Welcome to The Getty Center: A small, well-known and loved L.A. paradise of gardens, museums, pop-up sculptures in every color of the rainbow. Lavender and garlic caught me off guard as I slowly made my way down Robert Irwin's garden, a zigzagging stone path lined with  tiny red, yellow and light blue explosions bursting out of soft green leaf beds. The blossoms hung from overhead, keeping a watchful eye on the visitors who came--some from lands as distant as Virginia and Hong Kong!--to marvel at their spunky and spiky and silky flowered comrades. Water cried down the path next the the visitor trail, but like our senses, it too grew up, and learned the value of silence, at least a little bit by the end of the journey. The thick stream that crashed angrily through boulders at the top of the path calmed into a slow and steady trickle by the time we all reached the center. Not only  do the museums house Monet's cathedrals dressed in morning dew and (for the next few months) roomfuls of busty french noblemen cast in bronze, The Getty is also home to Van Gogh's Irises.