Snow covers the browns of the Garden ground giving prominence to anything taller than three inches. It's a perfect day for taking pictures, but with a sub-zero wind chill I can understand why folks with barrel lenses prefer to stay indoors. The annual orchid show that opened today seems more exotic, lively, and colorful than the shadow of a cinnamon fern on the snow.

The snow cover is underpinned with a layer of ice. Yesterday the sun began to melt the combo, but then the temperature dropped again. The temperature drop must have been faster than I thought. The freeze caught a slab of ice-covered snow on a tombstone marker before it could slide to the ground. This morning the rectangular slab stays suspended unnaturally on the marker like one of those balanced rocks in a national park.

The 4-1/2 acre lake in the Japanese Garden is frozen deep and hard. Either most visitors never get to these far reaches of the 79-acre Garden or they heed the signs that threaten prosecution for those who don't "Stay Off The Ice" because with one exception, the snow on the lake is unmarred, unmarked. At the far end of the Lake though there are tracks where a lone rabbit hopped from the shore to an island rightly named for the hare's unlikely journey: Tortoise Island.

I read this in a Wednesday newspaper. Columnist Christopher Andreae wrote, "There is a tree - one that never attains much height or girth but seems happy to enjoy existence in shady undergrowth. . . . On leafless dark wood it sports small spidery flowers composed of raggedy petals like tiny unkempt ribbons. These flowers seem more like insects . . . But they are unmistakable, and they are yellow. In the deadness of a hard winter, they are a sheer and tingling delight." This morning I saw this witch hazel tree in bloom.

A specialized garden that appeals just to kids is the latest feature to be added to botanical gardens. The Norfolk Botanical Garden has plans for a three-acre "Children's Adventure Garden." The $6 million dollar garden will take children on a plant safari where they can climb a hill, crawl though a tunnel, roll down a slide, and explore habitats from around the world. Botanical Gardens in Atlanta, Cleveland, and Salt Lake City have already added children's gardens and the botanical garden where I walk (The Missouri Botanical Garden) has just cut an old stand of oaks to make room for one. According to EDAW Inc., an architectural firm that specializes in the design of children's gardens, there are about six significant children's gardens in the United States and about twenty more are in the planning stages.

The botanical garden where I walk already has a children's garden. But, it is small. It is a long walk from the entrance, and it is a look-but-do-not-touch garden. The planned garden will be very different. It will be adjacent to the most visited close-in attractions in the Garden and it will be designed to entertain and engage kids. Children will be able to climb things, ride on a raft, wander along hidden pathways, explore a cavern, and search for extinct plants.

Why the sudden upsurge in interest in gardens for children? The director of the garden where I walk says such gardens are meant to "provide a stimulating environment for the early experience of childhood wonder at the natural world." But, aside from such lofty goals, children's gardens bring in additional revenue by attracting more people to botanical gardens - especially families with young kids. Attendance increased up to 150% when botanical gardens in Atlanta, Cleveland and Salt Lake City added children's gardens. The Norfolk Botanical Garden expects attendance increases of 60% in the first year after the garden opens. Botanical gardens already do well in attracting people who look, pause, marvel, ponder and offer opinion or explanation. But, except for festivals and special events, they seem to have less appeal for people who expect the gardens to amuse and involve them.

A couple of winters ago I read an article in the Atlantic Monthly titled "Plant Zoos: What exactly is a botanical garden for?" It was written by a New Englander who visited the new National Botanic Garden of Wales. She writes that the NBGW "appears more consumed by its visitor tally that by a love of plants." She quotes the Garden's director of horticulture as saying that the garden must realize that apart from whatever it does, it has to understand that "People want a nice day out."

When the children's garden appears in the garden where I walk, attendance and revenue will likely increase. People who never would have considered paying money to see a flower bloom will come to the Garden. I hope they will leave with more than "a nice day out" and that the exchange of a groove of old oaks for a new children's attraction will be justified.

The vine called Dutchman's Pipe (Aristolochia californica) in the temperate glasshouse has started to bloom. The tangled vine is native to warmer places so it needs shelter to survive. The vine sets flowers before it sets leaves so its pocket flowers dangle at regular intervals on bare gray vines. The plant got its stolid common name "Dutchman's Pipe" because to someone the curled necks and flared bowls of the flowers called to mind the many 17th Century paintings that portray Dutchmen drawing on their pipes.

I see things differently. There is nothing serious or contemplative about these flowers. They are just funny. They cause people to point and laugh and take pictures. They seem cuddly. They are absurd. They make us want to take a few home with us and hang them from the blades of our ceiling fans. I give them a new common name "Rubber Duckies."

rain and fog: calm: 41º

I must be among the few who hasn't read the Lord of the Rings trilogy. When I tell friends that I've started reading the books, they usually counter by letting me know that they read them "years ago." I thought of a passage in The Two Towers as I passed the great American Beech (Fagus grandifolia) tree at the entrance to the English Woodland Garden: "…they made their camp under a spreading tree…it bore many broad brown leaves of a former year, like dry hands with long splayed fingers; they rattled mournfully in the night breeze." The beech tree in the Garden spreads. Its papery leaves of seasons past amplify the winter wind. And this morning the dry leaves vibrate as they break the fall of raindrops. Even though I will never see that American Beech at night, I can image wizards and hobbits moving in after dark.

Rainy winter days give me another reason to like Japanese maple trees. Rainwater clings to each of their thin horizontal branches. It collects close to where it falls until a drop is formed. Strings of drops then line each branch like carefully spaced garden seeds. The movement of drops along each branch and tangle of drop-laden branches that I see as I look into the trees is like a junction of interstates at morning rush.

