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“. . . bushes and trees are still waiting for some imperative 'Now!'
which will breathe from the earth or from the sky; in that moment all the buds will open, and it will be here.”  -- From 'The Gardener's Year' by Karel Capek |
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 clear: calm: 42ºIt's only the trees that still are hesitant about acknowledging spring. Most are tentatively showing bits of color where leaves have begun to puncture the buds that have shielded them from the winter. The branches of trees seen from a distance look exposed and gray except for their tips. They are dabbed with reds, salmons, and yellows like a hand-painted chromophotograph prints.  Today is Wednesday: a workday at the garden. Unlike Saturdays when we have the illusion that the Garden is a gift from God, today the space is filled with all of the behind-the-scenes people. We share the Garden with people strapped to super-sized leaf-blowers; botany students and researchers headed to their offices shouldering bookbags and carrying covered coffee mugs; Cushman carts vying with visitors for the right-of-way; piles of tools, flower pots, and fertilizer waiting for work crews to arrive; and the sounds of cell phones and walkie-talkies linking field workers to operations. Visiting the Garden on a weekday is like arriving for a date several hours before the agreed upon time. It brings a dose of reality to the magic. Remnants of winter and the urgings of spring. The crabapples of fall mingle with the fresh leaves of spring . Peonies now long past the pips that scout for spring have shoved away a layers of mulch and look like a new season's growth of rhubarb.The witch hazels, snowdrops, and aconites have gone to seed, but this morning I hardly miss them. The scarcity of winter is fast being replaced by the abundance of spring. Today, nothing has faded; nothing is a leftover. Everything has the gourmet quality of a fine meal. Fields of Easter-egg colored crocus, beds of daffodils; the tight fists of hyacinth stocks ready to sprout; gaudy Fosteriana tulips, strings of lemon-yellow festival lanterns dangling from the branches of leafless Corylopsis trees, and wide banks of golden forsythia are at every turn. Grabbing most attention this week though are two Merrill Magnolia trees. One  near the scented garden is young; the other planted near Shaw's Town House is a mature specimen nearly 40 feet tall. Imagine a forty-foot tree, shaped like a hay stack is completely cloaked in white. No leaves, just thousands of gleaming white blossoms, each with made up of clusters of petals spreading three inches across. I'm reading Dean Koontz's latest suspense novel "By the Light of the Moon." In it is a character named Fred. Fred is a pet jade plant. He gets misted regularly; his leaves never gather dust; and his glazed clay pot is always securely strapped in when he is taken for a ride in a car. Something I saw this morning reminded me of Fred. While walking through the Chinese Garden to have a look at the unusual white forsythia, I noticed an older woman accompanied by someone who likely was her husband. She was carrying a cloth shopping bag in one hand and a camera in the other. She stopped at an overlook to the pond and took out two neatly dressed brown teddy bears, a big one and a smaller one, from her shopping bag. After positioning them carefully side-by-side on some rocks, she smiled and snapped their pictures from several angles. More positioning and more photographs on a marble bridge and the same on the steps to a pagoda. All the while her companion looked down or away from her and the bears. I got the idea that he had seen this kind of scene before and he neither approved or disapproved, just tolerated. Children, wedding parties, group shots of mugging teens, and fashion models out on professional shots: I've seen then all. But bringing loved objects into the Garden to photograph them in loved places was new to me. I bet she has names for her plush bears.  high clouds: windy: 27º Travelling East, away from the Garden where I usually walk, I stopped to visit the White River Gardens in Indianapolis, Indiana. The guide to the Garden shies away from calling it a botanical garden. Instead they prefer to say it's a "3.3-acre landmark botanical attraction."There were few visitors on this Sunday afternoon despite the orchids on display in the conservatory building. Perhaps it was the weather. The temperatures had dropped abruptly from the 60's to the twenties overnight. Perhaps it was the price of admission. I'm old. But with admission and parking, I still had to pay $9.50 to get inside. No matter. I'd been to White River Garden in the summer to see the annual butterfly show and was anxious to return to see it in winter. The entrance to the Gardens is through a rotunda meant to recall a grain silo. The inside of the rotunda is lined with a sixteen-foot mural of the seasons done by Miami artist Andrew Reid. The work called "Midwestern Panorama" has a wind-blown look reminiscence of Thomas Hart Benton. The mural is densely packed with romanticized images of each season. Too bad the white ventilation piping and ductwork obscures much of the piece. I bought post cards of each season in the gift shop to get a better look at the work with the obstructions.  I expect that most visitors come to the Gardens to wander around the glass house. It felt warm and cozy there today. The house has a steeply pitched gothic roof meant to evoke thoughts of an Indiana Barn. Height is needed because the dominant plantings inside are the Mexican Fan Palms (Washingtonia robusta), a hardy Southwest street and landscaping palm that can grow two feet a year trusting up to 100 feet. One description I read on the web described Fan Palms as "tolerant of heavy winds, salt spray, heat, cold, flood, drought, fire, and probably even nuclear attack." Likely they will even survive if Indiana doesn't make it to the final four.Like the Palm House at Kew in London, the glasshouse at White River Gardens has a walkup overlook observation deck that wraps around three sides of the house. Not as high nor difficult to reach as the Palm House walkway, the deck attracted kids who liked climbing up and down the steps and photographers who felt that the height created added interest and a more unobstructed view of the city skyline just across the river.  