the most extraordinary garden in the world."