clear: southerly breeze: 42ºF

It’s a few days from December but many of the roses still are in bloom. This morning there’s a dusting of frost on the grassy areas, but many of the summer bloomers go on, although with less enthusiasm. Although temperatures have been drifting downwards, they haven’t yet hit that this-is-it-and no-more level needed to end the growing season. Taking advantage of this year’s prolonged season, is this 2009 All-American Rose Selection winner aptly named ‘Carefree Spirit.’


Here’s what’s left of a sizeable clump of what used to be a ‘Sum and Substance’ hosta. I suspect the keepers of this botanical garden left the remains because there’s still some elegance left in it. As I looked at the clump, I wished I could have seen it from above – browned central scapes in the center surrounded by mushy yellow-green leaves in a petal arrangement. Imagine animating the display, adding a bit of color to get something like the ingenious Go Ho Ho holiday commercial that the Gap stores are splashing all over television.

Botanical gardens rarely talk about security – at least not to their visitors who want to feel that they’ve paid bought an ticket to paradise when they step inside. But when the San Francisco Botanical Garden wanted to institute an admission fee, it said it was because many their rare and endangered plants were being stolen. A few years ago the Quail Botanical Garden (now the San Diego Botanical Garden) reported they were reviewing what they could do improve their security after the theft of some rare (and expensive) uninsured specimens of cycads. At the botanical garden where I walk, I noticed that I have been seeing more security people patrolling the grounds in their golf carts, but until today I’d never been aware of security cameras keeping watch too. There, mounted smack in the middle of a soffit on the building that the visitors in 1859 would used to enter the garden, was this white camera labeled “Vandal Tough.” I don’t know if the camera is there to prevent something from happening or because something already happened and the keepers of this garden don’t want a reoccurrence. While cameras seem to be new, security isn’t. In the original rules that founder Henry Shaw wrote in 1849, he required that “the police (when there) save orders to remove . . . persons guilty of any kind of impropriety.” The improprieties that Mr. Shaw was referring to included people “attired otherwise than respectably,” unaccompanied children, and anyone caught eating, drinking, smoking, running, leaping over beds, or carrying a bag or basket. Visitors were also to “refrain from touching the plants and flowers” because touching leads “to suspicion, perhaps unfounded, that their object is to abstract a plant or flower.”

Lots of witch hazels here. They range from washed-out yellows to yellows in a shade you’d call Velocity Yellow if you owned a 2010 Corvette Grand Sport coupe. Then there are the oranges, bronzes, and deep reds: lots to choose from. That is if it happens to be early spring. This time of year though it’s yellow or nothing. The American witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) is the only variety that blooms in the fall. I thought. This morning though I found this witch hazel at the edge of the daylily garden: a shrub hazel filled with vibrant red-orange flowers. It shouldn’t be, but it was. From the looks of the dirt around the plant it was recently planted. The marker in front of the tree just said it was a “Hamamelis hybrid” with neither the hybrid cross nor the variety specified. The plastic tag still attached to the tree said it was “amethyst x holden 4.” I searched for this one but the only thing I turned up was that the Holden Arboretum in Kirkland, Ohio has a program to develop new varieties of witch hazel. I suspect what I was seeing was #4 in a series of possible new introductions. Before I learned to drive, I excitedily looked in the windows of auto showrooms to try to get a glimpse of the new models before they were unveiled. I felt the same way this morning when I saw this fall blooming witch hazel that wasn’t yellow, likely years before it’s named or unveiled.

At the very edge of the botanical garden are several stands of pussy willow trees. I watch them in late winter because their opening is usually the first hint that spring’s near. What to make of this? One of the furry catkins has already broken though even before winter’s begun. As my wife often says, “There’s always 10% who don’t get the word.”