 |
|
|
“. . .it seems for a moment Spring"”
 -- from "The Open Air" by Richard Jefferies |
|
|
|  overcast: calm: 62ºFPairs, clusters, and colonies are what give spring its dazzle. One-of-a-kind things are better left to a more solitary season. Spiked green pips of hostas dot expanses of dark mulch under the trees. Early specie-tulips crowd together like flowers in a centerpiece. Daffodils refuse to bloom alone. Even the woodpeckers and ducks now travel in pairs.  The Royal Ferns (Osmunda regalis) just coming up at the edge of the Bog Garden are the most formal and elegant of all the groups of spring. Their crosiers are still sheathed in what looks like a translucent birth sac. They huddle with their crooks facing inward, none choosing to grow faster than the other does. They are a living counterpoint to the statue of The Three Graces by Gerhard Marcks that stands just a few yards away. Magnolias cannot be ignored. When they bloom, they command awe. Pink, purple, or white--they dominate their surroundings. As radiant as they are this year, I have seen how vulnerable they are to an early spring freeze. Just one night of freezing temperatures can turn their colors to brown and their silken shapes to pulp. Let any cold wait one more week until the magnolias have ended their reign. 
Some magnolia blooms have already shattered and fallen. If the petals fall along the main walkways of aggregate pebbles, they soon develop patterns of brown Polka dots as the soles of walkers' shoes press petals against stone. In protected places, the petals form foreground patterns of purple and white that stand out against a field of brown mulch. The colors and expanse of the petals bring to mind the exuberant floral art of Polly Apfelbaum that I saw a few weeks ago. Apfelbaum arranges her creations of fuzzy, glowing flower shapes on the floor, calling them "fallen paintings." I think she would approve of the "fallen paintings" done by the magnolia trees this morning. It's a new one to me: Diascia it's called. Plants of the dainty pink flowers that look a bit like begonia flowers with spurs are being used as an edging along one of the island gardens. I checked my reference book Flora for more. It says that the flower is a South African native that few gardeners had ever head of before the 1970's. It goes on to say that its common name is Twinspur. It was so named because of two curved spurs at the back of each flower that cup supplies of nectar. The diascia I saw was called "Wink Pink." It is a trademarked plant (meaning it must be brought from a licensed dealer but can't be propagated, sold, exported, or distributed) of Simply Beautiful, an affiliate of the giant plant breeder and supplier Ball Horticultural Company. unsettled: breezy: 50ºFOnce each year, usually in early spring, I walk at Kew - The Royal Botanic Gardens. Since this garden along the Thames in southwest London is nearly four times as large as the 79-acre garden where I walk other weeks of the year, I never have seen more than the ribbon of main attractions that border its garden walls. To walkers of botanical gardens, walking at Kew is like making a pilgrimage to the source and inspiration for so many other botanical gardens throughout the world. In 1856 when Henry Shaw, the founder of the Garden where I usually walk, was developing plans to build a botanical garden in Saint Louis, he turned to William Jackson Hooker, the director of Kew, for advice. The Garden that Shaw built with its paths and vistas, buildings and gates, owes much to what he saw and liked when he walked at Kew in 1851.  Few who visit Kew leave without taking a picture or buying a postcard, poster, refrigerator magnet, or snow globe of the Palm House. Completed in 1848, Henry Shaw would have seen this house of curved glass soon after it opened. On the day I visited, the House looked imposing even against a grumpy sky. Ray Desmond, author of The History of the Royal Botanical Gardens Kew, says of it, "It is perhaps Kew's most beautiful building; seen at sunset on a summer's evening . . . it becomes an insubstantial bubble enveloping the silhouettes of tall trees, a memorable symbol of Victorian competence and confidence." 
Kew is situated along the final approach to London's Heathrow Airport, one of the world's busiest long-haul airports. Every minute or so an airplane with ten-abreast seating enters the sky above Kew's expansive green lawns. Depending on your point of view, the planes are either exciting diversions or intrusive interruptions to the Victorian formality of the Garden. None of the official materials published by Kew ever mentions airplanes or noise they send from the sky. Ironically, in their rules of Garden etiquette they do say "to preserve the peace and tranquility of the Gardens, so much enjoyed by visitors, the use of radios and cassette players is not permitted."The beds inside the Palm House are being dressed with a fresh layer of mulch. Like many botanical gardens, Kew makes its own mulch. The Garden's home-brew compost program began in 1989 over a concern about the effects of peat extraction on wildlife habitats. A sign in the Palm House says that the Garden produces one hundred tons of plant waste every week. They save and grind the plant residue and then mix it with twenty tons of horse manure collected from Queen's Household Calvary and London Metropolitan Police. In from ten to twelve weeks, the Garden has a batch of compost ready to be mixed 50:50 with bark shavings and then spread as mulch on the garden beds. 
