Where Land Takes Root: Rethinking the American Garden

Key Takeaways 

• Speakers at The Huntington’s American Garden Symposium argued that gardens should be understood not merely as designed landscapes, but as cultural archives shaped by science, history, labor, and ideology.  
• Botanical gardens have evolved from medicinal and economic collections into global conservation institutions. Early gardens were carefully curated to identify and use plants for medicine and cultural use; today, that work extends to preserving rare, endangered, and culturally significant species. 
• The Huntington’s living collection is one of the most diverse collections in the world, comprising more than 25,000 different types of plants.  
• Panels challenged conventional narratives of land and landscape—from the engineered greening of the American desert to the often-overlooked labor of immigrant workers who helped shape The Huntington’s grounds. 

Long before they were fixed in public memory as founders, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison understood themselves another way: as farmers and gardeners. 

Their letters are filled with observations about soil, seeds, and seasons—what to plant, what to graft, and what might grow. In her keynote at The Huntington’s American Garden Symposium, writer Andrea Wulf returned to that fact as a way of reframing the American origin story. 

“The land tells stories,” she said. “We have just forgotten how to read these stories.”  

For Wulf— author of Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation and six other books, including The Invention of Nature, which received the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize—gardens were not incidental to the founding of the United States. They were central to it—places where ideas about order, cultivation, and the natural world took shape alongside ideas about nationhood. Gardens, she said, are “a window into a much wider world of politics, science, and culture.”  

That framing echoed throughout the day. 

The symposium, “Perspectives on Gardens in the American Context,” held March 12 at The Huntington, was presented as part of THIS LAND IS …, The Huntington’s initiative marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Across its library, art, and botanical collections, the institution uses land as a lens through which to examine American history—its ideals, contradictions, and lived realities. 

The Huntington’s Susan Juster, W.M. Keck Foundation Director of Research, and Nicole Cavender, Telleen/Jorgensen Director of the Botanical Gardens, kicked off the event with context on the initiative and its role as an anchor in the symposium.  

The initiative emerged from a “two years-plus conversation about how The Huntington could provide a West Coast perspective on the American Revolution that was rooted in this place where we are and in our collections,” Juster said. “Land as a resource, material, economic, cultural, and spiritual … land as a commodity, land as political spoils … land as the seedbed of community and identity”—these overlapping meanings form the foundation of THIS LAND IS …, an invitation, as the ellipsis suggests, to continue the thought.”  

Cavender placed gardens squarely within that framework, positioning them as a primary site through which the nation’s relationship to land can be understood. 

Positioning the symposium within the broader aims of THIS LAND IS …, Cavender described the initiative as an invitation “to reflect, to question, and to imagine how the stories of land continue to inform the American experience today and tomorrow.” Drawing on the premise that land is “both common and contested ground, an evolving narrative shaped by many voices,” she framed gardens as one of the places where those stories become visible. 

She described gardens as sites where American relationships to land are expressed through design traditions, cultural and colonial legacies, migration and exchange, environmental stewardship, and the human relationship to the natural world. 

The question, she suggested, is not simply what a garden is, but what it reveals. 

A Living Archive 

In the opening session, Cavender and Sandy Masuo, botanical content specialist at The Huntington, traced the evolution of botanical gardens from medieval sites of medicine and study to modern institutions that balance research, conservation, and public engagement. 

Masuo began with a definition that reframed the familiar. 

“A botanical garden is very much a collection,” she said, “in the same way that an art gallery is a collection of pieces.”  

The distinction is foundational. Botanical gardens are not simply places to walk; they are structured systems of knowledge—documented, cataloged, and sustained over time, Masuo observed. 

“Each plant has a story and a legacy that you are preserving,” she said.  

Masuo also noted that the role of botanical gardens expanded significantly in the late 20th century, as the environmental movement reshaped public understanding of their purpose. No longer seen primarily as sites of display and study, botanical gardens increasingly became centers for conservation—engaging in seed banking, endangered species protection, native plant advocacy, and broader biodiversity stewardship. 

At The Huntington, Cavender suggested that this broadened mission is visible in both scale and practice. The institution maintains a living collection of 48,000 accessions, comprising roughly 74,000 individual plants and more than 25,000 distinct types—many of them rare or unique, supported by a climate that allows for unusual botanical diversity. 

Those numbers, she suggested, are only the beginning. Behind them is an infrastructure of research, conservation, and care. In a region defined by scarcity, water use at The Huntington is both intensive and closely managed, supported by extensive irrigation systems and specialized staff responsible for maintaining them across the landscape. The scale of this system relies on careful resource management from the gardens to the laboratory.  

Cavender pointed to the institution’s cryobiotechnology program—an area in which The Huntington has become a leader—as an example of how botanical collections extend beyond display. Scientists are developing methods to preserve plant material in liquid nitrogen and successfully regenerate it, a process she described as “like Star Wars,” but essential to conserving species that cannot be stored through traditional seed banking. 

The work, she noted, includes developing cryopreservation protocols for plants ranging from avocados and agaves to magnolias, while training researchers from around the world in these techniques. 

Around that scientific core is an equally complex human system: curators with deep specialization across plant collections, horticultural staff who manage cultivation and plant care, and teams responsible for irrigation, operations, and interpretation across miles of landscape. 

