snow and fog: calm: 31ºF

The snow that fell overnight is still on the Garden walkways. It's heavy and packs tightly underfoot leaving a clear imprint of the pattern and logo of the treads of my shoes. We can hear the repetitive sound of shovels scrapping the walks in another part of the Garden, and we saw a Bobcat with a wide rotating brush attached to its front sweeping the plaza at the entrance to the Garden. It won't be long until all the walks are clear. For now though, every visitor leaves behind a visible trail.

We climbed to the top of the observatory to look at the maze. No one had entered it this morning so the pattern of snow on the walks was unbroken. The tops of the hedge of yews that form the corridors of the maze were covered with a couple of inches of snow. The effect was like looking down at pencil drawing of a symbol that had meaning in some culture long gone.

The temperature is steadily rising. On the black hand rails at the top of the observatory the snow is slowly slipping from their tops, then twisting down their sides to end up as trim on the bottom of the rails. We watched as a line of snow curled from the top to the bottom of the rail, twisting like a curving centipede along the length of the rail.

The Garden's annual orchid show opened last night. For the show the Garden keepers brought in over 800 orchids from their permanent collection of some 8,000 plants. I asked one of the orchids experts on hand at the opening to point me to what he thought was the rarest orchid in the show. He said that he thought it was an unnamed Vanda orchid hanging high in a Ficus tree. Last night under subdued lights, the orchid looked like a burgundy five-petalled hellebore. Today in the light of day it looks more like an over-sized blue or purple African violet. My camera records its color as purple, but color-shifts are not unusual with this camera, so next week I'll go back next week and look again. I wish I had thought to ask the orchid expert what made this particular Vanda orchid so rare.

"Don't go out there," one of the morning "regulars" who had just finished walking warned as we were about to begin our walk. The northwest wind was keeping the snow parallel to the ground. Mid-sized bells on the bell-tree sculpture were clanging without anyone's help. Wind rushed through the high branches of the oaks and bald cypresses. It was the kind of morning we waited all season for: cold, blustery, and snowy. We relished getting out. It was as though we would get points or a "I did it on a nasty day" T-shirt from the Garden keepers if we walked this morning. As always though, walking in the Garden is less about the weather and more a matter of just doing what we always do on a Saturday morning.

So far this January, more than six inches of precipitation fell. With that kind of moisture paired with today's high wind, we expected to see some toppled trees. Surprising, there was just one: a mature dogwood tree in the English Garden had fallen onto one of the walkways.

The gray buds on an ornamental peach tree mark the spots where pink blooms will open in a couple of months. The branches moved to the wind, but the settings on my camera weren't fast enough to catch them. The picture I took blurred the peach buds, turning them into pussy willow catkins. There are two stands of real pussy willows at the far side of the Japanese Garden that I'm keeping an eye on, but I'll wait for a better day to check on them.

Hellebores are at their worst just now. They are still green, but look like shopworn items put on clearance. Their leaves are tattered and dull, bent and hugging the ground. I know they will recover as they begin to bloom, but just now they look so disheveled it seems best not to embarrass them by taking their picture. But things are better for hellebores inside the Temperate glasshouse. There a hellebore that would not thrive outdoors is in bloom. The plant, native to the Eastern Mediterranean region, is called Corsican Hellebore (Hellobore argutifolius). Its large, lemon-lime petals are perfect-- not a stamen out-of-place in this climate-controlled place out of the cold and wind.

Sometimes when I see a particular flower, finished growing and in full bloom, I wish I could have seen it when it was seeding or a bulb. Each fall I buy a few amaryllis bulbs to pot indoors. It's partly because I like to see them bloom in January, but mostly it's because I like watching the bulbs, waiting for the pip of a flower stock to appear. Then I get to see the stock grow taller and watch until the sheath protecting the buds opens so that I can count the number of flowers I will get. I thought about watching flowers grow when I looked at a spectacular five-foot tall snapdragon called 'Winter Euro-Yellow' blooming in the Temperate House. As if overnight, here it is, tall enough to meet me bloom-to-nose. I wish I could have watched it all along the way.

Inside the sheltered Linnean greenhouse, the camellias are in full bloom. Half way into the house is a small pool watched over by a statue of a little mermaid. The botanical garden's official guidebook says that the mermaid "brings good luck to those who toss coins into her pool." Maybe so, but at this time of year another tradition has taken hold: visitors decorate the little mermaid with fallen camellia blossoms they find on the garden walk. This morning the little mermaid has a tiara of pink camellias on her head and a couple more in the crook of her arm. Many more blossoms are floating stamen-side-up in the pool like wax decorative candles.

