It's days like these that sustain February's unsavory reputation. Even though it's unpleasantly windy and rainy, this is as fine as it will get today. As the day goes on, the rain is predicted to freeze and then switch to snow as the temperature goes down and the wind comes up. As I walk, I'm wielding my umbrella like a shield blocking wind gusts and driving rain. I read an essay written by a naturalist who rhapsodized about the joys of February as he tramped through soggy fields and bleached underbrush looking for signs of spring. Not me. I lean more to the Joseph Wood Krutch school of thought about the month.

"No doubt it was during this month that the first animal thought of the desperate device of hibernation, and one needs the soul of a chickadee not to have moments when one wonders if it would not be a good idea to sleep the month away . . . Thank goodness, February is the shortest month and somehow it is impossible, all rationality aside, not to blame leap year when it brings us one more day of it." (The Twelve Seasons)

The rain and wind amplify the sounds outside the Garden walls. The background drone of a nearby interstate and the whine of planes on an approach path have come inside. So too have the more distinct sounds of tires on water as cars pass along a city street just outside the wall. Inside too are the remains of a Friday night good-time tossed from a passing car over the wall into the ivy . The intrusions of sounds and sights remind me that the Garden is a fragile fortress preserved by the efforts of many who care about the life it sustains. I remember the 1970's science-fiction film Silent Running about a time when people stopped caring about growing things. The main character played by Bruce Dern was charged with caring for huge green domes attached to a space station circling the earth. The domes were arks that preserved the remnants of earth's animal and plant life. The plot turns on whether Dern could save the domes after they were ordered destroyed by those who cared no more about the life they sustained.

The Ornamental Kale (Brasica oleracea 'Peacock Red') outlasted November and December, but February did them in. Still they have character. In a mass planting, they could serve as a model for the fantastic billowly figures on stilts that always seem to appear at opening ceremonies of Olympic games or the army of invading machines in War of the Worlds. In my home garden I put in a few plants of another variety of kale --more compact, more cabbage-like. It died too, but with not nearly the grace of the Garden's 'Peacock Red.'

clear: fainty breeze: 18º

The frost pictures are here again. Three times this winter the panes in the glasshouse have been etched with these curved backbones of ice supporting spiky fronds. On this early morning the rare plumage was lit by outside colors of blues and buffs. The effect was like a tropical sunrise or the glowing gases in pictures of nebulae taken by the Hubble telescope. I must have taken a dozen pictures of the lower panes on the West door of the glass house. Then, I took a dozen more of a different specie -- longer, more snakelike shapes with fronds that ended in circles -- that formed on the panes of the roof. In this month when few things dare to bloom, the ice foliage is doing just fine.



The lily ponds were sporting still another version of icy growths. Forming where the giant Victoria amazonica water lilies bloom during long, warm summers are these odd shapes that look as though they belong in a medical textbook or a sci-fi film. The dark, round centers and tentacle-like runners make the formations look like the winter negative of the positive print of Victorias in summer.

The sound of flocks of crows that had enlivened the Garden in past winters is gone. West Nile virus, I read, killed them in large numbers. We spotted a lone crow up about as high as it could be in a Bald Cyprus Later, I saw three of them flying, black shards against the blue sky. Like the opening of fishing season, old almanacs used to list February 14th as the date when courtship among crows could officially begin. The crows I saw this morning were rushing the season. Like stunt pilots, two of them performed aerobatic maneuvers for a third that flew in a straight line. Seeing them reminded me of a passage on crows in winter that I read last week: ". . . crows are in a love frenzy. The bird below hurtles itself against the one above it and then climbs up, then the other does the same thing, and so they keep racing, going higher and higher until suddenly they both swoop down with a cry and start it all over again. Crows turning somersaults -- what a happy sight!" It was written over 75 years ago by Mikhail Prishvin, a Russian naturalist and game hunter. The crows I saw didn't do the whole ballet Prishvin saw. I'll have to watch for the second act.

