What to Know
- Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden in Arcadia
- The "Freaky Flora" route is included with your admission
- Plants with creepy or strange characteristics or stories are featured on the special digital map
What would the Halloween scene be without its numerous strange, straight-from-nature touchstones?
We're not talking about werewolves or talking bats or bewitching moonlight, though those spooky story staples certainly do have a natural (or rather supernatural) connection to the holiday.
Rather, we're swooning over real-world plants and flowers, the fantastical flora that can give even the most ardent garden enthusiasts pause due to their wonderful weirdness, their prickles, their odd smells, or some creepy combination of characteristics.
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The Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden is celebrating its stranger specimens this October by sending visitors on a hunt for the "Freaky Flora" around the 127-acre property. And this is more sweet than strange: Access to the map and the roster of plants is included with your admission.
Nope, these peculiar plants, unearthly cactuses, and eerie herbs won't pop out and startle visitors as they saunter by. But learning some facts and stories about these bizarre botanical superstars, thanks to the online map and descriptions, is part of the lightly eeky, more-fun-than-freaky adventure.
You may come across the Bat's Wing Coral Tree — see if you can detect the shape of a bat's wings in the tree's leaflets — and the Strangler Fig, which is not a particularly welcome guest when it finds a host tree to grow upon.
Pomegranates (which can often look like open mouths with tiny teeth after they've passed their peak ripeness), fennel (keeping phantoms at bay is one unusual role the herb has filled), and the Mouse Trap Tree (check out the seed pods, which seem to boast "horns") are all featured on the fascinating line-up.
There are 25 plants on the Freaky Flora map, and you can go at any pace you like (and make however many stops you want). Call it a fresh-air'd adventure with an autumn tinge, one that connects nature to Halloween to our own gardens back home.
Keep in mind, if you go, that work has begun on the arboretum's new Visitor Plaza. For parking and arrival information, start here.
