overcast: southerly breeze: 33ºF

Most of the leaves and much of the fall color is gone. The last few trees to change look dull under this morning’s gray skies. The burning bushes (Euonymus alatus) in the Japanese Garden are exceptions. Their leaves – some red, some cream, and a few still green – got me to thinking about poinsettias. With Thanksgiving over it’s time for a visit to a nursery to pick out a plant to take home. And next week when this botanical garden’s annual holiday flower show opens, I’ll get a chance to see which poinsettias the planners chose to feature this year. “Wow, could anything be more exciting?” I think you must be thinking.

The stocks of a few stands of ornamental millet are still standing. They’re in a sheltered spot near a brick wall, so unless sparrows looking for seeds ravage them, they’ll likely last until spring. Their heads, which look so inconsequential when out in the open, look striking when put against a reddish backdrop.


Inside the glasshouse where the camellias are starting to bloom, I saw a new shrub no more than three-feet tall. It’s filled with clusters of tiny buds that are close to blooming. Even when the buds open, the flowers will be small -- very different from the eye-popping display of camellia flowers soon to come. I checked the metal tag attached to the shrub. It’s named Camellia transnokoensis. My copy of Flora, the know-it-all book of information about plants, says that Camellia transnokoensis was found growing at an altitude of nearly 8,000 feet on the slopes of Mt. Noko in central Taiwan. Flora says that at most each of the flowers will be less than a half-inch across. This morning, the buds look very pink, but the flowers are supposed to be pure white. Next week I plan to make a return visit to take a picture.

The fronds on massive bald cypress trees (Taxodium distichum) planted on both sides of the botanical garden’s central axis have just started to brown and fall. Some of the walks and hedges already have a dusting of what one of the visitors to the garden calls “cinnamon sugar.” I read that bald cypress trees will grow to these heights even without standing in or close to a ready supply of water. If they do grow in standing water though, they develop a spread of knobby knees around their base. The trees growing here have no knees to speak of.

Odd things these. They’re called sea onions (Ornithogalum longibracteatum). A nearby sign says they come from South Africa. A clump of them is thriving in the glasshouse that houses plants native to the Mediterranean climates around the world.

Lots of times I take pictures of things I see here but only after I’ve downloaded them do I really see what it is I’ve seen. These sea onions – case-in-point. From the web, I learned that they’re neither onions nor do they grow in the sea. Not a surprise. Namers of things choose names not because they’re apt, but because they remind them of something they know about. More interesting than the name though is the way this bulb reproduces. Visualize the Alien movies here. The large big sea onion bulbs form lumps under their skins that grow to the size of marbles. Then these bulbets rupture the skin to escape. They drop to the ground; they root; and then it all begins again. Unknowingly, the picture I took shows some young bulbs growing near their parents and a scar left by the birth of a bulb.

muted sun: easy breeze: 38ºF

What’s left to do? From what I can see, there’s little left to do to put this botanical garden to bed for the winter. This morning I noticed that all of the outdoor fountains had been drained. All but one of the reflecting ponds with their toppings of water lilies were gone too as were the over-sized pots filled with oleander, lemon trees, and pomegranate. All this digging and storing must have been done early last week just ahead of a string of nights in the freezing 20’s. The tender plants will stay penned up in the glass houses on the fringes of the garden until summer comes again.

What do visitors who come to this botanical garden see and talk about as they walk? Sometimes I hear snippets of conversations as people pass me, but rarely do I hear anyone talking about plants or flowers. The words I catch most often are about day-to-day life: lazy fellow workers, furnaces that don’t heat, stiff joints, high school reunions, and details about vacations taken and yet-to-be-taken. These lush 79-acres are turned into a set where the real focus is on the lives of the walkers, not on the life of the garden. What I hear is like the conversations Virginia Woolf wrote about in her short-short story “Kew Gardens” where walkers at that botanical garden talk about past loves, past lives, and when the garden’s café gives discounts on a cup of tea. When the people in Woolf's stories do talk about their surroundings, they tie them to things they like to do or remember doing.

We’ve had lots of nights well below freezing. I wouldn’t think these cold nights and short days would encourage a mid-season daylily to push up a scape, fill it with buds, and then bloom. ‘Chester Cyclone’ has done it though. This morning it opened with a blossom at least six-inches across. Its deep lemon petals shift to green as they narrow to the throat. I don’t know whether Chester Cyclone first bloomed in July, but even if it had, it wouldn’t have been a stand-out among that summer crowd of attention-getters. Now though in mid-November, it has no competitors.

Just as the Chester Cyclone is extending the summer, this furry pussy willow that I found in the Japanese Garden is pushing spring. It all makes me wonder if we’ll soon get to the time when everything will be blooming all the time. We’ll be able to pick and choose what to grow and easily as we can go to Michael’s and put together a silk bouquet of tulips, daffodils, asters, hydrangeas, with a bird of paradise in the center.

I just noticed these pumpkins. They were on the back porch of the house that garden founder Henry Shaw lived in mid-1800’s. Two things about them got me to climb the steps for a closer look. One: the unusual decoration. It looks as though a strip of Victorian lace had been draped around the pumpkins, pinned in place, and then sprayed with black paint. Second: a white pumpkin. I sure these white varieties must be common enough to parents with kids and to planners of holiday parities, but they were new to me. I even touched one to convince myself it wasn’t an orange pumpkin in mime. Could this be the start of a trend to breed pumpkins that can match any décor?


