There were three good reasons to visit the Norton Simon Museum this week, and while one of them is in the rearview mirror by now, two of them are very much awaiting your next visit.

The first good reason was that Monday, the day I was able to get over to the Norton, marked the last day for nine or so months for strolling in the museum’s west and north gardens, those freeway-loud but otherwise idyllic green spaces where the giant Maillol and Henry Moore sculptures are lining seemingly every step you take down the decomposed-granite paths.

The gardens will be closed until late summer or early fall for both a facelift and some structural upgrades to the big pond and elsewhere.

You know you’ve achieved veteran’s status around here when you recall major redesigns in one of our signature buildings or landscapes as if it were yesterday.

The garden design by Nancy Goslee Power achieved a Giverny-like grandness surrounding those 28 sculptures — the place is as great as the art. Completed in conjunction with Frank Gehry’s update — more natural light — to the original Kelsey & Ladd building, the re-imagining of the Norton has made it a must-visit site in Southern California. In fact, it’s always interesting to me wandering the place how something on the order of half of the visitors are foreign. It’s a world attraction.

And now the pond floor is going to get strengthened, the DG paths repaired using resin-bound gravel “that is permeable but stable, allowing for greater access to the garden during the rainy season,” the museum says. New seating out there as well, Plus, and maybe most noticeably: the “steel picket fence on the south and west perimeter will be replaced with a solid wall that will reduce the noise caused by traffic on Colorado and Orange Grove Boulevards.”

So you can’t go out in the garden, but you must get in to the museum to see the PST-aligned show “Plugged In: Art and Electric Light.” which closes Feb. 17, and the magnificent Velazquez portrait of the 17-year-old Hapsburg Spanish queen Mariana, looking peeved at having to marry her uncle, on loan from the Prado in Madrid, which goes back home after March 24.

We met up at the Simon’s entrance with Elise Ann Doyle, widow of the one Pasadena artist featured in “Plugged In,” the antic and erudite Walter Askin, who died in 2021, aged 92, and headed downstairs to see his “Polyplanograph” from 1970. It’s from a series of brightly lighted pieces built out of Plexiglass-sheet boxes Askin created, decorated with his own decals, “vertically arranged over a light source to create an aquarium-like effect.” As I said of Walter’s art after he died, his work is always both of a high and original level on its own and available to those of your otherwise-cultured friends who claim that they don’t care for contemporary art. It’s ever-playful, science-related, fun. The work on view, a box glowing red and orange like a sunset, turns itself off every two and a quarter minutes so the Plexi doesn’t overheat. Make sure you see it in the next month.

And the rest of the show, tucked downstairs with the Indian sculptures, with two extraordinary Robert Irwin glowing discs, seminal Don Flavin tubes, and the huge neon Rauschenberg “Green Shirt” that used to tick off the philistines when it was hung on the side of the building, originally the Pasadena Art Museum, in 1970

And now it’s been fully half a century since the industrialist took over the museum, and decades since the staff of one of the finest small museums in the world has been allowed to bring in from the vaults works from the eccentric, small, amazing collection amassed by the PAM before it went under to display alongside the Old Masters, Impressionists and early 20th-century artists favored by the rich collector with the amazing eye.

Always a fascinating mix on view. Get over there, Mondays and Thursdays through Sundays, for a good time.

Wednesday at random

Monrovian Brian Saeki, once city manager of Covina, now city manager of Whittier, is leaving town next month for the apparently greener pastures of ... Vernon. Two reasons they are greener, if you’ve worked in half a dozen city halls, as Saeki has. First, there’s the $357,000 compensation. Second, no one lives in Vernon. I exaggerate. Some 222 people live in Vernon. It’s the smallest city in Southern California. Whereas 88,000 live in Whittier. And every one of them has an opinion about whether or not to chop the ficus trees in Uptown. And about many other issues. In Vernon, all you’ve got to wrangle is what Vulture magazine says was formerly “an industrial wasteland where the corruption charges outnumber people,” from the time Vernon was fictionalized as Vinci in “True Detective.” I’m sure that’s all been cleaned up now.

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com.