← Misc · 2021–2025

Gardens, a Getty and a Battleship

Afternoons in Los Angeles: gardens, museums, a few streets at night, and the December trees.

This post is not about one trip. It collects the afternoons around Los Angeles that were spent somewhere other than a trail or a beach: gardens, museums, a few walks through town, and the big Christmas trees that go up every December. The outdoors and the coast have their own posts; so do the views from up high, including Griffith Observatory. What is left is a smaller, quieter set, and most of it, it turns out, is the Huntington.

As with the other posts here, everything is reconstructed from the camera roll: what was photographed, where, and at what minute.

A morning at the Pacific Asia Museum

The first of these outings, on Saturday, October 16, 2021, started in Pasadena at the USC Pacific Asia Museum. My first photo there is at 11:33 and the last at 12:36. The galleries that day had a samurai armor in a glass case, a folding screen painted with landscapes, blue-and-white porcelain, and a photo exhibition of the Hakka round houses, by Elizabeth Hill.

The last photo at the museum is of the pond in its courtyard: a curving stone rim, lily pads, and orange koi under the leaves.

On the way to the Huntington there was a short stop at Pasadena City Hall, around 1:30, for the dome and its courtyard garden.

The Huntington, three times

The Huntington in San Marino is a library, an art museum and a set of botanical gardens on one large estate. It is also the place that appears most often in this post: in October 2021, again in December 2021, and once more in March 2023. All three visits ended up at the same lake in the Chinese garden, so the photos make a small record of one view in three seasons.

October 2021: the first visit

The first photos inside are from 2:13 pm. The first stop was the glass-domed conservatory, full of tropical leaves.

From there the photos move to the Chinese garden, Liu Fang Yuan, which takes up most of the afternoon's camera roll. A lake sits in the middle, edged with rough, pitted rocks and crossed by a white stone bridge, with pavilions around the water. One of the pavilions had an exhibition of calligraphy, A Garden of Words: The Calligraphy of Liu Fang Yuan.

The photos from the next half hour go around the lake: past the bridges and the pavilions on the far shore, through a grove of bamboo, and up to a waterfall in the rocks.

Next door is the Japanese garden, and in it the bonsai court, where the trees are kept in pots and in low beds of gravel. This one, a wide pine with flat layers of needles, was photographed at 3:17.

By half past three the photos are in the Desert Garden: barrel cacti by the dozen, tall columns of cereus, and agaves under a hard blue sky. The last stop of the day was indoors, in the art collection, at 4:34, where Gainsborough's The Blue Boy hangs in a green room.

December 2021: winter

The second visit was on Wednesday, December 22, 2021, two months later. My first photo that day, at 1:23, is of the entrance, hung with Christmas wreaths. The sky was white and overcast this time. In the Japanese garden, a row of ginkgo trees along a plastered wall had turned completely yellow and dropped their leaves on the ground beneath them, and the slope below the Japanese house had a stone pagoda among red and orange shrubs.

Then back to the Chinese garden. The lake was the same as in October, but the water plants had died back to brown stalks, the willows were turning, and the pavilions on the far shore were reflected in flat grey water. Near the lake is a small waterfall over a wall of pitted grey rock.

On the way out, at 3:26, the photos pass the rose garden and the small round temple at its end, a ring of white columns under a dome.

March 2023: spring

The third visit, on Sunday, March 12, 2023, was an hour in the late afternoon, from about 3:40, mostly in the Chinese garden again. Six of the photos are mine, starting at 3:50. The first is a tree in full pink blossom. The rest are of the Chinese garden lake again, under a blue sky with white clouds this time, with the white arched bridge and a stone lantern standing in the water.

Put next to the October and December photos, it is the same view three times: clear and green, grey and brown, and then blue and green again.

My wife's photos from the same hour add two spring details: a double white blossom at 3:51, and an orange koi in the clear green water of the lake at 4:02.

The Getty

On Saturday, February 24, 2024, we went to the Getty Center, on its hilltop above the 405 in Brentwood. Our photos from there are almost all of the view. To the east, a cluster of towers stands above the green of the Westside, with more on the horizon. Just below the terrace is the cactus garden, a round bed of spiky plants on a stone promontory.

On the north side the hill drops into the Sepulveda Pass, and my wife's photo at 4:24 looks straight down it: the 405 running through the gap between the hills, every lane full.

The USS Iowa, with Wangcai

On Saturday, June 14, 2025, we took Wangcai to San Pedro to see the USS Iowa, the battleship that is now a museum on the Los Angeles waterfront. The photos are all from outside, between 2:05 and 2:11, under a sky full of long streaky clouds: the grey superstructure, the big gun turrets, and the visitor gangway up to the deck.

Wangcai was more interested in the pier. On the pier beside the ship lies a huge rusted anchor chain, and she stood and looked at it.

In October 2026 she walked past another museum ship, the USS Midway, in San Diego.

In town

A few walks through town left only a handful of photos each. On a Monday night in November 2021 I walked Universal CityWalk, all neon and video screens: a popcorn shop with its name in lights, and the Universal Studios sign glowing over the entrance at 9:53, after a late film at the cinema there.

Later that month, on the Friday after Thanksgiving, the white tower of the Village Theatre in Westwood was wrapped in a huge poster for Licorice Pizza, and the crowd was out on the crossing below it.

In August 2022 there was a walk down Hollywood Boulevard, with a star on the Walk of Fame, and in April 2023 a drive up Beachwood Canyon, where the Hollywood Sign shows on the hill above the street.

In July 2024 a short walk in Chinatown ended at Blossom Plaza, a red building with paper lanterns strung across its courtyard. And in March 2025 there was a public tour of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which left only a photo of the visitor badge.

December trees

The last group is the Christmas trees. On the evening of December 21, 2021, I went with a group of friends to The Grove, where a tall tree covered in white and red lights stands in the middle of the outdoor mall, and a Santa's sleigh with reindeer hangs on a wire high above the fountain. The Grove's green trolley was running through the crowd, strung with lights for the season.

Three days later, on Christmas Eve, I walked past the tree at L.A. Live downtown, set up over an ice rink between the glass towers. A year after that, on December 23, 2022, the Grove's sleigh was up again, and this time I photographed it in the afternoon against a clear blue sky.

We were still there after dark, when the sleigh lit up and fake snow started falling over the crowd.

The most recent is at the Citadel Outlets in Commerce. We went on Thanksgiving night 2024, November 28. The tree there is lit in blue and purple, and the palms around it are wrapped in bright green lights, so the whole plaza glows green and violet.

The Christmas lights further south, in Laguna and Newport, are in Irvine and around.

Map built from the photos' timestamps and locations. Photo locations have been removed from the published images. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors; each place is marked where its photo was taken, and home is never marked.

Some photos in this post are my wife's.