Garden Flourishes and Fizz End the Year
Just inside the Ottoman Garden is a stone pedestal fountain. Near the base of the fountain is a faucet and a bowl. Traditionally visitors would turn on the water and cleanse their hands and feet and perhaps say a prayer to allow their minds to turn away from outside thoughts toward the beauty and calm that awaits them in the garden. The stone engraving near the top of the fountain is covered with gilded arabesque decorations like these. I especially like looking at the scrolls and foliage at this time of year. They remind of the fizz and exuberance that mark the end of the year and they also encourage me to put the old year aside to see more clearly what lies just ahead.
A new year’s treat in the Bird Garden – three or four tightly packed clumps of snowdrops are in full bloom. They’re easy to spot because there are so many of them and because as patches of bright white on an otherwise brown and gray background, they’re hard to miss. The sign near the clumps identify the snowdrops as Galanthus nivalis – the most common of the 20 species of snowdrops. The sign makes no mention of any cultivar name.
In the summer, the thing I (and many kids, too) like best about the Boxwood Garden are the leaping fountains. A spout of water spews in a high arch from a lead fountain landing in the basin of nearby fountain. From there it jumps to the next basin. The leapfrogging continues from basin to basin until it begins all over again. This time of year, the fountains are drained and quiet. But look at the dwarf Miscantus (Miscanthus sinensis ‘Yaku Jima’) – a exuberant winter stand-in for the fountains.
Holiday Specials
Here's to you. A Merry Christmas!
Now that so many of us carry our smart-phone cameras with us everywhere, we all take more pictures of more things. While som4 visitors to the botanical garden may come away with more pictures, some of the plants and flowers they leave behind don’t fare as well. To get a close-up of some attention-grabbing bloom often means trampling over ground covers or small ferns that aren’t very photogenic. In the Linnaen glasshouse where the Camellia japonicas are just starting to bloom, I noticed that foot paths were beginning to form from the walkway to the prettiest camellias to far away to photograph. Signs urging visitors to “Please stay on the walks’ don’t seem to dissuade some camera carrying souvenir seekers.
A nursery man planted a witchhazel seed 20 years ago. He grew the seeding on and when it finally flowered, he realized he had something unique – a Vernalis hybrid that had good fall color, that reliably shed some of its leaves before flowering, and that had rich lavender-colored fragrant flowers. Tim Brotzman of Brotzman’s Nursery near Ashtabula, Ohio is the nursery man who introduced Hamamelis x 'Amethyst' to the trade. I noticed this morning that an 'Amethyst' is now in witch hazel collection here at this botanical garden. This shrub I saw is all the more unusual because it’s in full bloom (although more copper than lavender) a month before expected – a nice holiday treat. See it in bloom behind the daylily garden near the East garden wall.
Any time of year, this Castor Aralia tree (Kalopanax septemlobus) at the entrance to the Japanese Garden has something exotic to offer. Now that all of the dense foliage is gone, the tree reveals a trunk that’s lined with studs each topped with a single thorn. In spring the tree puts on large finger-like leaves that look a bit like the leaves of a castor bean plant. In summer the tree throws out shoots topped with flower umbels a foot across that look like of shooting stars. In the fall the leaves turn yellow and the umbels dry but hang on tightly through early winter.
The Aralia tree is related to the native thorn-covered devil’s walking stick, but it’s an import from East Asia. Various parts of the tree are used in traditional Asian medicine to treat rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, and liver diseases.
Empty halves of the seed pods left by the summer-blooming trumpet honeysuckle
All is Well: Indoors and Out
When I last saw the poinsettias in the greenhouse, their bracts had just a hint of color. I wondered whether they would be ready for the opening of the big holiday flower and train show just a couple of weeks away. I asked the grower if he was worried. He assured me that the critical times for this year's crop had past. The bracts would be in full color when the show opened, he said. He was right.
Hardy germaniums are true to their name. No flowers of course, but their leaves are untouched by freezing nights and shorter days. This time of year the plants in the Ottoman Garden (Geranium sanguineum ‘Album’) are even putting on a holiday display with their contrasting red and green leaves.
Columnar trees that stay green are standouts in the winter. Leafless trees with branches that go off in all directions are easy to ignore in the winter unless they have eye-catching barks. But upright columns of green stop the eye, demanding attention be paid. My favorite winter columnar is this Flushing Yew (Taxus x media ‘Flushing’). It’s growing in a plot near the old ginkgo tree near the Climatron. It’s a skinny yew with very dark green, almost black, needles. ‘Flushing’ is the skinny jeans of the yews – slim and trunk-hugging from top to bottom. The yew is described as a ‘pencil yew’ that will top out at 8 – 10 feet and stay just 3 feet wide at the most. For a bit of “Who knew that?” information, Louis the Plant Geek says about yews: “Yews can live for many generations. It's not possible to count growth rings accurately because the centers of old trunks tend to rot out even while the trees themselves continue to carry on century after century” and as such yews are the perfect trees to plant to “create a bond between the present and the unknowable distant future.” Louis suggests that ‘Flushing’ Yews, so predictable in their height and spread, could be used to create living sculptures that “could remain living centuries beyond any memory of you or your descendants.”
