clear: calm: 37ºF


Downtown the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade will be starting soon.  This is the third year that this botanical garden has had a float in the parade.  And by some odd coincidence, this happens to be the third full year that the botanical garden has been headed by an Irishman from Kilkenny, Ireland. I haven’t seen the Garden’s float, but of course it will be green to reflect its theme: “Conserving the World’s Green.”  Lucky onlookers along the parade route will be handed real flowers by a troupe of parading flower people dressed up to look like daffodils or bearded irises.  No one’s saying whether the president of botanical garden will make a cameo appearance as a leprechaun.

Meanwhile back at the botanical garden, the shamrock along the edges of the walkways in the climate controlled Temperate Glass House has put on a fresh coat of green just in time for the big day.

Overlooking the bulb gardens is an untitled statue of a woman by Sheila Hale Burlingame.  I looked at the back of the stature this morning.   Clasped hands – a symbol of patience and expectation.  She waited and watched all though this cold, relentless winter waiting for spring.  Today for the first time, I think her wait has paid off.  All around the patient woman there are yellow aconites and white snowdrops blooming side by side.  Even the grass along the bulb garden is greener.

Here they are:  the Snow Crocus – the Tommies (Crocus tommasinianus).  They’re blooming here in the bulb garden and in scattered patches throughout the garden.  Their grass-like leaves are packed in tight clumps that expand each year.  In places, the Tommies have jumped their beds and tried to set up new colonies in the lawn.

Witchhazels are still spectacular.  The keepers of the Garden planted them in just the right places to catch the morning sun.  Pass early morning sunshine though the spidery petals and the effect is electric.  This yellow-orange variety is ‘Doerak.’ 

This is the only camellia I’ve ever seen that has a true rose-red color.  It’s named ‘Jinqu’ (Camellia edithae) and it’s just started to bloom in the Linnaean glasshouse.  The flowers haven’t fully opened but they still have an elegant look about them.  While ‘Jinqu’ wouldn’t survive outdoors in our winters, it does well a bit further south.  In a public garden in Austin that has an outdoor planting of ‘Jinqu,’ I saw this post written by the keeper of the camellias at the garden: “[the first blossom] on this plant was picked less than an hour after it opened. And the next flower AND THE ENTIRE BRANCH IT WAS ON was ripped from the plant shortly after. In order to save the plant from certain destruction, I was forced to remove all the rest of the buds. I will do the same thing again this year if people will not respect this plant and this garden.”  I’m certain the keepers of the botanical garden where I walk also have similar tales to tell.  It seems that for some visitors, experiencing beauty isn’t enough unless it’s possessed.  I’m hoping the blooms on the ‘Jinqu’ growing here will drop naturally when they’re spent.

I saw a group of four or five small Lego pieces on display in the Kemper Garden Center.  They’re a reminder that the Garden will be hosting a travelling show of larger than life Lego sculptures this summer.  The plan is to set up 25 Lego brick sculptures, all of which will have some connection to nature.  So I expect to see things like butterflies, rabbits, hummingbirds, and lily pads all made of colorful Lego pieces.  Unlike similar shows that place the Lego sculptures in outdoor areas, the show here will set them up in the Garden’s two large glasshouses.  An inside location means that admission can be charged to see the show, but it also assures that the pieces will be a bit more protected  from overly curious visitors or souvenir seekers.  As the keeper of the ‘Jinqu’ camellia learned, beauty needs protection.  The downside to an indoor exhibit means that all of plants inside these greenhouses will be off-limits to visitors unless they're willing to pay more money to see what they could have seen without the surcharge.

light wind: patches blue: 37ºF


Best not to dwell on the winter storm alert that promises freezing rain and sleet topped off with snow.  That’s to come.  Today though the ground is bare so late winter flowers are easy to find.  Snowdrops have begun to pop-up throughout the garden, but the biggest, most concentrated cluster of them is just inside the Bird Garden.  Hundreds of them are blooming in tightly packed colonies.  Each year the separate colonies get wider across and come closer to joining up to make a carpet of blooms

Since the snowdrops are blooming, I would have thought that buttercup-colored aconites and the hellebores would have followed suit.  I saw neither.  Many of the hellebore have had their spent foliage trimmed through and there is some vague signs of developing buds.  What surprised me was this cluster of dwarf iris in full flower.  See them in the rock garden just outside the temperate glasshouse.  They’re easy to miss because they’re only four or five inches tall and their petals are deep purple verging on black in places.  I think their early bloom must have surprised the keepers of the garden because even though the little flowers are blooming, they have no ID sign to name them.


It’s still much too early for forsythias, but not too early to begin cut a sprig or two, put them in a vase with a bit of water, and wait for them to bloom.  This morning after we left the botanical garden we visited the Art Museum.  Scattered in the entry hall were eight urns on pedestals each filled with a larger than life spray of forsythias. Who knew such a common, sometimes maligned little shrub could dress up so beautifully?

This was our lucky day.  We’ve visited the orchid show several times since it opened at the end of January.  Each time we visit, we head to the back of the display hall to look at the vanilla orchid (Vanilla aphylla) hoping to see a flower.  The yellow-green flowers of the vanilla orchid last only a day.  They open in the morning and close in the late afternoon.  Since we see this vanilla vine so infrequently, I thought our chances of ever seeing a flower were slim.  Today finally we got to see one – just one. The orchid on display here is not the workhorse of vanilla bean/flavoring industry the Vanilla planifolia.  This one is another of the 100 or so other species of Vanilla out there.  I read in Vanilla Orchids, a new book by Ken Cameron, that this one -- the Vanilla aphylla -- grows wild in places like Vietnam.  Cameron says it’s become a favorite of orchid growers because it takes well to cultivation in greenhouses and also has a reputation of flowering more frequently and more freely than other species of vanilla orchids.  It’s also unusual because it has no leaves.  Instead the flowers appear from a tangle of thick green climbing tendrils that the orchid seems to use for photosynthesis.


We saw this horizontal band of circular holes on a sugar maple tree in the Native Plants Garden.  It’s the signature mark of the yellow-bellied sapsucker.  I’ve read that the birds test many trees before settling on ones like the sugar maple that have the highest quality sap.  Then they feed on those repeatedly.  The sap that the birds don’t get oozes out and runs down the bark.  The bleeding sap dries there attracting insects and squirrels who feed on the sap while causing further damage to the tree.   So far the damage on this tree is confined to a few holes.  I’ll check back next week to see what happens.

Go to the Climatron, this botanical garden’s greenhouse that houses its tropical collection, to see the Jade Vine (Strongylodon macrobotrya) in full bloom.  Once a year about this time the vines sent out these chandeliers of clusters of waxy pea-like flowers.  They have color so vibrant that you’d swear they was photoshopped.  This year one of the chandelier of flowers is hanging down at eye-level – a rare chance to get a close look.