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“night edges in on us from both directions
as this corner of the earth turns its face from the sun. yes, the same old things go on, but they begin and end in the dark.”  -- From 'wintering over at the end of the century' by Alvin Greenberg |
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 clear: calm: 16ºWe were alone in this 79-acre Garden this morning. We neither met nor saw anyone along the paths. Even the "regulars" must have been worn down by the persistent cold and the cover of snow that blocks all hopes of spring.  One catbird has somehow gotten trapped inside the Linnean glass house. I spotted it last week feeding on the red berries of an asparagus fern. Aside from those few berries, there is not much else to interest a catbird in this house of prize camellias. I wondered if the bird could survive until the days when the windows and doors again would be opened. The keepers of the house must have wondered too because we saw a generous spread of cracked corn mixed with crabapples on the ledge of a high window. Alongside the loose feed, there were some branches of beautyberry still filled with purple berries for the bird to pluck. This catbird will live to see the windows open again.The lake in the Japanese Garden is frozen and snow-covered except for a few spots where water bubbles up from the circulating pumps below. In those places the diminished lake looks like a basin fountain filled with water that silently and slowly falls from its brim. Long before the flowering quinces are ready to put their pink or red flowers out for admiration, I noticed that they usually rehearse by showing a few flowers deep inside their tangle of prickly stems. The road show usually begins this time of year. I looked for them this morning, but the month of cold seems to have delayed the show.  Prunus mume: a Japanese flowering apricot is about to bloom. Within the week as the weather warms, the twenty-foot tree planted within two feet of a brick wall that faces South will be the darling of the Garden. The tree will glow with delicate pink blossoms that will send their sweet, spicy fragrance to lure walkers in for a closer look. I thought that the Garden keepers made this midwinter magic happen by taking advantage of the tree as they created a microclimate of shelter coupled with the slow release of nightime heat from the bricks. It turns out that protection and warmth only help the flowering apricot to do what it wants to anyway: bloom in the middle of winter. From the Brooklyn Botanical Garden I learned that the flower buds have a "staggered dormancy." As the inevitable freezes of winter pick off the first crop of flowers or buds, another crop begins to break dormancy; then another. Like ranks of Redcoats in the Revolutionary War, new crops of buds and flowers just keep appearing until the weather no longer kills. snow shower: calm: 13ºThe snow started just as we left the Linnean glass house where the camellias have started to get serious about blooming. The snow was falling in chips rather than flakes. It was dry, airy, and quiet sticking easily to the paths and lawns. There were no walkers ahead of us so we had the privilege of being the first to mark the fresh snow. We paused often to look back. Ours were the only footprints that disturbed the white this morning.  The Garden is filled with benches. In greener times, they blend inconspicuously into their surroundings. Now though, they cannot hide. I was especially interested in benches today because a catalog I ordered from a designer of garden furniture called Country Casual arrived yesterday. Some of the benches they are selling I felt sure I saw in the Garden. I took pictures of some benches in the Garden and then compared them with those in their catalog. A match. The Garden benches are in a style Country Casual grandly calls "Monarch." They are made of solid teak, a favorite in English Gardens. The catalog says that because teak is so waterproof, it was the wood of choice for English sailing ships. When wooden sailing ships gave way to steel vessels, some of the timber from the tall sailing ships was recycled into garden benches. Since teak is a tropical hardwood native to South Asia, Country Casual takes pains to let buyers know that the benches they sell are made from "ecologically harvested timber from countries with an official commitment to sustainable management of their natural timber resources. For every tree felled, more than one is planted to replace it." Gratifying, but not surprising since the Garden takes tropical conservation very seriously. Finally, the weather has been cold enough, long enough for ice formations to form on the falls in the Japanese Garden. The soft curves of ice meeting flowing water have formed a second solid falls to complement the flowing one. Can banana trees overwinter in Zone 6? The Garden keepers think so. The tall banana trees in the Chinese Garden that had a stock of still tiny green bananas when the first frost hit were cut to the ground and mulched with coarse wood chips. The mound of chips covering the stocks and roots is at least a foot and a half high. I'm anxious to see when the mulch will come off and whether there will be banana trees this year. Put it in the strange but true category: I overheard part of a conversation between two workers at the ticket counter. One remarked that it surprised her how many people came into the lobby, used the restrooms, and then left without buying a ticket to come inside. Another replied that she wasn't surprised at all because the restrooms in the Garden are among the cleanest and neatest in the area. "Yes but," the first went on, "A person would really have to be a restroom connoisseur to want to first find a parking place and then walk all the way from the lot to get inside." Finally: "Well, let me tell you, we're flush with connoisseurs here." We saw a hawk today, the first ever