high clouds: breezy: 37ºF

Not much more than a month ago the tiny washed out purple blooms on the Tommie crocuses and the tightly closed orzo-shaped white flowers of the snow drops were enough for me. Spring raises the bar. Now a stingy bloom here and there won’t do. I want to see flowers in bloom all the way to my peripheral vision. I want color too: bright colors – color combination that are too garish to have been done by nature without some help.

The botanical garden where I walk each week has yet to oblige. But, I see signs. Two weeks ago I counted just a handful of small daffodils in bloom. This morning, who can count? The garden is flooded with yellow. Keepers of this garden claim that they’ve added over 3000 more daffodil bulbs to the army of bulbs already planted. The hottest new varieties are likely to appear in the display gardens nearest to entrance. (This year I am watching for ‘Pink Flush’ – an all-pink daffodil, so new that it isn’t even listed in catalogs of the big bulb dealers.)

In other parts of the Garden, the older varieties of daffodils that were planted years ago are left to expand or die as they will. I figure that a daffodil that looks spectacular in these outlying places is tough and smart. The daffodils here are not the darlings of the flowers shows or ones that cost as much as a tank of gas for an SVU. This morning the north end of the English Woodland Garden was lit-up with outsized clumps of a pre-1923 variety of trumpet daffodil named ‘Unsurpassable.’ The fist-sized yellow blooms of ‘Unsurpassable’ have perfectly proportioned trumpets that flare to a frilly bell. As a bonus, the flowers angle up as if inviting close inspection.


Blues, reds, and golds are summer colors: common in July; rare in March. I found them though this morning in two flowers. Patches of Early Flowering Borage (Trachystemon orientalis) with their iridescent blue blossoms shaped like shooting stars are blooming in the English Woodland Garden. In the display beds, a Kaufmanniana tulip named ‘Stresa’ is about to bloom. The ‘Stresa’ buds look like summer beach balls alternating lipstick red with corndog yellow. The buds sit there tightly closed, squatting on their short stems sheathed by their form fitting leaves. I like these tulips just as they are. When they bloom, they will assume their characteristic shape – picture a flabby and graceless star shape sprawled on a Barcalounger.

A day after I saw the neat plot of ‘Stresa’ tulips at the Garden, I saw more of them on my way to a neighborhood gas station. The tulips were blooming in a long-neglected strip of land near the road. The glitzy tulips were blooming among remnants of last year’s weeds. Unlike the newly planted tulips in the botanical garden, these Stresas had formed a large clump of more than a dozen blooms. They had multiplied as daffodils do; they had survived neglect; and they proved that they can be treated as reliable perennials.

Early spring is a perfect time for detecting the effects of microclimates on plant growth. This morning while walking in the Japanese Garden, I saw these two shrubs of Korean Spice Vibernum (Vibernum carlessi) growing side by side. One had just begun to shrug off winter. The other had full-sized leaves and looked as though it would bloom in a few days.

In the catalog of a bulb broker, the Dragon Arum (Dracunculus Vulgaris) is described as the ‘evil cala.’ This morning on an off-the-beaten path in the botanical garden, I saw a clump of these evil twins as their leaves began to push through their protective sheathing of camouflage colors. These Dragons are exotic-looking even now. This summer they will mature into a bouquet suited for a Goth wedding or a Georgia O’Keeffe painting: wide raggedy purple-red collars out of which will protrude long dark spikes. Added to that, the flowers have an odor that only a fly could love. The catalog of the bulb broker says the Dragon Arum is hardy in zones 7 and higher, but here it is: coming up in an unsheltered location in zone 6 and doing just fine.








filtered sun giving way to overcast: calm: 34ºF

What makes for perfection in a witch hazel? In the book Winter-flowering Shrubs, author Michael Buffin says three things are needed: 1) very large flowers; 2) a strong, rich, cinnamon spice scent; and 3) rich autumn color.

I like those three. But to them I would add three others: 1) flowers that are bright, even on cloudy days: yellow-golds or lively oranges are my favorites. Rusty reds I can do without; 2) flowers that bloom on completely bare branches. Some witch hazels have a bad habit of hanging on to their long-dead leaves too long. Seeing a witch hazel bloom when its braches are still covered with leaves is like trying to see a play from the restricted view seats; and 3) My perfect witch hazel would be loaded with flowers --no skimpy branches or toothy gaps between blooms. In his book, Buffin says “I have yet to find the perfect witch hazel package,” but if forced to pick a just one, his choice would be ‘Pallida’ – “the best, largest, and most scented of the yellow-flowering forms. If it had exceptional autumn colour, it would be a hard act to follow.”

