clear: calm: 84ºF

I’ve been taken with a canna named ‘Erebus’ ever since it started flowering in early summer. Its undersized (for a canna) salmon-colored flowers and its blue-green foliage makes it a stand-out. But the thing that really sets ‘Erebus’ apart from other cannas is how cleanly it sloughs-off its spent blooms. On most other cannas the dead flowers hang on like a dark beard below the blooms. Not a pretty sight. On ‘Erebus’ the spent blooms whither, shrivel, and drop quickly so that the new flowers and buds always get the attention.

The botanical garden’s annual daylily sale is next weekend. This morning we found that the keeper of the daylily garden had clipped the fans of the varieties that will be offered for sale. During the week to come, volunteers will dig the clumps that have been marked and then lift, separate, label, and bag the plants for the sale. The garden’s daylily sale is the biggest of the plant shows, so I suspect that daylily fanciers will be here this weekend to get a sneak preview of varieties that will be on the sales tables next weekend.

Long before Dale Chihuly built his glimmering towers of glass and resin, there were bottle trees. When I saw this bottle tree “growing” in the children’s garden, I thought first of the Chilhuly tower in the Garden’s entry fountain and then of the first bottle tree I had ever seen. Years ago we visited an Ozark attraction near Eureka Springs, Arkansas called Quigley’s Castle. Story goes that the “Castle,” the house that stands there still, was built with rocks and stones that Mrs. Quigley collected over the years. When she got married, her husband promised her that he would use the stone she had gathered to build a house. And he did. But building it wasn’t that pressing for him until one day when he was away, the determined Mrs. Quigley and her children tore down the house they were living in and moved the family into the chicken coop.

Mrs. Quigley also collected colored bottles and glass and used them to fill her garden with the bottle trees that we saw when we visited. Mrs. Quigley’s bottle trees were built to last. The “trunks” are made of concrete. Rods were embedded into the concrete before it cured. Then bottles of all kinds were hung on the trees. Our tour guide told us that Mrs. Quigley especially prized milk of magnesia bottles because of their rich, cobalt-blue color.

I don’t know why Mrs. Quigley built the bottle trees, but tradition has it that bottle trees were built close to a house in a spot where they would catch the sunshine. The sunlight gleaming against the colorful bottles would attract evil spirits like flypaper. Then once an evil spirit entered a bottle, it was trapped there as long as the bottle wasn’t broken.

I spotted three more varieties of hardy camellias this morning. Each is growing in a protected spot in the English Woodland Garden. So now in addition to ‘Lu Shan Snow,’ there are ‘Winter’s Joy,’ ‘Winter’s Star,’ and ‘Winter’s Charm.’ All of these ‘Winter’ varieties were developed by William Ackerman, the man who wrote the book on hardy camellias. All of the camellias are supposed to be late fall bloomers. All of the 'Winter' varieties are some shade of pink and all are said to be hardy to at least minus 5ºF degrees. I found pictures of all three of the ‘Winter’ varieties on web pages of the United States National Arboretum. ‘Winter’s Charm’ and ‘Winter’s Star’ is here. A snow-covered blossom of ‘Winter’s Joy’ is here. I hope to take my own pictures soon.







clear: calm: 67ºF

It’s now three days after the wind storm that struck the city and county. Nearly half a million people are still without electricity. Fallen trees and branches litter most streets and yards. Just outside the walls of the botanical garden we saw a car that had been crushed by a toppled sycamore. Inside the garden a reported forty trees had been lost and a dozen more were in danger. The glasshouse that houses the garden’s camellia collection is closed. From what I could see from the outside the roof of the glasshouse has many panes of broken glass and the ventilation slats are twisted and broken. A maintenance building at the far side of the Japanese garden also was badly damaged by a nearby tree that snapped. The winds that hit the area were estimated at 80 mph with gusts as high as 100 mph.