in the Garden. It was close, but it just stayed long enough to swivel its head before moving on.  clear: chilling breeze: 12ºI knew it before we left  for the Garden this morning. The frost ferns would be blooming this morning. With temperatures in the low teens and the wind chill somewhat less than zero, ice etchings would form on the windows of the Linnean glass house. I was right. They were there. Tracings like the plumes of feathers on a Victorian hat had formed on most of the windows. Because the etchings only form when temperatures much below freezing blanket the single panes of glass that separate the warmth and humidity inside the house from the cold outside, the plumage is rare. It is also short-lived. As the sun begins to heat the South facing walls, the tracings disappear. By nine o'clock they were gone. Other tracings are more lasting. The climbing hydrangea (Hydrangea petiolaris) on the Garden walls has completely exposed its branching. From a single hefty stock, the branches sprawl into ever-smaller tributaries forming a network that looks like a physical map of a river system. The sign that names the vine calls it "Sevenbark." A curious name. Nothing that I could find on the web says anything about what the common names might mean. A plant called "Ninebark" gets a lot more attention though. Depending on where I looked, the name referred to the number of medicinal uses the bark has; the number of layers of bark that could be peeled from the stems; or the number of distinct shades of brown within the bark. I'll give "Sevenbark" a closer look, but not this morning. My hands are not leaving my gloves.The combination of lush color coupled with elegant design is hard to find in winter. Trees and shrubs are mostly the shades of gray, brown, and black favored by designers who decorate those fashionable apartments that appear in Metropolitan Home magazine. Imagine glossy deep green leaves in elegant groups of three, pendants of red berries, and creamy spear-shaped leaves marked with striations of green. That's the combination growing along the wall at the entrance to the Chinese garden. The green and red belong to a bushy three-foot shrub called Heavenly Bamboo (Nandina domestica). At its feet is the creamy white ground cover called Dwarf Whitestripe Bamboo (Pleioblastus variegatus). This combination has got to be Holy Grail of container gardeners: elegant, colorful, disciplined, evergreen, hardy, with just a hint of red to banish stodginess.  It can't be. My fingers tingle inside my gloves inside my overstuffed coat. The zoom lens on my camera refuses to retract. Yet here it is: a yellow flower blooming on a bare willowy green stem here in the Chinese Garden. The plant has the incongruous name Winter Jasmine (Jasminum nudiflorum). Jasmine: lush, sultry, heavy scent; a slow fan in a smoky room; a brow being wiped with a crisp white handkerchief. Winter: none of the above. An odd combination for an odd but appreciated flowering on a colder that usual January morning. A line from English nature writer Richard Jefferies seems to fit: "Perhaps if the country be taken at large there is never a time when there is not a flower of kind some out . . . The sun never sets, nor do the flowers ever die." clouds: breeze with the South: 28ºThis morning we remembered a visit to the Garden on a New Years Day three years ago. It had snowed in the pre-dawn hours. We arrived just as the Garden was opening. Ours were the first footprints in the new snow of the new year. Human prints that is. When we got to the plank bridge in the Japanese Garden, we found the distinctive hand-like prints of a raccoon who had crossed into the new year long before we arrived.  By next week the last traces of Christmas will be gone. The display of designer wreaths in Monsanto Hall is gone. The holiday show has closed. The remnants of the half-off tree ornaments for sale in the shop are nearly gone. Outside, a live tree on the patio of the Spink Center still sports its decorations of baby-blue bows and oversized cardinal-red balls. But by next week it too will be gone. Left though will be the conifers in the Japanese Garden decorated with icicles formed by warmer days followed by colder nights. Ice needles sparkle as they dangle, artfully hung, from the tips of pine boughs.Winter favors sight over smell. Smells do remain, but they need to be coaxed out this time of year. This morning I used my thumb and forefinger to release the scents from papery hops and the frozen leaves of sage, rosemary, and thyme. The oils were not as strong as they were once and will be again, but they were there, as if denying winter. Leaves in the water usually form kaleidoscopic patterns as wind currents constantly reshape their coming together and drifting apart. Below the plank bridge in the Japanese Garden a mingling of oak leaves and sloughed off pine needles has been hardened by ice into a rigid pattern that will last the day.  Pots and pots of tazetta narcissus were in bloom in the Temperate House adding their musky fragrance to the mix of wintertime smells under the glass. A line of pots set in front of a column of Italian Cyprus trees reminded me of the description of tazetta that D. H. Lawrence wrote about in his travels through Tuscany: "Spring begins with the first narcissus, rather cold and shy and wintry. They are the little bunchy, creamy narcissus with the yellow cup like the yolk of a flower. The natives call these flowers tazzette, little cups. They grow on the grassy banks rather sparse, or push up among thorns. To me they are winter flowers and their scent is winter." To me, with snow covering the ground just a few feet away, they are spring.I looked up at the slanted panes of glass that cover the Temperate House. The chunks of snow that had slipped to the bottoms of the panes formed shapes waiting to the named by anyone looking up. Here is a picture of the snow on the windows; but then, here is what I saw:   |