Seen together, Cavender and Masuo suggested, the botanical garden is not a backdrop but an infrastructure—one that produces knowledge, preserves biodiversity, and makes both visible to the public. 

What those systems preserve—and what they leave out—became the focus of the afternoon. 

What Survives and What Doesn’t 

Danika Cooper, associate professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning at UC Berkeley, in her presentation “On Dry Ground: Infrastructures of Control and the Making of American Desert Landscapes,” challenged what she described as a longstanding “myth of emptiness”—the idea that deserts are barren, uninhabited spaces awaiting transformation. 

That perception, she argued, has shaped not only how deserts are represented, but how they are altered. Framing arid land as lacking—ecologically and culturally—has justified efforts to remake it, redirecting water and reshaping entire landscapes to conform to a fantasy of verdant abundance. 

“This imagery does more than describe a place,” she said. “It produces a particular way of seeing the land.” 

That way of seeing, she suggested, continues to influence how landscapes are designed and maintained today. “That’s why it’s so exciting to hear about the Desert Garden at The Huntington and all the ways that water is being managed more strategically here.” 

Her remarks reframed the garden not as an escape from the desert, but as part of a longer history of interpreting—and intervening in—arid landscapes. 

That attention to how landscapes are made—and how they are perceived—carried forward into the afternoon’s discussions. 

Moderated by Masuo, the panel “Garden Archives and ‘The Missing Story’” turned to archives and absence. 

Joy Columbus, director of Smithsonian Gardens, home of the Archives of American Gardens, approached the topic through the lens of stewardship—and partnership. She recalled how Lonnie G. Bunch III, secretary of the Smithsonian, visited The Huntington and returned to Washington, asking why the institutions were not working more closely together. That question, she said, led to a broader charge across the Smithsonian to find points of connection. 

Columbus also drew a distinction in language that reflects a larger philosophy. While Smithsonian Gardens operates as a botanical garden, she prefers the term public garden—“because we want to entice people to plants.” 

“Our archives are a seed bank,” she said—collections that preserve not only what has been, but what might still grow. “We use these stories to connect people to plants, places, and history.” 

Natalia Molina, Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Dean’s Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC—and a former research fellow at The Huntington—extended that inquiry to what remains unseen. 

An award-winning author, a Guggenheim Fellow, a MacArthur Fellow, and current vice president and president-elect of the Organization of American Historians, Molina is the author of A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community, a community history of Echo Park shaped in part by research conducted at The Huntington. The book, a James Beard Award finalist, is widely cited as essential Los Angeles reading. 

Molina began with a photograph from The Huntington’s archives: a gardener, unnamed, standing beside the plant he tended. 

The label identifies the plant—not the man.  

“Those trees were planted, those tracks were laid, and those gardens were tended by hundreds of human hands, hands that remain largely invisible in the institution’s official history,” she said. 

Her presentation, “The Silent Hands That Shaped the Huntington: A History of Its Immigrant Workers,” traced those lives through archival fragments and, increasingly, through oral histories. 

The Huntington has begun recording interviews with longtime workers—many of whom emigrated from Mexico or came through family and village networks that connected one generation of workers to the next—documenting labor, migration, family ties, and the ways the institution has functioned as both workplace and community. Molina noted that many workers came from Villa Guerrero, linked through cousins, friends, and neighbors who helped one another find work. She played excerpts during her talk, allowing those voices to be heard directly, in Spanish, in the room. 

In one oral history, Jose Manuel Moreno, a maintenance technician, reflected: “The little jobs, the big jobs, it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s the thing that you want to do.” 

For Molina, these accounts do more than supplement the archive—they reshape it. 

“This isn’t just Henry Huntington’s story,” she said. “It’s an immigrant story. It’s a California story. And we built this.” 

Together, the speakers reframed the garden as an archive—one shaped not only by what is preserved, but by what has yet to be fully seen. 

From Ideas to Landscape 

Late in the day, the conversation moved outdoors. 

Participants crossed into the Oak Meadow, an expansive new landscape at The Huntington named in honor of the national tree. Still in development, the space will connect the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art, the MaryLou and George Boone Gallery, and The Rose Hills Foundation Conservatory for Botanical Science—physically linking the institution’s art, library, and botanical collections. 

Planted with California natives alongside North American species adapted to Southern California’s climate, the meadow is designed as both a gathering space and a living system. 

After a day of discussion, the shift was clarifying. The questions raised indoors—about stewardship, memory, omission, and care—were no longer theoretical. They were embedded in the landscape itself. 

A garden records what is chosen, what is left out—and ultimately what is preserved. 

About THIS LAND IS …

THIS LAND IS … is a sweeping multiyear initiative that invites visitors to reflect on the American story through the lens of land. Anchored by the tagline “Reflections for America at 250,” the initiative draws on The Huntington’s library, art, and botanical collections to spotlight relationships between land, United States history, and American identities. Discover a season of exhibitions, experiences, and conversations across the campus: www.huntington.org/this-land-is  

THIS LAND IS … is made possible through major support from The Fletcher Jones Foundation and Stewart R. Smith, Robin A. Ferracone, Logan Smith, and Tracy Beetler through The H. Russell Smith Foundation. Generous support for this initiative is also provided by LeeAnn and Ronald Havner through the JCS Foundation.