I wish I could fast-forward to August as I look at the plantings that just appeared in the display beds outside the Linnean House. Right now, the plants are very young. Not being very good at visualizing, my mind's eye goes blind when I try to see flowers and color carpeting every open patch of ground.

The keepers have a bold plan this year. For the tall plantings at the back of the beds, grasses, canna, and purple butterfly bushes got the nod. Next, fanning out in a chevron, are what I think are dwarf sunflowers of an unknown color (none of the identifying labels have been put in yet). Spreading out from the sunflowers are pentas. The border nearest the walkway is filled with ornamental peppers. Never would I have imaged such a grouping. I wonder if it will turn out to the inspiration of genius or the result of a committee decision?

Without fail, each week, Pat walks up to the vine of golden hops (Humulus lupulus 'Aurea') on the pergola near the Linnean House and says "I love that plant." It is stunning: leaves cut into three lobes; a chartreuse that glows softly in shade and electric when lit by sunlight; a full, soft blanket of leaves embracing the uprights.

Oh, what the hell? I can never have too many pictures of lupines.

















I went back to the German Garden for another look at the flower I thought might be edelweiss. I wasn't. I found a patch of it in an easy-to-get-to place. The label says it is Knautia. The National Garden Book says Knautia is a perennial with ties to the pincushion flower (Scabiosa). Like the pincushion the description goes on to say, the flower does well when cut and is good for drying. That may all be so, but I'm not interested. I want to see the edelweiss in bloom. On a web site somewhere, I read that in the edelweiss was prized in the late 1800s as a token of love. Suitors would risk their lives dangling on Alpine rock faces where these elusive flowers grow to pick a bouquet for their true love. For the sake of love or machismo, about fifty men a year fell to their deaths trying to snag a bunches of edelweiss. Could it be that some 21st century romantic picked the Garden's edelweiss?

Chinese ground orchids (Bletilla striata) are in bloom in woodsy, shady spots throughout the Garden. These exotic flowers always startle me with their orchid-like flowers draped from tall scapes that poke up from small clumps of speared-shaped leaves growing close to the ground. They look odd outdoors, as though they don't belong. When I first noticed them a few years ago, I thought someone had liberated them from a tropical greenhouse.

Botanical gardens reward quiet contemplation -- slow, deliberate movement. People who walk quickly or jog (God forbid) stand out. Those who are still; those who meander carrying note pads or cameras fit in. This morning I saw a group of three teenaged boys, munching on donuts from white bags that had each brought in with them. They walked quickly, they talked loudly, and they had good fun chasing one another around the maze. They stood out. Seeing them reminded me what a passive place these Gardens are and why the many who prefer engagement and activity stay away. Realizing this, I now understand why the Garden hosts special events and festivals of one kind or another nearly every weekend. They do it welcome the active: the people who may see garden as an attractive backdrop for shopping, food tasting, looking at exhibits, or engaging in conversation. Nothing wrong with that at all. These gardens are not monastic or scholarly preserves. We each must see them and use them as we will. I used to see the active side of the Garden as disturbing and disruptive. Now I see it as vital. Maybe next week, I'll chase someone around the maze.

This morning the local hosta society was selling plants that were donated by its members. Last year when I saw and smelled the huge white blooms of 'Aphrodite' hosta (Hosta plantaginea) in the Fragrance Garden, I knew I needed one for my own garden. I was in luck. There were two large pots of 'Aphodite' for sale. I bought them both. According to the description of 'Aphodite' in The Hosta Handbook, the plant was almost unknown until the late 1980s. Then it was smuggled from China into Germany. By the 1990s it began showing up in the gardens of hosta aficionados. Now with tissue culture, the plant is widely available. Too bad such a lovely plant has such a tainted story.

I think foxgloves have to be the most photogenic of flowers. I know I have way too many pictures of them, so this year I resisted (so far). Anyone know of a support group I can join?

