filtered sun changing to thick clouds: brisk north wind: 25ºF

As usual, I showed my botanical garden membership card to the woman at the admissions counter in the entry hall.  And as usual, I expected to be waved right through.  This morning though, she said, “Just a minute.”  She explained that now everyone entering the Garden would need a ticket.  She would issue the ticket and another person would check it and hand me back a stub before I could enter the grounds.

The woman at the admissions counter said the ticketing plan was being put into place now so that the kinks could be worked out before the expected crowds arrived in late spring to see Dale Chihuly’s glass sculptures and the new Children’s Garden.  She went on to say that when the entry hall is crowed and ticket lines are long, a good number of eager visitors just walk by either side of the admissions counter and go on their way without paying.  As the crowds increase this spring and summer, so will the losses unless the leaks in admission fees are stanched by issuing tickets to everyone.

For members of the botanical garden who receive fee admission as a benefit of their membership, the new “nobody gets in nowhere without a ticket” policy could mean waiting in a long line just to be issued a complementary ticket.  The keepers of this garden have already considered that, we were told.  The plan is to install card readers in the entry hall that will scan membership cards and spit out a ticket.  From the days of when Henry Shaw, the founder of this botanical garden, would stand at the gate to thank visitors for coming to a computer-driven fail-save system of tracking and ticketing every member: a century and a half of progress.

Because I have a membership the Garden, I hadn’t paid much attention to what this garden is charging visitors to come inside, but today I checked the price board on my way out.  General admission with no concessions or discounts is $8.00.  To see how the admission fee here compares with other well-known botanic and public gardens, I checked the web sites of eleven other such gardens.  Here’s what it costs to get into a dozen of the top gardens during their high seasons:

$20.50 (US)
Royal Botanical Gardens,Kew, London

$20.00
Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Coral Gables, FL

$19.95 (US)
Butchard Gardens, Vancouver Island, British Columbia

$15.00
Longwood Gardens, Kennett Square, Pennsylvania

$13.00
New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, New York

$12.00
Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, Sarasota, Florida

$12.00
Atlanta Botanic Garden, Atlanta, Georgia

11.06 (US)
Montréal Botanical Garden, Montréal, Canada

$8.50
Denver Botanic Gardens, Denver, Colorado

$8.00
Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, Missouri

Free
Chicago Botanic Garden, Chicago, Illinois

Free
San Francisco Botanical Garden, San Francisco, California

Apart from the two gardens that have no admission fee, the botanical garden where I walk with its $8.00 admissions fee ranks last on the list making it a “Best Buy” among botanic and public gardens worldwide.  OK, but I still don’t like standing in lines even for bargains.

When I was shopping at a mall last week I stopped to look in the window of a candy store to watch strawberries being hand-dipped strawberries into a vat of dark chocolate.  Each berry ended up coated in chocolate just up to its shoulders so that the dark color of chocolate and the red of the berry with the green of its cap could all be seen.  This morning the opening capsules of the Persian Ironwood (Parrotia persica) tree reminded me of those dipped-chocolate berries.  All winter the ironwood keeps its tiny chocolate colored capsules tightly closed.  Then just in time for Valentine’s Day, the capsules open to expose a nest of bright red flower buds.

Another Valentine’s reminder: the pots of heart-red cyclamen scattered around in the glasshouses.  Their helter-skelter petals aren’t heart-shaped, but their color is a perfect match for the day.

After a walk in the Garden in mid-September of 2003 I wrote: “Until this morning I had never seen a crab apple bloom in the fall. I followed a hummingbird to an old crab apple tree in the bulb garden and saw the bird hover beside a patch of pink. When the bird lost interest, I moved closer. The tree was speckled with tufts of pink-white blooms. Unlike other nearby trees, this crab had few fruit and even fewer leaves. Perhaps the aged tree will die before the other crabs bloom again. So it blooms now, one last time.”


Despite my prediction, the crabapple tree did bloom again for two more springs.  No more though.  This morning we arrived to find a rotten stump where the old crab had been.  If the crab had been mine, I know I would have kept it until it had had its last spring.







sun, then clouds: stiff north wind: 21ºF

Winter’s back.  Temperatures are again being reported with a wind chill discount tacked on.  I’m dressed for the cold but in place of my usual small cup of White Castle coffee that I carry with me on my walk, I’ve substituted a large one instead.  Then for a treat to eat at the end of my walk, I stopped at the World’s Fair donut shop (the city’s best and only a couple of blocks from the botanical garden) to buy a glazed twister.  My treat and my resolve both were gone by the time I got to the Garden.

