overcast with a spit of snow: light breeze: 33ºF

“Don’t look at them,” I told myself. Maybe if I don't look at the magnolias just popping into bloom, they’ll live long enough to open fully. Better not to see them at all if they’re destined to be browned by frost. Still, if the new blooms make it through tonight, they’ll live to open when the warmer temperatures get here next week

The scent of jasmine seems out of place in the Midwest. Show me the romance of a chilly, overcast morning in March. When I think of jasmine I see an bottle of red wine opened on a table for two on a bougainvillea-laced veranda overlooking a garden. There is a warm breeze coming in from the sea and the sound of water as it spills from the lip of a fountain. Enter here the faint scent of jasmine that from time to time drifts up from the garden. Now erase all that and go back to this March morning at the botanical garden. The pink jasmine (Jasminum polyanthum) vines over the doors of the Linnean glasshouse and four or five baskets of jasmines that hang over the walkway have begun to bloom. I have nothing against pink jasmines. The buds are a delicate shade of pink. The white blooms are like a star on the head of a pin. But a glass building filled with so much of their heady scent is like a small room with a couple dozen Air Wick air fresheners going full tilt.

The botanical garden has an experimental plot of pansies that they are testing for winter hardiness. The plot is unprotected on three sides and gets full sunlight. The pansies are not mulched. There are about sixty different varieties of pansies being tested. All of the pansies were planted in the fall and had ample time to root and flower before cold weather arrived. A few weeks ago the entire plot was lifeless. None of the sixty varieties flowered all winter. Today I thought I’d check again to see which varieties bounced back and started reblooming again. The fastest rebounder was a light blue-purple, small-flowered pansy named ‘Frosty Rain.’ When I got home I checked the web and found that ‘Frosty’ is one of the Rain Series of pansies developed by the PanAmerican Seed Company. The company says Rain Series varieties have “exceptional overwintering ability . . . and last through winter wind chill temperatures as low as -40°F!” As if that wasn’t enough, the Rain Series plants have also been bred for a “a fresh show of early color . . . flowering up to 2 to 4 weeks earlier than other pansies on the market.” I’m sold. But, I’d like it in yellow, please. So far, the Rain Series just comes in ‘Frosty’ and ‘Purple.’

Early blooming bulbs don’t look like much by themselves. Thousands of them are impressive though. There are three large patches of naturalized, electric-blue “Glory of the Snow” bulbs blooming in the garden this morning.

In Latin, this blue variety of Glory of the Snow is named Chionodoxa sardensis. I’m practicing saying “kee-on-oh-DOKS-ah” aloud because before this spring ends, I want to learn the Latin name for at least one of the “minor bulbs.” Besides, I like the sound of the word on my ear. My book on early bulbs says the word comes from the Greek ‘chion’ for snow and ‘doxa’ which means glory. The bulbs are natives of the mountains of Turkey. Apart from the eye-popping effect of a mass of these Glories, what I like best about them is the contrast between the blue of the flowers and the merlot-colored stems – a special treat I only saw when I stooped down to get an up-close look at the individual flowers.

Ever since I returned from Madeira, I’ve started keeping tabs on the progress of the blossom spikes on a plant named Pride of Madeira (Echium candicans) growing in the temperate glasshouse. The spikes have been slow to elongate, but next week I think some of the stocks will be in bloom. When the flowers finally do bloom, they’ll have an oft-washed blue color and will completely fill the stock. Even without flowers though, the stock is majestic. Packets of about eight buds apiece are arranged like cornrows along the stock and look like an army of caterpillars climbing toward the tip.








clear: flimsy breeze: 55ºF

Two weeks in early spring is too long to stay away from a botanical garden. Time and the keepers of this garden have done a lot while I’ve been away. The last of the pruning is finished. The bulb gardens have a fresh coat of decomposed leaf mulch. The less-than-prime-time bulbs have started to flower, and tulips pips and spirals are well above ground.

A bulb named Sternbergia candida was among the first to flower in the new Ottoman Garden. The sign identifying the bloom says it’s endangered. And rare it must be too since it isn’t even listed in Early Bulbs, the know-it-all guide to bulbs that bloom in the hedge season between winter and spring.

Turns out that Sternbergia candida is a relative of the more common Autumn Daffodil (Sternbergia lutea), a crocus-like flower that blooms in late fall in a shade that’s a dead-ringer for daffodil yellow. Candida though is white. It’s the only white flowering member of the family, I learned. It comes from the mountains of Southwestern Turkey where it’s called a “gravel daffodil.” I would guess gravel daffodils are endangered because too many folks are digging them up looking to make a fast buck while ignoring the conditions needed to keep the bulbs viable from harvest to replanting. This early morning, Candida was closed, so here’s a wonderful picture of a gravel daffodil in bloom in the Edgewoods Gardens, a huge bulb garden in Exton, Pennsylvania.

Last week I was thumbing through a copy of an in-flight magazine and saw a picture of a bronze bell with a fin dangling from the clapper. I read on because the bells featured in the article were so much like those hanging from a sculpture piece in the botanical garden where I walk.

“Soleri Bells,” the article calls them. The distinctive bells are cast in a workshop near Scottsdale, Arizona run by Paolo Soleri, an eco-architect. Each year his workshop makes and sells about 50,000 bells. The proceeds go toward building a town designed by Soleri to demonstrate that city-living need not destroy ecosystems.

In this botanical garden about a dozen Soleri windbells of varying sizes dangle from a gangly, bare-ribbed, decidedly unbotanical, iron scaffolding called a “Bell Tree.” Two walkers that we know never pass the Soleri bells without ringing them. They say if they passed without sounding the bells, their good luck just might end.

When I toured the botanical garden’s new Ottoman Garden last fall, our guide made special mention of the columnar juniper trees planted there. I remember he said that they came from Nebraska and that they were unique because while they would quickly grow to twenty-feet tall, they never would spread more than a few feet across. What I didn’t remember was the name of the tree.

This morning I saw a sign identifying the trees as Juniperus viginiana ‘Taylor.’ I looked up Taylor. It’s a town of 207 people smack in the middle of the Nebraska. Juniperus virginiana ‘Taylor’ is the town’s claim to fame because the tree was discovered growing in the wild near there about forty years ago. The Nebraska Statewide Arboretum learned about the tree and then took a leisurely decade to propagate and study it. Finding it hardy, disease resistant and adaptable to most soils, they introduced it to the nursery trade in 1992 and named it a "Great Plant for the Great Plains."

Why a tree from Nebraska in a garden named Ottoman though? The keepers of this garden are smart. I think they wanted the look of an Italian cypress (Cupressus sempervirens), a tall columnar tree native to Turkey. But they knew that any Italian Cypress planted in the Midwest would languish and soon die. So, they went for a doppelganger: -- ‘Taylor.’ Anyway, who’s going to know or care when these Nebraska beauties get their growth spurt?

Of all the hellebores the one I most hope to see in bloom is the Christmas Rose (Helleborus niger ‘Altifolius’). There’s only one clump of them in the botanical garden. They’re along a woodchip path in the English Woodland Garden: big cream-colored, generous blooms that face up, easy to spot at a time when most things are still grey or brown. Last year the frost turned the clump a sickly brown. This year though the display is glorious.

Like an eclipse, you have to be in the right place at the right time too see certain things in a botanical garden. In early morning when the sun is sharp and low in the sky, the exfoliating shards of the paper bark maples in the Japanese Garden “bloom.”