Last week’s windstorm sent me to our photo albums to find the pictures of a wood relief mural that we took on a visit to the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew. The piece was made to recall the losses sustained by Kew in the Great Storm of 1987. In that windstorm, said to be the worst storm to hit England since the Great Storm of 1703, Kew lost about 800 mature trees. Many were historically important, scientifically unique trees. The wood relief mural called “Kew Threatened by the Wind” hangs in the entry hall to the garden. It depicts the god of winds blowing through the trees and the familiar landmarks of the botanical garden. The mural is made from one thousand interlocking pieces of wood from thirty species of trees felled by the storm.

Does an ill wind blow anything but ill? For Kew it did. Two botanists affiliated with Kew, Mark Flanagan and Tony Kirkham wrote a book about the aftermath of the Great Storm of 1987. They said that just after the storm, tree scientists benefited by be able to study the roots systems and decay patterns of tree specimens that were entirely new to them. Then instead of shredding all the remains, the keepers at Kew invited woodcarvers to come to the garden to get chunks of exotic woods they had never before seen nor worked.

After the cleanup was complete, the staff at Kew Gardens surveyed what was left and decided that they had a once in a lifetime opportunity to expand and broaden their collection of the trees that grew in the world’s temperate forests. So beginning a year after the storm, researchers Mark Flanagan and Tony Kirkham were sent to collect seeds from trees that grew in South Korea, the mountains of Taiwan, the far eastern coast of Russia and Sakhalin Island, and to Hokkaido Island, Japan. The pair brought back 426 different species and varieties from their expeditions. Many of those seeds have grown to become the young trees that fill the spaces left by the Great Storm.

It’s too early to tell what advantages may be wrung from the aftermath of the storm that hit this botanical garden. Oddly enough, the garden has not even issued a press release detailing the extent of the damage done to its collection or any plans it may be making for what happens after the cleanup is complete.


Nearly every month, some society, organization, or association that fancies this or that kind of plant or flower has an exhibit and sale at this botanical garden. So far this year, groups have been here showing and selling orchids, lilies, daffodils, herbs, carnivorous plants, African violets, daylilies, roses, hostas, rock gardens, bonsai, dahlia, and wild flowers. This week it’s the show and sale of the Henry Shaw Cactus Society, a group whose history goes back over sixty years. Each plant or flower show has its own character. As plants, I like cactuses and succulents least, but I like the cactus show the best. The cactus folk put on a meticulous show. Here offered for sale are hundreds of precisely labeled specimens ordered in ways known best to cactus fans. In the exhibit area the entries in each category are appealing arranged on evenly spaced long folding tables, each covered with a pressed white tablecloth. My show favorites are the dish gardens – whimsical arrangements of cactuses growing in fanciful containers. Here is a dish garden called "Button Garden" and along with a cactus cocktail called "Sophistication."







dazzlingly clear: almost calm: 75ºF

What could be happening to ‘Sugary?’  The plum-sized tomatoes are just fine when they are green, but just as they begin ripening the glossy, blemish-free skin that helped earn them the All-American Selection medal last year cracks open.  The gashes run all the way from the stem to the blossom end and widen as the fruit matures.  What causes cracking?  The Missouri Extension says “Tomatoes will crack when there is a fluctuation in the growth of the tomato plant.”  So a tomato cracks when the inside grows faster than the skin expands.  It could be too much rain, not enough rain, dry spells followed by wet ones, wet ones followed by dry ones, high temperatures, low temperatures, or back and forth temperatures.  The fault this time is in the stars, not in the care given to these most pampered of tomatoes grown in the botanical garden’s demonstration plots.  I suspect that seeing cracks in these prize specimens will be smugly satisfying to many local gardeners.  They will point to the cracks on ‘Sugary’ and feel a bit better about the tomatoes growing in their gardens at home.