When walking at my usual Garden, I almost never visit tropical glasshouses, so I was eager to get outdoors. No one else was outside on this afternoon with a wind chill in the teens. My favorite parts of the outdoor garden are the eleven mini-gardens, each illustrating a different a way to design and landscape a small city garden. The Metaphor Garden uses fire as a theme with a sculptural cauldron as a centerpiece. The sign says that summer plants of yellows, oranges, and reds complete the theme. A medieval-style sunken garden invites visitors to walk down three steps below ground-level to see a formal herb garden. A raised garden in the shape of a circular mound surrounds curved stone seats in a cutaway though the diameter of the mound. The guide says there are other gardens with intriguing names like Motion Garden, Whimsy Garden, and Mist Garden, but they will wait for another time.  One of the things I like best about the White River Gardens are the plant stakes they use. Instead of being used just to name a plant, the markers called "Gardener's Notes" are used say something timely and interesting about a plant. A marker beside a container planting of winter weary pansies has a hand printed note that says, "Poor Pansies! The freezing weather has made the leaves and flowers droop. The pansies are still alive, however, and the leaves will revive on a warm day. These pansies can't stand the severe cold that sometimes occurs in Indiana winters. We'll know they are dead if the leaves turn black." The initials of the botanist who wrote the note and the date the note was written follow. So simple and timely. Such a personal way to help visitors think about what the botanist knows.As I was leaving White River Gardens, I wondered whether it was the kind of Garden that could draw me back week after week. I thought as I pulled out of the parking lot, "No, it's not large enough or diverse enough." Now I think differently. I would become a member and be a "regular." But at White River Gardens, I would sit more, likely see more, and surely think more than I would ever do in a larger garden.  cloudy: calm: 33ºWith the temperature above freezing and rising I knew I had to get to the Garden early. A wet heavy snow fell last night giving trees, shrubs, and sculptures a white icing. Even before I arrived, clumps and shards of snow had begun to loosen and fall from tall trees. Few people seem interested in the snows of March. Even a photogenic display like today attracts scant interest. First snows of November or December are more alluring. When I arrived just before 8 a.m., only four other cars were parked in the lot. Along my walk I spotted just one tripod-toting photographer taking panoramic views of Turtle Island from the zigzag bridge.  The snow has turned much of the serious sculpture in the Garden to a comic parody. One of the Miles statues portrays a grief-stricken Orpheus just at the moment he realizes that he has doomed his bride to eternal death by looking back at her. Today the snow makes Orpheus look as though he is drying off after a morning swim. In the German Garden, the frowning bust of a bearded Dr. George Englemann, Shaw's botanical advisor, has a stripe of snow running down his prominent nose making him look like the Klingon, Worf. My favorite though is the ever-scowling bronze statue of  Henry Shaw. In preparation for Fat Tuesday he is wearing a Pirates of Penzance admiral's hat along with an ermine stole draped casually over his frock coat. Very stylish!I wasn't sure what I was I was seeing. I spotted two dark mounds in the snow some thirty- to forty feet from the walk. My first thought--two rocks. I went on. As I walked away, I wondered why the keepers of the Garden would have put two rocks in a large expanse of lawn that would have to be cut by machines. I turned back. Without binoculars and not wanting to get my shoes wetter than they were already, all I could make out were bumps on the rocks and occasional bits of white. Holding on to the rock idea, I thought I was seeing a flock of sparrows nestled in the pocks of a lava rocks. It wasn't until I saw a bit of movement and a flash of white that I knew I was looking at a circle of quails. Each quail was in a nesting position--butt in, face out. There were about a dozen of them in the big circle-- half that in the smaller one. Their bodies radiated out from the center like spokes on a wheel. Judging from the lack of snow around the quail circles, they had been there at least since about nine last night when the heavy snow began falling. Stonehenge, the Avebury circles, crop circles, and now quail circles. Another unsolved mystery. I couldn't wait to get back to a computer to find out why quails form circles. The Texas Wildlife Management Handbook explained it all: "A quail covey forms a close circle at nightfall, with each bird facing out in readiness to fly. Each bird in the roosting ring lifts its wings slightly to form an unbroken  circle. This allows for the transfer of body heat. With all eyes facing outward, the Bobwhite covey has a 360-degree view of approaching danger. Members of the covey huddle together and share the task of listening for possible danger. When anything approaches too closely, each bird in the covey flies a different direction. Such night flight requires roosting in a fairly open spot to reduce collisions with trees or other objects." Bird circles may be ordinary to birds, but not to me. The quails reluctantly must have stayed in their circles well beyond dawn because the snow was deeper that they were tall. Their loss; my once-in-a-lifetime good fortune. Imagining spring gets to be more urgent each week. This week of clinging snow nurtures imagination. I looked at a tuft of snow on this faded oak leave hydrangea flower and imaged a bearded iris.Back inside after my walk, I looked again at the astounding 90-foot landscape mural of 24 paintings by John Louder that he calls The Missouri Discovery Series. The paintings are placed side-by-side on each wall. Two five-foot canvases depict Louder's impressions of each month of the year. I looked most closely at March. As if foretelling this day, Louder has used the foreground of March to paint a leafless tree laced with a tracing of snow on each branch and bud. |