OUR HOME - THE HUNTINGTON

The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens have been the headquarters for Orchid Digest since 1997. We are proud to be working partners in this community to support the shared interest of conservation, research, and education within the orchid family. The Huntington supports us in many ways, including but not limited to hosting our annual Speakers Day, providing meeting spaces for editorial and board meetings, and a place to call home for our archival material and rare books.

Henry and Arabella Huntington first transformed their private estate into a public institution in 1919. Since then, the collections-based research and educational institution, serving scholars and the general public, has dramatically grown over the past century.

Library:

With over 11 million items, the Library is one of the world’s great independent research libraries, housing items representing American history, architecture and landscape design, British History, California History, medicine, science, technology, Western American History, and much more. One of the major highlights of the collection is their Gutenberg Bible, of which only 12 surviving vellum copies exist.

Art Museum:

This collection, containing over 42,000 objects and pieces, focuses mainly on American and European art and spans more than 500 years. The two most iconic pieces representing the Art Collection are Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy and Thomas Lawrence’s Pinkie.

Botanical Gardens:

The gardens encompass approximately 130 acres of the 207-acre grounds and contain more than a dozen spectacularly themed gardens and many plant collections. The two most popular gardens are the Desert Garden and the Chinese Garden. The Desert Garden houses one of the largest outdoor collections of mature cactus and succulents in the world. The Chinese Garden (Liu Fang Yuan) is one of the most extensive classical-style Chinese Gardens in the world, with over 12 acres of space dedicated to the culture.

The Huntington Botanical Collections are either built into the gardens or housed in their many greenhouses or growing facilities. Some of their more prominent botanical collections include bonsai, cycads, desert plants, and camellias. We are most proud of their Orchid Collection. With over 1,500 different species at The Huntington, the orchid collection makes up 10% of their holdings with over 1,500 unique orchid species.

Orchid Collection: With over 10,000 plants in their holdings, The Huntington has one of the largest orchid collections in the United States with over 3,600 unique varieties and 1,5000 species, representing 280 genera, including but not limited to, Paphiopedilum, Phragmipedium, Cymbidium, Cattleya, Stanhopea, and Lycaste. Over the past decade, their growing orchid collection has been recognized as one of the most species-diverse collections in the world. Most of the orchids are maintained in three off-view greenhouses and one public conservatory. In all, their growing space for orchids and tropicals total over 26,000 square feet. The extensive and diverse holdings of orchids in the collections enable staff to display blooming orchids year-round in the Rose Hills Foundation Conservatory. The orchids are rotated weekly for the public to view, enjoy, and interpret.