I've always felt that camellias were formal flowers. I can image a single pink bloom at the center of a corsage surrounded by a splay of glossy green camellia leaves. Maybe it has to do with rarity. Unlike places further South where camellias are everyday backyard shrubs, here they are given tender treatment in a greenhouse set aside almost exclusively for their use. In that greenhouse dozens of varieties of camellias are blooming now. Whatever their color or petal arrangement, they all have short woody stems that make them seem to nestle on beds of green leaves. This morning we spotted a camellia in full-bloom that was nowhere near a leaf of any kind. The puffy pink and white bloom was held in place by a stem that jutted out from midway up the trunk of the tree. This kind of willy-nilly bloom wherever you will behavior is acceptable for red-bud flowers, but I would have expected a bit more decorum from a camellia. As my wife is fond of saying, "Whatever the rule, there is always 10% who don't get the word."

When Scottish plant hunter Robert Fortune set out to bring back plants from China for English Victorian gardens, he was warned, "The value of plants diminishes as the heat required to cultivate them increases." With that admonition in mind, Fortune brought back several shrubs from northern China that bloom in late winter. I have been watching two of plants introduced by Fortune: the Winter Honeysuckle (Lonicera fragrantissima) and Winter Jasmine (Jasminum nudiflora). Neither have blossoms that stun, but both offer flowers with heady scents that smack of summer. I know of three places in the Garden where the Winter Honeysuckle grows. Winter Jasmine grows in two: outside in the Chinese Garden and inside under glass in the Temperate House. Two weeks ago the cream-colored Winter Honeysuckles had just started to flower. Then a week of temperatures near zero made them wait. The Winter Jasmine in the Chinese Garden has just begun to set buds, but bright yellow flowers already have begun to open on the shrub inside.






clear: calm: 21º

My reference materials on plants ratcheted up over the holidays. For years I used the Sunset National Garden Book as the source I turned to for information about the shrubs and flowers I saw on my walks. Then I saw a display in the Garden gift shop of a new two-volume set called Flora: A Gardener's Encyclopedia and companion CD. "A wealth of up-to-date information on over 20,000 plants" the introduction claimed. I tried out the CD. It identified the sun-spotted Farfugium I had puzzled over as Farfugium japonica 'Aureomaculatum.' After that, Flora went straight to the top of my gift list. Last week, my set arrived.

Flora says that 'PJM' and 'Nova Zembla' are among the hardiest of rhododendrons. I planted five 'PJM's' last August. Now I have an urge to get a couple more rhododendrons when spring comes, so I decided to see if I could find a 'Nova Zembla' shrub among the Garden's collection. I spotted one easily. It's a large shrub - about 5 feet tall and just as wide. The limbs open away from the center of the plant giving the shrub an airy open look. The tapered glossy leaves are deep green, but today the cold caused them to curl inward to protect themselves. Flower buds jut from the ends of the branches like candles on a Victorian Christmas tree. My new book shows that the flower balls that will emerge from the buds in late spring will be red with a suggestion of blue. I wonder how many other people use the botanical garden as place to preview plants before making a commitment to them?

The garden keepers usually leave dried flowers on shrubs until late winter. The buff browns of hydrangea globes are so bountiful that individual balls never standout. It's just the opposite with the panicles of the Oakleaf Hydrangeas (Hydrangea quercifolia). Each of the elongated flowering stems has a shape, texture, and arrangement of blooms that makes it different from others on the same shrub. Shadows and contrast also come into play with small, dark, densely packed male flowers providing background for the stage-front females. Oakleaf Hydrangea flower heads are my choice for winter's most photogenic plant.

Squirrels are unusually active this morning. I hear them squealing. I see bands of them chasing around in the trees and on the ground. The explanation has to be either food or sex. Once back home I checked the internet. Sex, it is. Gray squirrels like those in the Garden are in the middle of the first of two of their breeding seasons. The activity I saw this morning was the mating chase of the squirrels: "Five - ten males begin to follow females up to 5 days before estrus, although as many as 34 males have been documented to follow a single female. A dominance hierarchy is formed among the males, and on the day of estrus females will mate first with the dominant male. However, she will also mate with several other males throughout the day." Gestation is about 40 days, so new babies ought to begin arriving just after Valentine's Day. Sources say a winter litter is usually about two or three squirrels.

The waterfall on the west side of the Japanese Garden has been turned off for many weeks. Mussels that lived in the still water below the falls are dead but still give off rank smells on warmer days. So that workers can do what needs doing to repair the waterworks during cold weather, a sheet of heavy plastic larger that I thought possible has been draped over the top of the falls and down the sheer cascade. Whether intended or not, the effect is like a Christo wrapping. The breeze blows the plastic from side to side and up and down. Air from the bottom billows the material to form a sail that bubbles away from the rock face. The "work" is like a miniature version of the fabric-wrapped cliff on the Australian coast that Christo and Jeanne-Claude did in the 60's. As I looked at the wrapped falls in the Garden from different perspectives and at varying distances, I can understand the words that Christo and Jean-Claude use to describe their work: "You see things you have never seen before. You also get to see the fabric manifest things that cannot usually be seen, like the wind blowing, or the sun reflecting in ways it had not before. The effect lasts longer than the actual work of art. Years after every physical trace has been removed and the materials recycled, original visitors can still see and feel them in their minds when they return to the sites of the artworks."