A couple of years ago I read a line in William Ackerman’s book Growing Camellias in Cold Climates that I thought only a true-believer could write: "Camellias have the genetic potential, through hybridization and selection, to be sufficiently rugged to complete with such ornamentals as Rhododendrons, Azaleas, and Hollies."  The claim seemed particularly far-fetched since I’d never even seen a camellia growing anywhere in this botanical garden except in a heated glasshouse.  Dr. Ackerman, a retired scientist who worked at the National Arboretum near Washington, watched helplessly as two unusually harsh winters in the 70s wiped out most of the garden’s collection of nearly one thousand outdoor camellias.  Starting with what was left — less than two dozen plants — Ackerman began a breeding program to develop camellias that could withstand the cold.  He found that Camellia oleifera was the most cold-tolerant specie.  Camellia oleifera is grown extensively in Asia not for flowers but for seed oil used in cooking and in cosmetics sold to reduce wrinkles, freckles, and spots.

This morning at the edge of the walkway in English Woodland Garden I saw a newly planted Camellia oleifera named ‘Lu Shan Snow.’  This is the first camellia I’ve ever spotted growing outdoors in the botanical garden.  In his book Ackermann says he used Lu Shan Snow to breed dozens of other cold hardy camellias.  He says he choose Lu Shan Snow as a parent because it could survive temperatures that dipped repeatedly to minus 15ºF.

Ackerman says that Lu Shan Snow blooms in the fall — from October until it’s killed by heavy frosts.  Hardy though it may be, Lu Shan Snow has its detractors.  It’s been called “a little homely” because its plain-jane, white flowers shatter quickly and they lack the size and carnation-like fullness that people travel to Southern gardens to ogle.

I'm excited though.  I can’t wait to take a picture of the botanical garden’s first outdoor camellia — humble though it might be — when it blooms this October.   I’d like it even more if Lu Shan Snow survives to bloom again in October 2007.







clear: light breeze: 75ºF

Some mornings I get to the botanical garden before the fountains are turned on. That happened today. One of the Dale Chihuly pieces – an assemblage of bolder-sized chunks of some hard synthetic material that he calls “Polyvito Crystal Tower, 2006” is centered in the middle of a circular fountain at the entrance to the grounds. The piece is meant to be seen through sprays of water shot upward by the jets that surround it. The water softens the piece and makes the blue plastic chunks seem as though they are being juggled by the jets of water. Without the water, Chihuly’s Tower is naked. The mystery is gone. This morning the Tower reminds me of rock candy crystals on a swizzle stick. Dryden and Palmer, the country’s largest (and only) maker of rock candy sweets has given wonderful flavor names to describe blues similar to those Chihuly uses in the Tower: blue raspberry and cotton candy.

To get a close-up look at three of the outdoor Chihuly glass sculptures, visitors have to walk on the grass. Now, more than two months since the opening of the exhibit, it’s easy to spot the places favored by photographers to take their pictures. Patches of grass have been tramped dead in places. I stood in a couple of those spots of bare earth imaging the pictures I would get. The photos would make nice souvenirs, good mementos of a one-time visit, but they lack the drama of the photos that bloggers are posting to their sites. To get more interesting, unique photos, some visitors have begun to get off the beaten earth and are tramping through planted beds damaging plants and flowers. This morning I saw several signs in the expanses of creeping liriope that border Chihuly’s “Japanese Bridge Chandelier, 2006” cautioning visitors “Please do not enter planting beds when photographing the exhibit.”

Daylilies are still flowering wildly, but the season’s peak has past. Until today, I thought that after a daylily flower bloomed, it closed and then gradually shriveled and dropped. This morning I found the exception. I saw a dark-colored daylily filled with dead blooms that were as open as newly opened flowers. The dead blooms are more transparent and fragile-looking that the fresh ones, but they have enough structure to support even the ruffled petals inside. I wish I taken time to get the name of this daylily that blooms more than a day.