According to all that's right, I ought to be able delay spring gratification. Someday tulips will appear in the outdoor bulb beds. Labels already are in place to let us in on what varieties of tulips to watch for. I ought to be able to wait. And I will. But in the meantime, for visitors like me who want to savor spring in this month of waiting, the Garden keepers have given us tulips -- pots and pots of them -- blooming in a glass house inoculated against February.

filtered sun: light breeze: 37º

It's a day away from Ground Hog Day--that yearly reminder that the end of winter is just barely in sight. Still it feels like a day in early spring. "The first day of spring is one thing, and the first spring day is another. The difference between them is sometimes as great as a month," so goes the adage of an experienced outdoorsman.

There are still no flowers to point to, but people have returned to the Garden. The paths are again filled with visitors. Youngsters are skipping along the broad walks. Little kids are screeching excitedly from strollers being pushed by dads. Artists with pencils and watercolors have returned. Birds are everywhere. A flock of robins is bathing in a bog meant to wet the knees of a grove of bald cyprus. Sounds of bluejays, cardinals, geese, and tiny birds whose names I'll probably never learn enliven the Garden.

I am planning to buy some large clay pots this spring. The catalog from White Flower Farms whetted my interest in gracefully designed pots from Italy and Crete. Somewhere though I read that such beautiful, yet quite expensive, pots will crack if left outdoors in winter. That means I would have to add emptying and cleaning pots to my list of fall chores. Until this morning, I was going to buy the pots and ignore the warning. "Overly cautious," I thought. Then I saw this substantial clay pot in the Scented Garden. My plans quickly changed. At a garden nursery, I saw some plastic pots that mimic clay so well that a passerby had to flick them with a finger to see if they were the real thing. Maybe those instead?

I've just finished reading a book written by Marcia Bonta, a writer-naturalist who lives on a 640-acre mountaintop farm near Tyrone, Pennsylvania, that she and her family converted to a nature reserve. On a walk with one of her sons, she wrote "Steve always tells me that I should look up as I walk." Good advice for a bird watcher, I thought, but not so good for people like me who find more by looking down. This morning though I thought I would try looking up. If I hadn't, I wouldn't have seen it. Sleepily clinging to the top branch of a not-so-tall tree in the English Woodland Garden was an opossum--the first I'd ever seen in the Garden and one of few that I'd ever seen so close. Opossums are night creatures, so it wasn't surprising that this one looked so lethargic. For the ten minutes we watched it, it didn't move. Its eyes were open, but it didn't blink. It's that kind of behavior that earns opossums their reputation. According to a Missouri Conservation Department description of the habits of opossums, the creature should not have been where it was. They say, "An opossum's home is any place that is dry, sheltered and safe. . . This shy and secretive animal is seldom seen because it is abroad mostly at night." Could the appearance today have something to with making more opossums? Today is February 1 and the Conservation Department says "the breeding season for opossums begins about first of February."

I neither like nor dislike opossums. Other people have stronger feelings toward them. Marcia Bonta, the Pennsylvania naturalist, writes "Opossums like skunks and porcupines, have a bad reputation. They are usually described as ugly, repulsive animals whose only defense is a cowardly one, that of playing dead by rolling over on their sides and setting their months into horrible toothy grins." She goes on to say that while she doesn't share that opinion, she does acknowledge that opossums are not very smart. I found a study that was done to find out how smart opossums really are. The researcher who did the study found that the larger an animal's brain case was in relation to its total body size, the more intelligent it was. An opossum's brain case, he found, could hold only 25 dried beans. A cat's holds 125 and a raccoon's 150. Almost as a consolation prize, the researcher goes on to say that while opossums may not be very bright, they hear and smell very well. I'm glad I decided to look up this morning.

Combine a low sun in the southeast with the peeling paper-thin bark of Paperbark Maple (Acer griseum), and you have what looks to be a tree on fire. The cinnamon-colored fragments of bark extending like wings from the tree truck caught by sun and breeze make the tree look like a tower engulfed in flames.


In the Temperate glass house, the almond tree has begun to flower.