The newly arrived yew hedges have been put into place around the paths of the English maze. Oddly enough, all the yews that were brought in last week have been planted, and there’s still a gap that easily could gobble up about fifty more shrubs. Surely the planners couldn’t have screwed up the arithmetic. Another order must be on the way. I found this picture on the botanical garden’s website of yews being planted here when this maze was built in 1986.

The patch of white Florida Swamp Lilies (Crinum americanum) has just begun to flower in the glasshouse that features temperate gardens. Swamp lilies don’t flower often here so it’s a treat to catch them in bloom. The long, dangly stamens make it hard to smell the flowers without getting a nose tickle, but for whiff sweeter than oleander it’s worth a sneeze.

clear: calm: 44ºF

The winter-hardy camellias planted last year are now a year old. Last year, before the cold weather set in they were all wrapped in loose-fitting burlap coats stuffed with oak leaves. Most survived.

All of the hardy camellias planted last fall are billed as fall bloomers, so this morning I visited three of the shrubs to see what was happening. ‘LuShan Snow’ (Camellia oleifera), a variety widely used as breeding stock for other winter-hardy camellias, was the least healthy. Last year ‘LuShan Snow’ had lots of buds and even managed to set a few small, shaggy white blossoms. This year it has just one small bud and nearly all of its leaves have fallen. Even with another year of cold-weather protection, I think it’s doomed.

The two winter hardy hybrid varieties that are spin offs of Camellia oleifera are faring better. Both shrubs are larger than they were a year ago. Both have good number of shiny, dark green leaves. And best of all: buds and blooms. ‘Winter’s Star’ is already blooming. It’s a deep pink color with blossoms about three-inches across. This one rivals many of the Camelia sasanquas that just now have begun to bloom in the sheltered, climate-controlled camellia house. The other hybrid, ‘Winter’s Joy,’ hasn’t bloomed yet but it’s loaded with buds. I counted about a dozen and a half on the pint-sized shrub. When (If??) it does bloom, it’s billed to have bright pink pom-pom flowers.

After the hottest part of summer had past, the garden keepers planted even more camellias in shaded, sheltered parts of the English Woodland Garden. Unlike the other camellias with winter in their names, these new varieties speak of spring: ‘April Tryst,’ ‘April Dawn,’ and ‘April Snow.’

I tracked them all to Camellia Forest Nursery, a nursery in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, that specializes in breeding and selling camellias. The ‘April’ series is their introduction. What’s unusual about them is that they are all Camellia japonicas – the same mainstream, voluptuous specie that draws crowds to the camellia glass house in mid-February and that fuels the early spring garden tours to Southern states. Yet here they are in the Midwest– outside and unprotected. Camellia Forest Nursery says that varieties in its April series are “the most cold-hardy C. japonica cultivars available and are the best choice for growing outdoors in zone 6, the coldest area where Camellias can be dependably grown.” This botanical garden is in Zone 6 (in good years). So we’ll see.

Most of the tulips were planted and mulched this week. Eventually the tulip beds will be identified with formal printed signs, but for now their underground beds are marked with yellow wooden sticks. Names of the varieties were printed hastily with magic markers.

I’m most interested in the beds where two different varieties have been planted because I like to figure out how the planners decided which tulips would share a common space. I looked at four different shared beds to see what they had in common. The pairs I checked were ‘Salvo’ and ‘Ballade’; ‘Hocus Pocus’ and ‘Yokohama’; ‘Christmas Dream’ and ‘Don Quichotte’; and finally ‘Black Parrot’ and ‘Black Hero.’ From what I could see by looking at their pictures and reading descriptions about them, the mates were matched by color, height, and bloom time. Tulips with like, rather than clashing or contrasting colors were usually paired. A taller tulip was always paired with a shorter one, and the blooming times were spaced so that as one wave of tulips faded, another was coming on. The result: a long season of bloom where the color stays constant within a bed, but without the splash that displays around malls and corporate campuses make.

For head-turning effects, the large commercial displays I’ve seen reverse what the botanical garden does. They mate two tulips with the same height and bloom time and then pick two varieties with vivid, contrasting colors – one light, the other darker. I used to get a catalog from a company called Colorblends that specializes in planning corporate displays. They sell bulk quantities of bulb combos that “are blended and timed to bloom simultaneously . . . to assure you a dazzling display of Nature's Fireworks in your spring garden.” They say, “We invest in time trials and quality control so you don't waste your time and money trying to figure things out.”

A clump of saffron crocus (Crocus sativus) is blooming this morning. I don’t think I’ve even seen this clump in bloom before. It’s the real thing – the legendary autumn bulb used to make yellow-red dyes and drugs that are said to cure anything from a toothache to the plague. I read somewhere that saffron cake is a traditional specialty along the Cornish coast of England. Supposedly the tradition began when ancient Phoenician sailors began trading saffron for the tin that was being mined there. I found a recipe for Cornish Saffron cake on the web, but in case I never get around to making it, I also entered a drawing to win a saffron cake from a bakery in West Cornwall.