The leaf miners already have discovered some of the columbine leaves. I know many consider their subcutaneous tunnels ugly and disfiguring, but some more artistic than I think of them as nature's graceful etch-a-sketch. I wonder if there are those who can read the future in the paths the insects make?

Deep inside a bed in the German Garden is a patch of edelweiss (Leontopodium alpinum). I've been intrigued by it ever since reading that last July, the keepers had to pack the patch in ice to trick it into thinking it was that still high in the German Alps. I've never seen edelweiss in bloom, and, not being one to trample though flower beds, I couldn't get close enough to be certain that the fuzzy flower I saw through my not-so-good zoom lens really was an edelweiss. When I compared what I saw with the picture and description of the flower in the National Garden Book, I think it could be an edelweiss, except for one thing: the book says the flowers are white. The plant I saw has red flowers. A mystery.

The miniature date palms are back in place in their niches outside the Linnean House. They didn't overwinter in the Linnean House, but they could have, and perhaps did in other, earlier times. I wonder if the well-heeled and titled folk of Victorian times had coming-out parties when their treasured tropicals left the protection of their orangeries.

Fringe trees (Chionanthus) with their lacy wind-compliant streamer-like blossoms are in flower. In some places the tree/shrubs toss their flower-laden limbs invitingly over the walk ways. I tried to smell the clusters of strings as I passed, but just ended up getting my nose tickeled.

This is prime time for bearded irises. Odd that the keepers of the garden should choose this time of year to renew the beds. Parts of the iris garden have even been cordoned off with yellow caution tape. With so much digging, there would scarcely have been a display at all this year. To provide the expected spectacle, new irises, many in full bloom, have been brought in to fill in. Many of the new comers still have magic marker brands on their leaves. Still even without blooms, I often stroll though the iris patch just read the names that breeders have given to their creations: Close Shave, Men in Black, Credit Line, Mind Readers, Kiwi Cheeecake, Skywalker, Starship Enterprise, and Broadway Joe. How names get attached to blooms must be a story in itself.

Young creatures are appearing. Last week we saw a pair of mallards with a brood of about a dozen ducklings (ever try to count ducklings?) and a fuzzy Canada gosling trailing close behind its makers. This morning the waning bulb garden sheltered a pair of bunnies watched over by their mom.

Columbines. I wish they bloomed all season. Their shapes, their pure solid colors, their exotic bi-colors, the frosty color of their delicately cut leaves, and the way they play with the breeze. I think I could become obsessed with this flower. If not careful I could get drawn into planting more of them, learning more about them, or even finding a columbine fanciers group to join. I need to temper my enthusiasm by thinking about with what comes after flowers fade: leaf miners and brown singed leaves. But then there are the beautiful small shiny black seeds . . .

The two heat-stressed weeping birches outside the Lymann Building are gone. Last summer, keepers lavished attention on these two and they waited this long into spring to see if signs of life appeared. Not to be. Just two stumps and a now meaningless label are left.

A new one for me: fuchsia (Fuchsia 'Leineperle') as a bedding plant. I nearly walked by them in German Garden because they looked so much like impatiens. They were planted in partial shade and were just about the same size and shape as impatiens. Then as I looked more closely, I saw their distinctive fuchsia bi-color, the white petticoats, and oversized tongues. I wonder if fuchsia as bedding plants is an extravagance only the Garden can afford or whether this is a sneak peek at a new affordable plant that will soon appear at garden centers.

Many of the trees and shrubs in the Garden have two metal tags loosely attached their lower limbs or branches. One tag is the botanical name of plant. The other always has a green stripe along the bottom. Today, I got close enough to read the green tag on a crabapple tree:

The kiss of the sun for pardon,
the song of the birds for mirth,
One is nearer God's heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth.