An odd thing about the deadneddle (Lamium) – one specie is considered a weed and another is sold in nurseries as an attractive decorative ground cover. Lamium purpereum, the purple deadneedle, is the target of herbicides. Another specie, Lamium maculatum or spotted deadneedle is a desirable darling as a ground cover. Both are called “winter annuals” because they germinate in the fall, develop as plants in the winter, then flower and set seeds as winter ebbs. This patch of Lamium maculatum called ‘Pink Chablis’ is thriving just outside the Kemper Center for Home Gardening. When in bloom its pink flowers will rise on stems above the low-lying silver and green foliage marked with faint pink slashes around the leaf veins.
Volunteers at the botanical garden have again turned the gourds grown in the Garden into ornaments that decorate the holiday tree in the Kemper Center for Home Gardening. The theme this year is children’s stories and nursery rhymes. Here’s a gourd transformed into the Cheshire Cat with a hot pink feather boa tail draped over its head (a la Disney).
Deep inside the Japanese Garden is a collection of Pussy Willow trees. All are filled with tightly closed buds. A few though at the tips of their branches have a pussy willow or two that refuse to wait for spring. Hardy or foolhardy? It’s too soon to know since winter doesn’t even arrive for a couple of weeks.
Inside the Linnean greenhouse an unremarkable pink double camellia named 'Egao Corkscrew' has started to bloom. It’s blooming on a very young shrub that has years to grow before reaching its mature height of 6 – 8 feet. More than the flower itself, the word corkscrew in the flower’s name caught my attention. As the shrub grows the slender branches and stems are supposed to curl and twist back on themselves giving the plant a contorted appearance. Even though this shrub is quite young, some trunk twisting has already started.
Spring Preview
Snowdrops in November? I’ve seen clumps of them blooming every year about this time in the Bird Garden. But until I read The Plant Lover’s Guide to Snowdrops I thought snowdrops that bloomed in November were just normal snowdrops behaving abnormally. Now I know better. I think this one is an unusual snowdrop that normally blooms late in the fall – the Galathus reginae-olgae. I can’t be certain that these snowdrops are Queen Olgas because they’re not identified, but they look very much like the pictures of Olga posted in the web. Reginae-olgae was first noticed in the 1870’s growing high in the mountains near Sparti, Greece. It was found by a Greek botanist who named it after Queen Olga of Greece. Once attention had been paid, the autumn snowdrops also were found in Albania and on the island of Corfu. The bulbs are not easy to come by. None of my bulb catalogs list it. There must be a good story here: How does an unusual, hard to find, and hard to grow snowdrop from Greece end up flowering on a November morning in a botanical garden in the Midwest.
Temperatures in the teens were just too much for this red hot poker 'Rockette Yellow' that I saw last week. Its head is browned and bowed, but the flowers are still holding on.
Here’s what left of the water hyacinths (Eichhornia crassipes) that were growing on the pond in the Chinese Garden. The cold has turned the once green nest of balloon-like forms at the base of the plant to brown. With all of the leaves gone, all that’s left is this tight cluster of swollen stems that look as though they’re dunking for some under water treat.
Water hyacinths are grown as ornamental annuals in this botanical garden. Further south where they don’t have tough winters to contend with, they can become pests. Because water hyacinths double every twenty days, they quickly form a thick mat over the surface of water.
That mat reduces the light that gets though to the life below. The plants also slough-off material that decays and saps oxygen needed by fish. Also when they start to take over larger lakes and rivers, boats have a tough time getting through their tangle of leaves. The best example of water hyacinths wildly out of control is on Lake Victoria in Africa. There the plant is expanding at the rate of 6000 tons a day. Google pictures shows the story of what they can do.
Early plant collectors who wanted to bring their discoveries home usually failed. Live plants didn’t travel well – long sea journeys, salt spray, days in dark holds, and hit-and-miss care took their toll. Less than one percent of plants made it back alive. As a part of the Garden’s Holiday Show, there’s a display outlining why survival odds changed from 1% to over 90%.