Most of the camellias in the Linnean glasshouse are now in full bloom.  This year several new varieties have been added to the collection.  The new shrubs are just a few feet tall and most won’t flower this year though.  With 32,000 registered varieties of camellias to choose from, I wonder how the keeper of this garden selects new additions.  What sets the newly acquired shrubs apart from the many already here?  Until all of the new ones mature and bloom, I won’t know.

One of the newly planted camellias did bloom this year.  It’s a japonica variety named ‘October Affair.’  It was introduced to the trade by the Camellia Forest Nursery, a mail order nursery in North Carolina that sells rare and unusual trees and shrubs from Asia.  In warmer places where people take camellias for granted, ‘October Affair’ blooms in the fall.  Here it waits until February.

Bloom time aside though, this new camellia is unlike anything else in the glasshouse.  The buds open as soft pink. Then, as the flowers mature, the pink fades leaving the center white and the petals at the edges a pink blush.  In between the center and the edge, the two colors gradually shade one into the other.  The effect with even a few blooms is stunning.  When mature, ‘October Affair’ is supposed to top out at ten feet.  Imagine that.

I like visiting the camellia house early before the keepers of the garden have a chance to pick up spent blooms from the walk.  Other visitors who arrive even earlier often pick them up as souvenirs or display them in some unique way.  One long-time custom is to throw them into the fountain pool in the center of the glasshouse and watch them float, blossom up.  Another is to use the blooms to make a wreath for the small fountain statue of Amphirite, the reluctant wife of the Greek sea god Poseidon.  This morning I saw this new use.  Some spent blossoms – all white – were used to line the edging bricks of the glasshouse walkway.

The camellia trees and shrubs were underplanted with impatiens.  When the impatiens got leggy and stopped producing new flowers, they were ripped out.  This morning the keepers of the garden are about half way through planting primulas with high colors under the camellias.  What’s interesting about the planting is the pots.  The primulas are set into the soil while still in their pots.  The pots are made of some sort of composite woody material that is porous enough to allow the plants to take in moisture from the surrounding soil while keeping their roots contained.  I’ve never seen these kinds of pots before either in garden catalogs or in stores, but I can see the advantage of having a pot that can be moved in and out easily.  For the plant inside: no transplant shock because it never leaves its familiar cocoon.  For the plants outside, odds are that their roots will never come in contact with the roots or nutrients inside the pot.  For us visitors: we will never know the difference once the pots are in the ground and covered with soil and mulch.

Each year it’s a race to see which shrub will bloom first.  There is a stand of Winter Jasmine (Jasminum nudiflora) at the edge of the pond in the Chinese Garden and another in the temperate glasshouse.  Ought to be no-contest.  Inside should trump outside every time.  Oddly though that doesn’t happen every year.  Last year the inside shrub bloomed first.  This year it’s the Winter Jasmine growing outdoors.  The shrub in the Chinese Garden with its buttery-yellow blooms that stud its green, willowy arching branches is in full bloom this morning.  A couple of years ago, I learned that the winter jasmine has no scent.  But for a shrub that blooms in early February, that short-coming can be overlooked.

The botanical garden’s annual orchid show opened in late January.  We went to the show on opening night to mingle with the crowd, have a glass of wine, and snake our way around the display hall to point and admire.  This botanical garden has a collection of 8,000 orchid plants.  How many plants in their collection are in bloom now and how many are rotated in and out during the six-week show, I don’t know.  Numbers don’t matter anyway.  Up, down, straight ahead, partly hidden, hanging over the walkway, there are orchids everywhere.  This year our favorite is a variety with the jaw-breaking name Brassolaeliocattleya Crowfield ‘Mendenhall.’  My reference book, Flora, says that the name is an amalgam of three distinct orchid geneses and that orchids of this fusion are kinds most often seen in florists and orchid shows.  ‘Mendenhall’ has hard waxy green-black leaves that set-off its pleated blooms of lime-green outer petals and inside lips and noses dabbed with cream and lavender.