Happy Birthday Margaret W. Murphy
November 1, 1995

A stanza from "God's Garden" by Dorothy Frances Gurney to cheer visitors like me and to mark the birthday of a Margaret W. Murphy. From buildings, to theme gardens, to benches and shrubs, so many people have followed the lead of people like Margaret W. Murphy. In return for their money, they get a plaque, a place that carries their name, or a green-stripped tag on a tree. I seldom think about it, but if all those people had found other uses for their money, none of us would have reason to want to walk here today.

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Kingsblood tulips are some of the boldest reds still in bloom. Dozens of them have been planted in the corners of the Garden's courtyard. They were a uniform field of color, about the shade of Julia Robert's dress in Pretty Woman. Except for one. It was etched with yellow flames from its base to the end of its the petals. Odd I should see this renegade just as I finished a book by Michael Pollan called The Botany of Desire. In it he recounts that the tulip frenzy of 17th Century Holland was stoked by tulips that had been "broken" by a still unknown virus. Especially prized were the tulips with breaks that had pure, vivid colors that extended from cup to petal tips with edges along the sides that were filigreed or feathered. Finding such a specimen was akin to having a winning lottery ticket, he said. If a 17th century Dutchman spotted the Kingsblood I saw, he likely would have torn up his ticket. The breaks on this one were splotchy and dull. The feathering was filmy and ill-defined. Still, prize or not, it was satisfying to see nature asserting itself in this place of planning and predictability.

I remembered that Pollan described a similar experience: He spotted a red break in one tulip among hundreds of vibrant yellow ones planted along Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. I looked up his words when I got home: "And there was something thrilling about it-I could hardly believe my luck. To me that careless splash of red seemed almost like a visitation-of the distant past, yes, for here was the return of the virus so assiduously repressed, but of something else too, some inchoate, underground force that riveted me. It was as if the whole grid of flowers and, by extension, the grid of the city itself had been put in doubt by that one ecstatic, wayward pulse of life."

Manchurian lilacs are in bloom all over the Garden. Over the years, Pat and I have tried to take pictures of them, but their small, delicate flowers that cluster in tight bunches always come out looking like orchid-colored blobs. Anyhow, these beauties are best enjoyed by sniffing. Of all the late season lilacs, 'Miss Kim' (Syringa patula) is my favorite, even though by next week I know she will have disappeared.

On a splendid day such as this, it doesn't take much imagination to see Henry Shaw standing on the balcony of his house looking out at the prairie land he was transforming into a botanical garden like the one he saw at Kew. Looking out to the left, I wonder if Shaw would have seen the sapling that would turn itself into the massive Scotch elm (Ulmus glabra) that this morning has covered the lawns and walks with its translucent envelopes of seed protectors. Whether Shaw planted this elm or not, he surely would have been aware of Londoner's fierce opposition to cutting down some elms in Hyde Park to make way for a building to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. In what turned into an ingenious compromise, designer Joseph Paxton replaced the flat roof in his original building plan with a vaulted barrel of glass tall enough to enclose the 90-foot elms and then some. Whether Shaw wanted to remember the elms he saw in the building dubbed the "Crystal Palace" as he planned the plantings he would see from his balcony, I don't know. I like to think he did.

Aside from an invented history, this Scotch elm is even more remarkable just because it still is alive. After seeing it so hale and hearty, I thought it must an elm that had some special dispensation from Dutch elm disease. Not so it seems. An advisory from the University of California extension warns that Scotch elms "are especially susceptible to both elm leaf beetles and Dutch elm disease. Do not plant these species and consider replacing them in areas where they are growing." Thanks this morning to all the keepers of this Garden for looking after this beautiful tree for so many years and for not heeding the advice of those California nay-sayers.


The most photographed scenic view in the Garden has to be the annual blooming of the billowing orchid and white azaleas crowding in on the waterfall in the Japanese Garden. It's used by the Garden on postcards, calendars, souvenirs, and recently on the front of soft drink machines discretely positioned throughout the grounds. Just for fun, I thought I'd join the parade and take my own pictures of the real azaleas and the ones rendered to dispense Cokes, oh so tastefully.