A British doctor and botanist named Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward changed the odds with a discovery he made in the 1830’s. He says his discovery was made by accident. Dr. Ward wanted to see a Sphinx moth emerge from its chrysalis so he put the chrysalis in moist leaf mold and then sealed it in a glass jar. The moth never emerged, but a seedling fern did. Ward moved the jar to a north window and kept the lid on it for four years. The fern thrived sending out three or four new fronds a year. From this beginning, Ward reasoned that if he built a tight wooden case, filled it plants set in moist loam and covered it with a tight fitting glass top glazed into place, he would be able to transport live plants over long distances. The technique worked. Live English plants were successfully sent to Australia in glazed boxes and live Australian ones successfully returned. These Wardian Cases as they came to be called suddenly made moving live plant possible and profitable.
The Wardian Case is the ancestor of terrariums like the one displayed in the show. But Ward thought his cases could have another important use. He felt that if the poor people in London would build and fill a case with plants and then spend time watching them grow, they would improve and strengthen their character. “The highest and best feelings of our nature is excited by the contemplation of the works of God,” he wrote.
If you go the see the holiday lights at the botanical garden’s Garden Glow, take a look at how floodlights are being used to highlight trees and architectural features. When I walked the Glow last night, I was particularly taken by the lighting and shadows cast by this statue called Fountain Angel that was originally commissioned as an entrance piece for the 1904 Saint Louis World’s Fair.
This morning I took a closer look at the lighting used. It all comes from 7 lights arranged in a small fixture. Motif, the company that makes the fixture, says that the individual lights are only 3 watts apiece. Each fixture has a remote control that allows the bulbs to scroll though the color wheel until just right one is found.
The Garden Lights Up On Opening Night
600,000 lights this year
First sight: The entrance to the Glow
Walkway to the dome
A look inside the dome
The tunnel of lights
Carolers in the Garden
A forest of lights
A sweetgum in lights
Light show on the Garden axis
Columns of light on the old greenhouse
And so it ends . . .
Nights in the 20s have ended the lives of the plants that were still managing to hang on. The leaves on the flowers and shrubs that were struck down during the week are still green and holding on. Leaf drop and browning are just ahead though.
This morning there was ice on the reflecting ponds. At this time of year, ice is a still a novelty, not a nuisance. Dressed in my black quilted coat with my hood up, I leaned over the pond to get a closer look. Here’s my crystallized self-portrait.
This flower is remarkable simply because it’s still alive. It’s a Red Hot Poker or Torch Lily called ‘Rockette Yellow.’ It’s blooming on an 18” stock and that’s poking though foliage that looks like a thick clump of grass. It along with several other nearby clumps that didn’t fare so well this morning have been blooming vigorously since September. The Gardener’s Encyclopedia Flora says that most of the Red Hot Pokers (Knipofia) are South African natives. There they flower from late autumn to spring. In a zone or two south of here they do that too. Here, Flora says “none will tolerate repeated heavy frosts.” So for this last ‘Rockette Yellow,’ the end is near – snow this afternoon and another night of subfreezing temperatures ahead.
The outdoor holiday light show opens this weekend. Much is in place, but much needs to be readied.
At 8:30 on a Saturday morning workers are here already putting up a display in was a tropical lily pond until a few months ago. Brushed metal trees are up and glow globes are being eased into position and wired for lighting.
Inside too the gift shop is preparing for the show too. Gloves with LED lights sown into the fingertips are here. So too are pillars of wax Luminaria candles that have a battery-operated flame so akin to fire that I was fooled when I saw them for the first time. Of more use that either glow gloves or faux candles are these pocket tissues. They’re destined to become best-sellers for visitors who come inside after a long walk on a cold night.
They look like 6-foor long necklaces – these bead-like clusters hanging from the end branches of some of the Dawn Redwood trees (Metasequoia glyptostroboides). The clusters are easy to spot because they’re hanging on the outer branches of the trees that get the most sunlight. I learned that each of the beads is a developing male cone. The cones began to form in early September and will release their pollen in February. Nearby on the same tree, the waiting females are hanging by themselves elsewhere on the same tree. I’ve haven’t seen the developing female cones yet. They’re harder to spot because they’re green colored and they hang by themselves rather than in gangs like the males. Finding them should be easier when all of the needles finally drop.
A Time of Reruns and Coming Attractions
The freezing temperatures of the last couple weeks have ended the lives of some, but not all the plants of summer. I looked at a patch of orange nasturtiums near the row of Bald Cypruses. Some were in full bloom. Nearby others were wilted and browning with leaves curled by frost.
With shorter days and colder nights, only the hardiest plants survive. They’re easy to spot now because so little of summer is left. What the cold hasn’t taken, the keepers of the garden have. They’ve uprooted most of the summer plants and hauled them away to make way for spring bulbs and for the pansies that will add some winter color to the display beds.