The cicada killer wasps are still active in the herb garden behind Shaw’s mansion. This week, armed with the confidence I got from reading Professor Holliday’s website I waded right in among the swarms of buzzing wasps. I was looking for the holes in the ground where the wasps take the cicadas they paralyze. The bare ground around the herb plantings was peppered with holes – all circular and between half-inch and an inch across. From what I learned from Professor’s Holliday’s web site, each of the burrows beneath the holes has sealed chambers that house about 30 cicadas that are harvested from nearby trees. Each cicada will be food enough for the young that hatch from the egg or two laid on each insect. By looking at the number of holes and doing the math, I figure next year should bring another bumper crop of new killer wasps to the garden.







clear: easy breeze: 84ºF

I think the most overlooked Chihuly glassworks at the exhibit in the botanical garden are the glass balls floating on the reflecting ponds in front of the Linnean glasshouse. The balls are big enough to see –I’d guess from one to three feet across – but they have dark subtle colorations that camouflage them when seen against the black-colored water in the ponds and the reflection of the sky on the water. They’re very different than the circus balloon like colors of the floating glass onions in the larger ponds. The ones here are more like Victorian gazing balls gone modern. Rather than the gold, silver, red or blue reflective surfaces of older globes, the surface of these Chihuly balls is opaque and crazed in places. Their surface is covered with canal-like lines. Between the lines are islands of blotches and spots. As I looked long and close at the balls, I thought of the NASA pictures of the shattered surface of moons of distant planets.

I think of cannas as drive-by plants. They’re tall. They’re flashy. They look spectacular in the middle of a green island in the middle of a much used city boulevard. This morning a different kind of canna was in bloom in the gardens bordering the reflecting ponds outside the Linnean glasshouse. It’s named ‘Erebus.’ The flowers are pink leaning toward salmon. The foliage is blue-green and the plant is tall without towering. I think the true test of a good canna though is how it sloughs off its dead flowers. Most don’t. Fresh and dead co-mingle making the plant look unkempt. I’ll take another picture of ‘Erebus’ in couple of weeks to see how it disposes of its dead.

This is the third week of spectacular bloom in the daylily garden. As I’ve done in past years, I’m making a top-ten list of my favorites. When the yearly sale of surplus fans comes around in August, I’ll be ready. I find I look at flowers with darker hues now – the deeper reds and burgundies. These colors show particularly well in the early morning. Then the sun, still at a low angle, lights their throats and petals making the blooms shimmer.

Life is good when a gardener picks the first home-grown tomato on the Fourth of July. Today’s July 1, so I returned to the tomato patch in botanical garden to see whether there might be any candidates for an Independence Day picking. Just one: ‘Sugary.’ With three days to go and sunny weather in the mid-ninety’s between now and then, it’s a sure thing that the ripening ‘Sugary’ will be red and ready to pick on the 4th.

Of the bees and wasps: The frame of the restroom building at the far end of the Japanese Garden is filled with the entry and exit holes of carpenter bees. I recognize the damage because several years ago the bees began to work on the framing and undersides of the eves on our deck. The bees look like oversized bumble bees and according to a University of Missouri Extension publication that I picked up a while back, the bees act tough, but won’t or can’t sting. They do like to make holes in wood though, especially soft, untreated, unpainted wood such as pine and cedar. They bore into the wood making nearly perfect ½ inch circles. Then they tunnel below a bit before they come out making a much larger, messier exit holes. Oddly enough the carpenter bees that worked on the frames of the garden’s restroom confined all of their digging to the women’s side of the building.

Hundreds of cicada killer wasps are again buzzing the herb garden. The last time this happened, the keepers of the garden sealed both entrances to the garden with caution tape and posted signs warning : "Cicada-killer wasps have temporarily taken over the herb garden." This year the herb garden has remained opened. The entrance sign lets visitors know “in spite of their large size, the wasps usually ignore people. However females can give a painful sting if bothered. Males are more aggressive but cannot sting.” Chuck Holliday, a biology professor at Lafayette College has a fascinating website devoted to everything most of us would care to know about the wasps. On his site Professor Holliday claims to “have caught, tagged and released over 1000 cicada-killers, and never has one tried to land on me and sting.” To prove it he posts a picture of a killer wasp resting on his finger just harmless as a butterfly. He also has pictures of a wasp lugging a cicada at least twice its side to its nest. I couldn’t leave the site without watching the video of the wasps mating.