The large terracotta pots used in the Palm House all have a distinctive fluted shape that slowly curves upward and then ends in a thin, outturned rim lightly etched with concentric circles. The pots are so unique and visually satisfying that I wanted to see who made them. Stamped in upper case blocky prints near the tops of pots was the name of the maker: S & B Evans & Sons. When I got to a computer I found that S & B Evans & Sons is a small, family operated pottery in the London's East End. They design and hand-throw terracotta and glazed pots for city gardens from a workshop in a former furniture factory building near the Columbia Road Flower Market. Drawing on a background in the fine arts, the Evans family makes and designs pots that they say have "strong visual literacy." They sell exclusively through their East End workshop, to visitors to the Chelsea Flower Show, and to commission clients such as Kew, the London Museum, Lambeth Palace, and Polo Ralph Lauren. I had hoped to buy a smaller version of the Palm House pots at Kew's gift shop, but even Kew doesn't sell them.
There is a wooded place I know where each Spring I know I will find vast colonies of dogtooth violets (Erythronium americanum). Even when they are not in bloom, their leaves, mottled with purple and maroon, are a treat to see. When they do bloom, their nodding lily-like flowers are always yellow. Until today I thought that all dogtooth violets were yellow. Here at Kew though I saw a colony of dogtooth violets that were a violet or lavender color. Same genus-different specie. These were Erythronium dens-canis. The Flora encyclopedia says they native to Europe and Asia and may have white, pink, or lilac flowers, but never yellow.Botanical Gardens seem fond of growing curious plants that cause people who would never go to botanic gardens to visit. I found two such plants in the Princess of Wales Conservatory at Kew: the Titan Arum (Amorphophallus titanum) and the Century Plant (Agave americana).  The flowering of a Titan Arum anywhere in the world draws crowds. When one flowered at Kew in 1996, some 49,000 people came to see the six-foot tall flower and to be joyfully repulsed by its overpowering scent of rotting flesh mixed with shit. I counted six Arums in various stages of development today. In 1889, the growers at Kew were the first to coax these stinkers to bloom in captivity. Now they seem to have mastered the technique: three Titans bloomed in 2002 and another opened last year. There were no signs of a blossom stock on any of the plants I saw and nor did I read about any predictions of a new rotter on the way. Still even without the perverse appeal of seeing a flower, I did have a chance to see the mossy-looking mottled trunk (or stem?) that rises six feet to support a much divided single leaf that emerges after a Titan flowers.  My timing was better for the Century Plant. The Century Plant is a desert succulent with pointed puffy blue leaves that reach out four- or five feet from a central rosette. Web sources say that when the plant is at least ten years old, it sends out a stock that may grow up to thirty feet tall before sending out a splay of yellow flowers. After flowering and setting seeds, the whole plant dies. In 1991 when a Century Plant bloomed at Kew, a pane of glass had to be cut from the roof of the Conservatory to allow the stock to continue growing. It has happened again. Another Century Plant is outgrowing the glasshouse and a pane of glass has been removed to let the stock continue to grow. Thank goodness the weather is warm. I wonder what would have happened had the plant taken a notion to flower in winter?The weather today is remarkably unsettled. Within the four hours we spent at Kew, the sun sometimes made walking uncomfortably warm. Then the clouds would move in and the wind gusts made a coat and scarf essential. Then a misty rain started followed by a driving rain with lighting and thunder. Once there was even a hailstorm. Then as though all was forgiven, the sun came out and the cycle began again. Timing again: we were inside the Orangery watching the hailstorm over a lunch of tomato-carrot soup and hot tea.  Kew is nearly at the same latitude as Labrador. Even though I know about the moderating effects of the Gulf Stream current, I still am surprised when I see camellias in bloom along the Garden walkways and palms rising up in unprotected lawns. The palms that grow best here are called Windmill Palms (Trachycarpus fortunei). According to an article in the journal Palms these palms were spotted on the Chinese islands of Chusan (now Zhousan) by plant hunter Robert Fortune while on one of his plant collecting trips to the East. Fortune sent some seeds and young plants back to Kew in 1849 where they were nurtured in the new built Palm House until the Garden's keepers kicked then out when they realized they were hardy enough to make it outside on their own.
