Surrounded by large piñatas, shaped like red flowers — as piñata hummingbirds flutter in the wind above me — this is the start of a new immersive seasonal exhibit at the Ventura Botanical Gardens, celebrating hummingbirds.
These piñatas aren’t for smashing to pieces, but to celebrate these enchanting tiny pollinators and the flowers they feed from.
“Hummingbirds really love plants with kind of tubular red flowers,” explained Joe Cahill, Executive Director of the Ventura Botanical Gardens. “Those are sort of their favorites. And those plants have evolved with hummingbirds, and they actually produce a different ratio of sugars that’s more flavorful and attractive to hummingbirds. So there’s a long history of hummingbirds co-evolving with these plants that have red flowers.”
Cahill starts off along the trail to show me the exhibits, nestled among the hundreds of thousands of plants at the gardens, which take up 107 acres — much of it on a steep hill behind City Hall…