clear: calm: 24ºF

This morning the botanical garden has an overlay of five inches of snow left over from a persistent snowfall last week. The main walkways are clear. Many of the side paths are not. A few visitors – likely those with cameras – have left tracks in some of the open spaces, but for the most part the unbroken snow allows the natural contours of the land to stand out.

Near the beginning of our walk we saw this snowman. It was only about two-feet tall. For eyes it had pennies. Its buttons were cones from a Canadian hemlock. I’m glad we got here early to see it because after our walk as we were drinking coffee in the garden café, we saw a young boy whack off its right arm when his parents weren’t looking.

The sky is cloudless. In the sharp morning light the blues become more intense from horizon to overhead. When I pointed my camera up to take this picture of a Carl Miles statue mounted atop tall column, the background colors looked as though I had used a Photoshop gradient tool to manage the subtle color shifts.

Birds obviously have their favorites when it comes to crabapples. Most of the trees have been stripped clean long ago. Flocks of robins passing through seemed to stake out a particular tree and then work in concert until they harvested all the fruit. Yet this tree growing outside the home garden center looks untouched. Curious. The fruit is plentiful and good-sized. It looks firm and ripe. Yet it’s not a target even now in late winter. I checked a few websites to find out why. The consensus: birds prefer smaller, mushier fruit. Apparently, the fruit on this tree will be eaten, but later. Trees like these serve as an emergency stash for the birds, foods of last resort to be eaten when all else is gone. So to see such a plentiful supply of fruit still on the tree is a good sign. It’s got to mean that the birds still have enough left in their winter larder.

The ‘Wintergreen’ boxwood (Buxus sinica var. insularis) planted along the entrance walk to the Chinese garden is just about to bloom. A sprig of it that one of the garden keepers brought inside is already in bloom. Only in January would anyone even seriously consider looking at boxwood blossoms. They’re tiny, inconspicuous, yellowish-green things that only a botanist would notice. Still this description on Floridata does make me want to give the blooms a second look (perhaps under a magnifying glass): “The flowers are not showy, but are quite fragrant. The star points are actually sepals - boxwood flowers have no petals. The flowers are in clusters consisting of a single female flower in the center, surrounded by several male flowers, recognized by their conspicuous yellow anthers.”







slowly clearing: breezy: 18ºF

“We’ll have to come back again when there’s something to see,” I heard a visitor to this botanical garden tell his companion. Lots of people seem to agree. The holiday train show has ended. The gift shop is closed during the week for inventory and the café is closed for cleaning. This morning, even though we arrived at the garden a full hour after it opened, ours was the only car in the visitor’s parking lot. Inside both ticket couters had signs that said “Closed.” “No tickets?” we asked a nearby security guard. “Nah,” he said, and just waved us through hardly glancing up from his morning paper. Even though the price of admission is waived for local visitors on Saturday mornings, understandably there’s still not a lot of interest in getting up on a cold morning to freeze your body parts so that you can look at lots of dry sticks and some neatly arranged beds of mulch. I’m here out of habit. With or without the cooperation of the weather, I’m here because this is what I’ve always done every Saturday morning for a dozen years.

The glasshouse that shelters the camellias in winter puts on a display of frost etchings about once a year. It happens after a few days of temperatures near zero. Then the single panes of glass on the south windows steam up and typically freeze into lacey fronds of ice crystals. After the last couple of days of frigid cold, I expected to see them this morning. Instead I saw these. How to describe them? A complex web of threads that look as through they’re been crocheted into a sea creature? I don’t know. These kinds of etchings I’ve never seen before.

I wanted to see how the beds of carnations in Ottoman Garden handled the extreme cold temperatures last week. The carnations are red and white flowering varieties developed by the California Florida Plant Company in Salinas, California. They’re part of a series of dwarf carnations the company named ‘Adorable.’ Really, ‘Adorable’ -- that’s their name. Despite the cold, nearly all of the plants looked terrific. Every plant has some browning and dying back, but all of them have lots of healthy stock left. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them in bloom even before the tulips open.

Here’s nature’s addition to “Sunglitter,” a bronze sculpture done by Swedish artist Carl Milles. It’s a ride-um-cowboy rodeo rendition of a sea nymph atop dolphin. This morning the bucking dolphin looks a little long in the tooth.

On mornings like these when my toes get cold and my fingers begin to tingle, I like to take pictures of orchids. I don’t care about their name or color. I take their picture just because they’re here. This is one outside the classrooms off the entry court to the garden.








clouds: stiff wind: 36ºF

I looked at this sundial this morning. It’s mounted on a pedestal off the brick entry plaza of this botanical garden. The inscription on the plate says that the sundial was given to garden by the North American Sundial Society when they met in town last year. Besides this dial, two others were installed in the garden to coincide with the society’s conference.

The most ambitious of the recently installed dials is one mounted on a pedestal at the entrance to the Ottoman Garden. The dial was modeled after one in the garden in the Topkapi Palace, the official residence of the Ottoman Sultans in Istanbul. The butterfly pattern on the dial catches shadows from the short pointer to mark the times of prayer for the Moslem faithful. The longer pointer tells local time.

There's an interesting story about the installation of sundial in the Ottoman garden here. For a sundial to work it has to be aligned to the polar axis -- true north. However, the Ottoman garden wasn’t designed to line up exactly north-south. So when visitors entered the garden, the first thing they would have seen was a magnificent marble sundial that looked as though it had been set a bit askew – sort of like a picture that’s been hung just a tad crooked. As the story goes, the folks at the botanical garden couldn’t live with a sundial that was out of kilter, so they straightened it. But after aesthetics prevailed, the times for Moslem prayers, the original purpose of the device, were way off.

The solution was to redesign the face of sundial to reflect “aesthetic north.” The designer did the math, the sculpture chiseled the new face, and just hours before the members of the Sundial Society toured the botanical garden the device looked straight and worked perfectly.

Other than the three new sundials, this garden has two others. There’s one in each of the two herb gardens. One has a base made to resemble a sun flower. The other is a whimsical sculpture of a classical child toying with the pointer on a sundial. The dial is set in the center of a bed of thyme. Yes, thyme.

They’re been a long time in coming. The flowers on the tall stock of the ‘Flapjack’ kalanchoe (Kalanchoe thyrsflora) are at last beginning to open. I can’t say they've been worth the wait. Each bloom is maybe a half inch across with four whitish petals that only grudgingly separate from their bulbous underpinnings. If all of the hundreds of flowers that line the stock would open at the same time as flowers on yuccas do, the result would have been less ho-hum. But as it is, it looks at though the buds will open, close, and wither without ever calling attention to themselves.


In its magazine to members, this botanical garden features a piece on Green Living titled Ditch the Bottled Water! In it they mention that a local university has banned the sale of bottled water on its campus “as part of a sustainability initiative.” The piece goes on to say that most bottled water is just tap water and that “90 percent of the plastic bottled are not recycled and end up in landfills.” The garden then urges visitors to buy a stainless steel refillable bottle at the gift shop and fill it from water in any of the drinking fountains scattered throughout the grounds. Yet with all this, the garden still has stocks several vending machines with water in plastic bottles. So far, the Chicago Botanic Garden and the Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh have stopped selling plastic water bottles. Who’s next? This garden, I hope.