Watch, Read, Listen

Thursday was a green-letter day. A simple idea planted more than 10 years ago came to life when board members of the California Avocado Society welcomed Brokaw, Rodriguez, and Shepherd family members to celebrate the successful establishment of Shepherd-Brokaw Orchard, the heart of a new Huntington Avocado Collection.

Well, this is a first! Visitors to The Huntington through Monday, May 2, will get to preview two of the three works under consideration for acquisition by the Art Collectors' Council on Saturday evening.

For the 16th year, the Huntington Library Press will represent The Huntington at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. This year, the festival moves from its usual venue at UCLA to the USC campus, south of the 10 Freeway and north of Exposition Park and the Coliseum.

So the story goes that the upper ponds in the Japanese Garden were filled with mud many decades ago, mud carried down the canyon in flash flood waters. And the significant point has been that rather than dig out the mud, workers just let it dry and then capped it with a new concrete pond bottom. Those upper ponds are significantly shallower than the main ponds at the garden center

Another post in a series about Mr. Huntington's Garden by the botanical director of The Huntington.

A new exhibition opens Saturday, April 23, which happens to be William Shakespeare's birthday. At first glance, "Revisiting the Regency: England, 1811–1820" might seem to be of greater interest to Jane Austen fans than to admirers of the Bard.

While out in the Shakespeare Garden yesterday, one of the guards reminded me that April 23 (this Saturday) is the day we celebrate Shakespeare's birthday. We have replanted the garden just in time to bring a bit more life and color to the clearing over which Shakespeare presides.

Monday was President's Day all over again. Pulitzer Prizes in history and biography went to books about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Ron Chernow's Washington: A Life took the honors for best biography