Verso

Home to gorgeous gardens, spectacular art, and stunning rare books and manuscripts, The Huntington also offers an impressive slate of lectures and conferences on topics and themes related to its collections. Featured are audio recordings of five recent lectures and conversations.

Summer is a time for enjoying the great outdoors, and what better way than by hiking and camping? That's as true today as it was more than a century ago, when one remarkable woman embarked on a 10-day camping trip in the San Gabriel Mountains with a group of friends.

Most of us have little experience of being thrown out of a garden. When I've been found wandering through The Huntington's orange groves (usually off-limits to visitors), at worst I'm asked by one of the polite staff to ramble somewhere less wild.

The Lily Ponds, among the first garden features developed at The Huntington, are at their seasonal peak now. William Hertrich, Henry Huntington's first superintendent of the gardens, created the five descending ponds from natural springs

You might skip right past it. In a room of the Jonathan and Karin Fielding Wingdominated by kaleidoscopic starbursts and spirals on huge early American quilts, The Huntington's new Virginia Steele Scott Chief Curator of American Art, Chad Alligood, stops in front of a small, dark piece of needlework.

Earlier this week, The Huntington announced "COLLECTION/S: WCCW/five at The Huntington," an exhibition that will be on view in the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art from Nov. 18, 2017, through Feb. 12, 2018. 

The papers of award-winning science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) came to The Huntington in 2008. By the time the collection had been processed and cataloged, more than 40 scholars had already asked for access.

As a historian of science, I'm fascinated with pictures that help make sense of past scientific ideas and practices. The Huntington's vast collection of rare 16th-century science books document how intellectuals of the day perceived the eye and the process of sight.