SOMETHING BORROWED

With this issue, The Huntington announces the name for its Chinese Garden. In the cover article, curator June Li explains how she and her colleagues drew on art, history, literature, and botany in selecting a Chinese name for the new 12-acre site.

One feature of Chinese gardens is the borrowed view. While composed paths take advantage of the beauty of the immediate surroundings — a lake, a tree, a plant — they also take in the distant landscape. For example, the San Gabriel Mountains are well outside the boundaries of The Huntington but nonetheless part of the scenery.

Much of what takes place at The Huntington is the result of one kind of borrowing or another. By lending Rogier van der Weyden’s Madonna and Child to a traveling art exhibition, The Huntington has helped provide a different context for viewing the 15th-century painting. But borrowing is not limited to the loans of paintings. The intellectual exchange between Huntington staff and local educator Avery Clayton helped kick off a new African American cultural series while supporting efforts to establish the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum in Los Angeles.

The back and forth among staff and visitors is seldom a zero-sum game. Botanist Rachel Schmidt Jabaily drew inspiration from her first glimpse of a puya plant at The Huntington and proceeded to travel throughout South America studying the family tree of the species. She returned to The Huntington recently on a fellowship to clarify identifications of all the puya plants in the Huntington Desert Garden.

History is full of stories of borrowed ideas or things. Civil engineer and historian Henry Petroski explains how a 19th-century toothpick manufacturer took a page out of the shoe industry’s manual. And environmental historian Jared Farmer contemplates the history of California’s eucalyptus trees, which began with the first imports from Australia in the 1850s. Just as borrowed views are part of a Chinese garden, eucalyptus trees are a permanent fixture of the state’s landscape.

MATT STEVENS

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