If you want to remember the better days it’s better not to even look at most of the hostas. There is one though that’s at its peak – the Hosta ‘Tardiflora.’ “Floriferous” is the right adjective for them. Their purple scapes are brimming with trumpet-shaped lavender flowers and tight clusters of stamens jutting out from between their petals. The keepers of the gardens have used the Tardifloras as a border plant so they’re easy to spot from the main walkway.
Every fall has its share of oddities – plants that bloom when they shouldn’t. This year the prize goes to the Umbrella Plant or Indian Rhubarb (Darmera peltata) that’s in full flower along the walkway in English Woodland Garden. It’s supposed to bloom in the spring on a naked stock ahead of putting out any leaves. I haven’t been able to find anyone who’s ever seen an umbrella plant that flowers in the fall, so get over to the woodland garden and grab the bragging rights.
Reblooming irises – not unusual as much as startlingly out-of-sync – are still blooming and attracting a lot of attention. In the fall it’s not uncommon to see a few tentative flowers on spring bloomers like crabapples, azaleas, and quince. But there’s nothing tentative about these reblooming irises. Their stocks are sturdy and tall. The number of buds rival the spring bloomers, and the flowers are full-sized. Oddly enough, while every fall year there are always some irises that rebloom, I’ve never seen the same ones bloom every fall. Here are two of this year’s most spectacular late blooming tall bearded irises: ‘Queen Dorothy’ (left) and ‘Double Shot’ (right). See them both before a hard freeze takes them out.
Preparations continue for the late November openings of the outdoor light display called Garden Glow and the indoor train/flower display called Gardenland Express. Outdoors the advertising flyer promises “over 600,000 stunning lights” and “pathways transformed into sensory light tunnels providing an explosion of visual magic.” Already a tall sweet gum has been strung with lights and the Plexiglas panels of Garden’s geodesic dome tropical greenhouse have been outlined in green.
This week a couple of larger pieces of the display have been moved in. These snowball trees have been installed at the entrance to the show and this suggestive, but unknown object is waiting to be installed somewhere.
Outdoors we can watch as the show gets put into place. But as for what’s inside we usually have to wait until we walk into the display hall on opening night to see anything. This morning though we got a sneak peak of the indoor holiday show by taking a behind the scenes tour. The tour was led by the nursery supervisor who’s responsible for ordering, scheduling, and growing the 5,000 plants that will be used in the show. The tour started in the display hall. Nine trains will be running, we were told. All are remotely controlled and monitored by a station master who can view and fix most technical problems from home. When a train falls off the tracks, though there’s always a staffer on site to put it a right.
This year the theme of the show will be the Victorian times of Garden Founder Henry Shaw. On display will be some Victorian furniture that Shaw could have used and some made-to-order small-scale replicas of the buildings Shaw had built. All of the replicas have been built by hand expressly for this show. Shows are planned two years in advance to allow for such attention to detail.
After seeing the display hall, we went into the greenhouses where the plants for the show are being grown. We saw long movable benches filled with begonia, chrysanthemums, cyclamen, kalanchoe, impatiens, ornamental peppers, hibiscus, coleus, and of course, poinsettias. One entire greenhouse is filled with them. The show will rely primarily on red, white, pink, and maroon poinsettias developed by the Paul Ecke Ranch in California. The varieties chosen all have dark green leaves set off by the large deeply colored bracts that spread out horizontally from the plants to give them a full, almost bouquet-like look. In keeping with the Victorian theme of this year’s show, no orange poinsettias will be used in the display.
Some bits and pieces I learned from the nursery supervisor who led the tour:
- Controlling the number of hours of darkness is critical for getting poinsettias to color. In September, no lights were permitted anywhere near the greenhouse where the plants are growing. Night workers anywhere in the greenhouse complex had to use flashlights to get around.
- Tiny insect feeding wasps are used in the greenhouses to control pests. The wasps eat 95% of the insects that could do the plants harm. The wasps always leave 5% of the insects to breed so that they can feed on the next generation of bugs. Just before the show, the remaining 5% are killed with a systemic insecticide so that the plants will be pest free when they are moved into the display hall.
- If the growing tip of a poinsettia is not pinched, the plant will grow long and tall with a single stem – “a straight up.” Poinsettias are pinched to make them grow side branches and they are sometimes doused with a growth regulator to stop them from getting too tall and gangly.
- More plants are grown than are needed for the show to allow for damage. Every year children and photographers accidentally fall into plant displays while trying to get a better view or a more unusual angle.
- The best way to kill a poinsettia is to let it stand in water. If the plant is wrapped in foil when bought, poke holes in the bottom of the foil to let out the water.
I asked the poinsettia grower who cared for these plants since July whether he thought anything could go wrong at this point. He said he wasn’t worried. Everything was right on schedule. The plants will be in full color for the opening of the holiday show the week before Thanksgiving.