overcast and dull: breezy: 35ºF

January and botanical gardens: the two don’t mix. Things are blooming outdoors, but the flowers are small and subtle. Most of the spectacle that visitors expect when they come to a botanical garden is going on inside the shelter of the glass houses. But I suspect that most folks pick up their allotment of January green by looking at the planters inside the atrium of a mall rather than coming to a botanical garden.

Partly to encourage attendance in this slowest of months, but mostly because of the renovation going on in the visitor’s center, the Garden has waived its $8 entrance fee until January 27. The restaurant is closed. So is the gift shop. But one new addition to visitor’s center is already in place. The two-story open space of the foyer now bristles with the glass arms of a twenty-foot long sculpture done by artist Dale Chihuly. The piece is suspended from the ceiling of the windowed, barrel-vault entrance by four cables and is lit by spotlights from above. A friend asked me if I knew how the sculpture was hung and assembled. Visitors were invited to watch the two-day installation, but I missed my chance. Now that I see the size and intricacy of the sculpture, I regret not having been here to see the transformation of the pieces brought here in three oversized North American moving vans into this huge hanging column of glass. I told a friend that although I didn’t see the work being hung, I thought it probably had been assembled like the branches on an artificial Christmas tree. I don’t know if I was right or wrong, but I hope the folks at the botanical garden made a video so we can all see how the pieces came together.

Chihuly’s cobalt blue, turquoise, and clear glass sculpture will be the splash piece of a larger exhibit of his works that will open at this garden on April 30th. Although labels and descriptions of the piece in the foyer are not up yet, I read in the newspaper that Chihuly named the work "Jerusalem Blue." What connects Jerusalem to a botanical garden in the middle of America, I can’t say. Dale Chihuly though does have a connection to Jerusalem. To mark the millennium he installed an exhibit of his work in the citadel in Jerusalem. The citadel is located on the highest point in Old City where fortifications were built and razed for more than 2000 years. Now the citadel has become the Tower of David Museum. Chihuly intended his exhibition in the Holy Land to be “a tribute to a unique site in a unique city in a unique country and at a unique time.”

The piece that hangs in the botanical garden echoes a more massive piece that was shown in Jerusalem. Named “Blue Tower,” the piece was more than twice the height of piece hanging here. “Blue Tower” rose from the ground in a deep entrenchment in an outdoor courtyard of the Museum. The colors of its 2000 glass arms gradually changed from turquoise to deep blue as the tower rose. No green was used in the “Blue Tower,” but Chihuly chose to install it next to a sprawling green vine that climbed nearly as high as the tower.

“Jerusalem Blue, the work hanging in the botanical garden, looks squatter, less elegant, less graceful than “Blue Tower” perhaps because instead of being tapered, the work is shaped more like a dumbbell and the transition of colors is less subtle. Like “Blue Tower,” “Jerusalem Blue” uses glass of the same turquoise and deep blue color (the shade of blue used in the flag of city of Jerusalem) as does “Blue Tower.” Added to the piece in the Garden though are plenty of curvy arms made of clear glass that are meant to sparkle under the spotlights.

As I tried angle after angle to photograph “Jerusalem Blue,” I found that this piece, like the one in Jerusalem, needs an accompaniment of green. When I looked at the work though the leaves of the tall ficus trees growing on either side of the sculpture, the work looked as though it belonged here.

Each year I like watching the berries on winterberry shrubs (Ilex verticillata) turn color as cold weather approaches. The bright red berries are favorites of birds, so it’s rare that the berries last the winter. A long row of red winterberries is planted along one side of the walkway that circles the bird garden. Signs along the stretch identify the varieties as ‘Jim Dandy’ and ‘Red Sprite.’ Curiously, about twenty feet of the shrubs has been picked clean. Then abruptly, the shrubs from that point on are filled with berries. My first though was that the bountiful shrubs were of a different variety that was less attractive to birds. So I went back to check. The shrubs laden with berries were all ‘Red Sprite’ – the same variety that was stripped of berries further up the row. Seeing the row of filled and empty shrubs reminded me of the time I went to a pick-your-own blueberry farm. To keep folks from jumping from plant to plant, there was a grower with us who gently insisted we pick each blueberry shrub clean before moving on the next plant. Ruling out an “overseer bird” who rations the picking of winterberries so that all birds make it though the winter, I have no notion about why I saw what I saw this morning.

The smaller the bloom, the more fragrant the scent when it comes to witch hazels. In the garden of native plants the Ozark witchhazel (Hamamelis vernalis) is now in full bloom. These little trees are filled with flowers none more than an inch across. Their fragrance though is large. With no competition from other blooming things, the peppery scent of the flowers carries far as it mixes with the cool morning breeze.