Anyone who has ever gardened can understand this dilemma: Three neat rows of young tomatoes, each plant with its own supporting stake have been planted. Then, between one of the rows, another row has been put in: no stakes and really much too close to the "real" rows. Like us amateurs, it looks as though even the professional keepers just can't bear to toss away extras that they so lovingly grew from seed. Like us, they always find a place for them or keep them, just in case.

We returned to the Garden café with wet feet and pants soaked to the knees from rain blown sideways. Few casual visitors are around this morning. The regulars divided themselves in three categories: those who holed up in the café deciding that staying dry was better that wet feet; those who ignored the weather, walking steely-eyed through the downpour; and those excessively cheery types who greeted us warmly as though to affirm that they couldn't be crazy to be out in this weather because others were out too.

As the water soaked through out waterproof shoes, we were tempted to join the café category, but we decided to go on at least half way in to the Tower Grove House before heading back.

It's as though fairy dust was scattered over every tree and shrub last week. Within the week, every leafy thing has its coat of summer. Open vistas have again been closed by a green curtain. To finish off the spring, evergreens have begun to candle and sprout fuzzy yellow-green tufts on their deep green branches. The giant bald cypress trees have just started to green. From a distance, they look as though they've developed a green day-old beard.

Buds of irises are plump and tense. One of the flowers of summer--the daylily--has already bloomed. This year's first: a miniature electric orange called 'Middendorf.'

Driving rain in late April probably is not prime time for looking at early tulips. Even in fine weather I easily can ignore masses of single-colored tulips. Neither do those two-colored ones with regular, predictable colorations excite me. But, I always take a closer look at any tulip, early or late, that has petals streaked with feathers or flames of vivid color. Maybe my excitement goes back to the tulipomania days of the early 1600s when these streaky varieties were so prized. Planted around the gazebo in the rose garden, I saw the end of the season for a early blooming variety called 'Monsella.' The petals were a daffodil shade. In irregular places the petals were pierced by fingers of deep burgundy. 'Monsella' reminded me of a tulip called 'Bizarre' that sticks out of a glass vase of flowers in a painting done at the height of the tulip craze by Dutch master Bosschaert. A book on flowers and fruit published by the National Gallery in London says that tulips quickly began appearing in most of Bosschaert's paintings when he found that the tulip-dazed Dutch would happily pay ten times more for a painting of a vase of flowers if it included tulips.

Yesterday a catalog from bulbsellers McClure and Zimmerman arrived reminding me to order for spring 2003. 'Monsella' the catalog says is a triple threat: it forces well; its blooms last; and most surprising of all for a tulip, it is very fragrant. I will order some.

Rain has a sway on early morning walkers in the Garden. It slows them down. Visitors seem more willing to pause and stop more often to see how the steady stream of water mixes with the colors of spring. Solitary men and women walk on the wet lawns far from concrete paths. Couples, young and old, saunter hand-in-hand. I put an ample umbrella between me and the rain. Others use caps, hoods, or yellow ponchos. A few have nothing, choosing to let the rain have its way with them.

Once a week visits aren't enough for a spring like this one. Blooming things seem in a rush to flower and die. Few flowers seem to willing to wait their turn to bloom: midseason and late-blooming tulips are flowering together; daffodils and wisteria are both in bloom. It's one of those rare years when summer seems to be nudging spring to get on with it and then get out the way.

Lilacs have always been one of my favorite shrubs. Their enveloping scent draws me back in time to the shrubs in my grandmother's yard and the packed vases of those orchid flowers that adorned Mary's altar during masses in May. In the Garden near the dry streambed a new clump of lilacs called 'Monge' has been planted. The three shrubs are still small, but they each have a few tight clusters of deep purple flowers. My feet got soaked walking over the spongy ground to get to the patch. They'll dry.