Decking out the mermaid with flowers has been done for many years. This year though I think a new tradition is taking hold. Visitors are collecting spent camellia blooms from the greenhouse and taking them outdoors to decorate a wall fountain in the nearby scented garden. The scallops in the bowl of a wall fountain called Poppies for Polky are dammed with camellia blooms that are now frozen, fragile as blown glass. The plaque beside the fountain says that it was given to the garden as a tribute honoring the long life of a close relative. Perhaps laying camellia blossom on the fountain bowl in winter will be the start of a new tradition of visitors silently remembering someone dear.

Two large ginkgo trees stand at the east end of the reflecting pools that define the Garden's east-west axis. Today the pools are frozen so hard so that when I leaned over to knock on the ice, I heard a thud. Trapped at the bottom of the pools below this block of ice, I could just barely make out the silhouettes of the fallen ginkgo leaves. They are still yellow. For now, fall is preserved below two feet of ice.

I thought they were pigeons or doves when I saw them grouped on an overhanging branch of a Cucumber Magnolia tree. They were robins, though. Reacting to the cold, they had puffed out their feathers, doubling their size.

The Rosemary plants in the herb garden are thriving. That surprises me. These tender plants of mild Mediterranean places ought to be dead by now. English herbalist John Gerard shares my view. In his 1597 book Herball, Gerard wrote "it groweth neither in the fields or gardens of the Eastern cold countries; but is carefully and curiously kept in pots, set into the stoves and cellers, against the injuries of their cold Winters." The variety planted here is called 'Sawyer's Select.' I'll be watching to see if it beats winter.

The ferns in the English Garden have been bent and twisted by the snow. Many of their fronds are frozen in place, perpendicular to the ground. As I look out at a field of them, they call to mind the fins of some prehistoric burrowing creatures as they go in and out of the ground or cruise half-submerged along the surface. Think Dune worms, but with sawtooth fins.

It's always in January that I get an urge to plant a stand of red-twig dogwood. Nothing matches them for color in this season of earth-tones overload. A stand of five or six different varieties of red-twigs has been planted on a rise overlooking the Kemper Gardens. Each year I look at them all. Never have I changed my mind about the one I would choose: It's a coral-colored variety called Bloodtwig Dogwood (Cornus sanguinea 'Winter Beauty'). Against a green background the intense colors of its branching twigs shimmer.

New snow: three inches of it fell yesterday after dark. Without wind to push it around, the snow spread itself evenly on tree limbs and piled itself in neat mounds on shrubs and on last season's flower heads. Such orderly snowfalls are rare. Often they come when temperatures are just below freezing. Then as daytime temperatures rise, the snow-etched landscape disappears.

We got to the Garden a bit after 8:00 a.m.. Nature photographers, sensing that this was a once-in-a-season morning, were already there. I spotted the botanical garden's official photographer setting up his tripod in the middle of the open field in the Knolls. Since he takes all the pictures used in the Garden's annual calendar, I think there's a good chance that this snowfall might show up as the January picture in the botanical garden's calendar for 2006.

A snow cover makes the commonplace things new. Today, the sundial mounted on a pedestal outside the west door to the Linnean greenhouse has been changed into a model for an orbiting space station like the one Stanley Kubrick used in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The lacecaps of last summers 'Blue Wave' hydrangeas have collected mounds of snow turning them into a field of winter peonies.




A few years ago, the keepers of the Garden scattered tastefully designed vending machines throughout the Garden so that visitors could get water or a soft drink to sip on while they walked. Bottled drinks meant empty containers to dispose of. Most visitors used trash barrels for their empties. But the trash barrels looked tacky and they made refuse of cans and bottles that could be recycled. So a month ago the keepers of the Garden put out elegantly designed containers that labeled "recycling cans." The cylindrically shaped receptacles have three slots on top: two small, round ones to deposit cans and bottles and a larger curved one for trash. This morning, as if approving of the Garden's effort to recycle, all of the bins are smiling.

Colors stand out against this covering of white making male cardinals are easy to spot. My eyes are immediately drawn to the yellow identifying tags wrapped around the trunks of small trees or shrubs. It's easy the trace the path of a planned watering line marked with orange flags atop flexible wires. A small witch hazel that I scarcely noticed last week has become a prominent feature with its shredded strands of coral petals embracing a dab of snow.

On cold mornings the Temperate glasshouse is usually our last stop. It's a place to warm ourselves and a time to check on the progress of some plants we keep careful watch over. Pat never fails to look at the euphorbia as she tries to predict when they will begin to bloom or to shed their foliage. Right now I'm fascinated the wax flower tree from Southwestern Australia. Each week more and more of it's almost plastic and beeswax flowers come into bloom. Inside here we see spring as it begins in another places. Outside: the Midwest winter.