I finally made it to the famous Huntington Library garden. As I was sorry to discover, the Conservatory greenhouse, which hosts the more rare cacti and succulents, is only open on Saturdays. Even so, the open-air collection was larger and more exciting than I had expected and definitely impressive way beyond the huge golden barrels that are featured in most of the photos out there.
First, the desert garden is so large (and in fact a very friendly guide recommended me I skip it in the interest of time) that I did not see it all in the two hours I spent there. Granted I took photos of almost every plant and spent some time trying to find a way to get close to the browningia’s – there is none. The garden has many columnar cacti which are interleaved with the other plants throughout the entire garden rather than isolated to their own section. Many of the more unusual ones shared the space with gymnocalyciums in what looked more like a forest substrate on the left side of the main path when descending into the garden. Very few of the plants had visible name sign posts: they all had small army-like metal tags which were impossible to read unless you are really close to the plant. And unfortunately you can only get very close to a tiny number of plants, the ones lining the pathways.
The garden does not have a large variety of gymnocalyciums, but the ones I saw looked much larger than what I was familiar with. The predominant genus was gymno horstii.
G. monvillei 
G. horstii 
G. denudatum 
G. horstii
I also spotted g. cardesianum, g. monvillei and quite a few g. denudatum, apparently a.k.a pink beauty.
I enjoyed most the thelocactus and coryphantha section, which is quite extensive. It has a lot of thelocactus hexadrophorous and t. riconensis, my two favourite thelocacti. I even spotted what looked like a t. hexadrophorous v. fossulatus (photo bellow), but I could not see the tag to verify.
Corypantha sp. and thelocactus hexadrophorous
The gymnocalycium section slowly merges into a small copiapoa section. The copiapoas are mostly of the spiny variety, and while larger than the small specimens you usually see in nurseries they were not as impressive as the large clumps found in habitat (like the one here Copiapoa tenebrosa clump in Chile).
Some other photos I took at the Desert Garden.