Perfect or not, my favorite variety continues to be ‘Arnold’s Promise’ (Hamamelis intermedia). This morning the tall prominent tree, smack in the middle of the English Garden is in full bloom. Masses of large buttery-yellow flowers cover the tree and on a calm morning like this one, its strong allspice scent scatters in all directions.

Just behind ‘Arnold’s Promise’ on my list of favorite witch hazels is a variety named ‘Orange Beauty.’ Its flowers are large. The medium-sized shrub that spreads more out than up is covered with flowers. Each petal is mostly yellow, except near its base. There the color subtly shifts to a burnt red-orange.

This will not be a good year for the ‘Christmas Rose’ hellebores (Hellebore niger). In early March the clump in the English Woodland Garden usually blooms. When late winter temperatures are to its liking, the creamy-white flowers will rise up on stems above the foliage and then bend over to make a pincushion of blooms. That doesn’t happen very often in this botanical garden. ‘Christmas Rose’ and mid-west winters are seldom compatible. The flowers I see most years are nothing like the ones English garden writer E. A. Bowles describes seeing in his November garden: “Coming so early before the cruel frosts, the flowers are borne on tall stalks and are as clean and perfect as though they had been grown under glass.” Here the scarce blooms on the ‘Christmas Rose’ are marked with the scars and wounds they suffered as they endured winter.

Not long ago I noticed what looked like a small Norfolk island pine tucked into a corner in the temperate glasshouse. It was scarcely two-feet tall yet it already had the characteristic triangular shape of a pine tree with branches that were lined with lush green needles right to the trunk. This morning I saw two more plants. These were growing outdoors at the edge of a stand of forsythia. The outdoor plants were about two-feet tall too, but their needles were brown and dry. The signs identified the plants as Wollemi Pine (Wollemia nobilis). The panda symbols on the nearby signs marked the pines as a rare and endangered species.


When I got home, I did some checking on the internet and found that the Wollemi Pine (pronounced WALL-um-eye and meaning “watch out, look around you”) is not only endangered, but was thought to be extinct until it was discovered in 1994. As the story goes, David Noble, an officer with the Australian parks service, stumbled upon a stand of the trees while he was hiking in the Wollemi National Park, a rugged wilderness area about 90 miles west of Sydney. The trees were growing in a deep, undisturbed forested gorge. Noble had never seen such trees before, so he some foliage to the Royal Botanical Gardens Sydney to be identified. The taxonomists there identified the tree as a new genus and species and aptly named it Wollemia nobilis.

The discovery created a sensation unequalled since the Dawn Redwood was found in China in 1943. The National Geographic News called the discovery of the Wollemi Pine “the botanical equivalent of finding a dinosaur alive today.” The Royal Botanical Gardens Sydney says it is “certainly one of the greatest botanical discoveries of our time.” Until now, Wollemi pines were known only as fossils. They are remnants of the Jurassic forests that blanketed that area about 150 million years ago at a time when the southern continents were a single landmass. The trees were believed to have been wiped out two million years ago when the world’s climate changed.

In the wild the trees can be 125 feet tall with trunk about three feet across. That’s about the size of the bald cypress trees that line the main axis of this botanical garden. Mature trees produce round cones at the tips of their branches. The spongy bark of mature trees is a dark chocolate color with rounded crackles that look like a nest of swarming maggots.

To keep the tree from becoming extinct, the Australian government has tried to keep the exact location of the trees a secret while at the same time propagating millions of specimens to sell. Experts think that the best way to protect rare and endangered species in the wild is to make them common and widely available commercially. So under contract of the government, the Birkdale Nursery, an international nursery outside of Brisbane, is propagating and marketing the trees.

In October 2005, eleven years after its discovery, the Wollemi Pine was “launched” with a special exhibit and Sotheby’s-led auction at the botanical garden in Sydney. Come April, the trees will be offered to buyers in Australia. A 16-inch potted tree will sell for $52 (US). Buy a two-foot one for $85 (US). Sales in the USA are coming soon. To fan interest in this now trendy tree, the Wollemi Pine has its own web site.

The Wollemi Pines I saw this morning were sent to the botanical garden where I walk as bare root specimens in November 2004. By April 2005, they were eight to twelve inches tall, with eight to ten branches each. Plans are to keep a pine in the temperate greenhouse for a few more years and then to transplant to the tropical, humid geodesic conservatory. The ones I found outside were planted to “challenge their hardiness.” Reading from the press release, “The pines may survive the local summer heat with enough moisture but whether they will withstand winter’s snow or freezing rain is yet to be discovered. The pines have survived several ice ages and protective “polar caps” on their growing tips seem to indicate they may withstand temperatures even lower than present day Australian conditions.” As spring comes around, I plan to visit the two outdoor Wollemi Pines each week to see if they awake.