The Atlas Cedars are the most dramatic and distinctive of the large, mature trees in the Garden. They look to be about forty feet tall. They are as blue as a blue spruce, but their spreading branches are lined with tufts of supple needles. Never having seen an Atlas Cedar, I thought that their tops had been loped off to allow their branches to open and spread. I later learned that at some point, mature Atlas Cedars stop growing up and begin to flatten out as they spread their branches out ever further. The old trees begin to look like carefully sculpted massive bonsai specimens against the sky. hazy blue skies: light wind: 43ºFPruning in this Garden begins in late fall and continues until leaf bud. I look at the clean, sharp cuts done by the keepers of the Garden and think that my pruning sheers need sharpening. I look at the sculpted lines of the newly clipped shrubs and marvel at the eye of cutters who are able to extract shape from jumble.  Most of the pruning done in the Garden goes unnoticed. Not always though. This morning we arrived to find that the hedge row of six-foot high privets (Ligustrum) that define the northern wall of the formal rose garden had been pruned. Sheered is a more precise word. The once manicured rectangle of interlocking hedges has become a row of jutting bare trunks and limbs. Like an interior designer who prefer an open floor plan to separate rooms, the pruners have made the rose garden part of the common visual space of the Garden. Like a bad hair cut, it doesn't suit. The rose garden is the Garden's Victorian parlor. It needs to be formal, elegant, and private, surrounded by fence and hedge. I'm certain that the pruning was done for the health of the privets, but for now the parlor has become a family room.The privets will grow back. But if a Q&A web source I read is right, it may be a while: ". . .remember the hedge will not look very good while it is being rejuvenated. With two years of hard pruning and then three to four years of gradual rejuvenation, it will look better than it did before you started."  The wide spears of the early Greigii tulips have begun to come up. The broken lines of maroon that converge at their leaf tips look as though they might have been hand-painted by watercolor artist. The tulips that will push up from these leaves in a couple of weeks will be short, stocky and flamboyant. The Greigiis are the courser, more muscular branch of a family best known for delicacy and refinement. Last year the Garden reported that they planted 44,500 tulip bulbs. Except for 500 of them, the rest are "treated as annuals" - a kinder way of saying that they're dug up and thrown away. The tough Greigii I'd bet are among the 500 that stay. My bulb catalog says that they are among the few tulips that like daffodils prefer to be left alone to multiply and form tight clumps.
Inside the Temperate House, the Wax Flower (Chamelaucium ciliatum) tree is in full bloom. In this Garden the Wax Flower blooms only under glass. In Southwest Australia, it's an outdoor plant. The small tree (or large shrub) sets on thousands of flowers that hang like tresses on limber branches of soft needles. The wedge-shaped petals look like pieces of a pie cut for five. Web sources say that florists like to use the flowers as fillers in bouquets because they can last up to three weeks without drooping or fading. A winning combination - the ephemeral look of a peach blossom and the toughness and longevity of a winter tomato. Outside again, the first rhododendron blooms. It's a Korean rhododendron (Rhododendron mucronulatum) that flowers in classic magenta. The shrub is sheltered from the north and west winds and gets plenty of sun from the south and east. Because it is planted near the doors that exit from the entrance hall, it gets pointed at by many visitors eager to confirm that spring is close at hand. clearing skies: west wind: 47ºFWhat two weeks ago the Garden would reveal only to those who looked with care, it now shows to even casual visitors. Days of long soaking rain that fell from warm skies have drawn out armies of blooms in places where two weeks ago there were only a few scouts. Hundreds of snowdrops are blooming above the cover of ivy in the Mausoleum Garden. Witch hazels (including my favorite 'Arnold's Promise') perfume the wind. Shrubs of winter honeysuckle (Lonicera fragrantissima) have recovered fully from the hard freezes that browned their buds and now are covered with fragrant creamy white flowers. Crocuses have begun to open in the lawn where 5000 new bulbs were planted last fall. The warmer microclimates in protected sunny spots have even cajoled a few early daffodils to open. Everywhere bulbs of are twisting and poking their way out of the ground, part of the 84,000 new spring bulbs that the keepers of this Garden planted last year.  Inside, protected by glass, new camellias continue to bloom. Every week I seem to have a new favorite. When I look at camellias I ignore their names, since I have no hope of growing a camellia or ever seeing one any landscape around here. Instead, color, shape, and size - the aesthetics of the blooms - are far more important to me. This week my wife discovered this white camellia that no judge would deny a '10.'At the east end of the glasshouse a rare yellow camellia (Camellia chrysantha) that we have been watching for months has finally begun to flower. The flowers are small and face down. They grow on a low-lying shrub that needs props and supports to keep it off the ground. This easily ignored plant is made remarkable only because its flowers are not pink, white, or red.  The prickly balls of the sweet gum trees (Liquidambar styraciflua) are falling. The garden keepers must have used a leaf blower to drive them from the walks where they like to wait hoping to turn some visitor's ankle. A reader on the GardenWeb, a question and answer forum where gardeners ask and answer questions for one another, asked what sweet gum balls could be used for. "Make them into ornaments or use them on wreaths," most people said. But I'm not sure I want to string my tree with garlands of spinney balls even if they've had a coat of gold spray paint and a drizzle of glitter. My neighbor told me that because they decomposed so slowly the balls could be used as drainage material in pots instead of clay shards or Styrofoam peanuts. I wonder if anyone on E-Bay would bid on a package of them if I included a slip of how-to-use-them suggestions? Hellebores and pussy willow are two of my late winter favorites. Now in the same week, I see both. The pure white upright Christmas Rose hellebore and the rose magenta of the retiring Lenten Rose are both in flower in the English Woodland Garden. Pussy willows are bursting from the new trees in the Japanese Garden and from the suckers that spouted from a knurled, rotten tree that was cut a few years ago.Trees - tall trees -- that flower in winter are startling because they are so unexpected. While the weather is still too cold to risk showing leaves, apricot trees are dressed in delicate whites and pinks. Each flower is small and fragile looking, but when they are massed against a blue sky, the effect is dazzling. |