From the internet I learned that 'Monge' was named for the 18th century French mathematician and revolutionary Gaspard Monge. It was introduced in 1913 by the Lemoine family in Nancy, France. Lilacs were a passion and business for Victor Lemoine and his son Emile who between them hybridized over 200 new varieties from 1870 to 1940. Lilacs of all kinds are celebrated annually at The Arnold Arboretum in Boston. The Arboretum has about 230 different kinds growing on 500 shrubs. Each year on Mother's Day they celebrate Lilac Sunday--a festival of color and scent. If I ever get a chance to take my mother or my wife to the lilac's party, I shall of course wear purple.

Nearly every plant in the Garden is marked by a black tombstone stake. Printed on the stake in white letters is the common name of the plant, its botanical name, and its native habitat. Exempt from this labeling are the plants in the Japanese Garden where education takes a backseat to contemplation and meditation. This morning though a tombstone marker appeared beside the most spectacular of all flowering Japanese cherries-- the Prunus serrulata 'Kwanzan.' Rainsoaked branches packed with clusters of deep pink blossoms hanging like grapes were leaning over the walkway begging to be noticed. Of all the flowering cherries in the Garden, the Kwanzans have the largest blooms. They are the ones most likely to be photographed and to appear on the covers of the Life Style sections of Sunday papers.

With all the pinks and whites on trees and shrubs, spotting some yellow was refreshing. On the fringes of English Woodland Garden, was a young Cucumber Tree (Magnolia acuminata 'Miss Honey Bee'). Its lemon-colored, silky petals had just opened. The color made me think the flowers might have a citrusey scent. But if it did, it must have been too delicate to overcome the heavy rain.

More yellow. Plus, the first rose of the season: the rosa xanthina. This 10-foot shrub is planted with its front to the rose garden and its back to the Chinese Garden. A nearby marker says it's from Northern China and Korea, so a placement on the border of East and West couldn't have been better. Rosa xanthina has simple yellow flowers, reminding me of pasture roses. The flowers cling to branches that splay from the center. Pretty as it is, the huge height of the shrub seems strangely at odds with the delicacy of the flowers, leaves, and arching canes.

I should have taken a couple of aspirin this morning. The warm weather this week invited me into my patch of outdoors to do more stooping and bending than my limbs and back could handle. Spring stiffness: it's a welcome hurt.

Increase my taxes, go ahead. On a day like this I'd gladly pay more to continue to keep the Garden as part of our communities life. The leading edge of spring has engulfed everything this week. It's that once-a-year time when beauty gives up being subtle and rare. Dazzling hues and jolting color combinations are everywhere. It's a day when I feel like a kid at Disney World: I want to do and see everything at once.

Seemed odd, but welcome. A woman in full bridal regalia was being led around and posed by a photographer just after 7 a.m. on a foggy morning.

Daffodils in every imaginable shape and color combination are at every turn. This is the season of the attention-grabbing large-cup varieties. My favorite is still 'Professor Einstein' (left) with its bright orange-red heart surrounded by pure white overlapping petals. The Professor got my attention a few years ago when it was featured prominently in the Swift Bulb Garden -- prime real estate for spring displays. I can't find it there anymore, but I did see hundreds of them in the English Woodland Garden and in the rock garden above the Prairie Garden. This year the Garden's choice for featured daffodil is one called 'Romance.' Clumps of these picture-perfect beauties have been planted in the Swift Perennial Garden where they vie with nothing else for attention. 'Romance' has the quality of fine porcelain with no sharp edges. Tasteful, beyond doubt.

In the strange, but true category, put the 'Juno' Iris. The flags perch on top of two-foot high stocks that look like field corn. Then there's the even stranger looking plant in the Chinese Garden that looks like a yellow artichoke. Beyond the usual black stake poked into its container pot that labels it as 'Musella,' there's nothing. Even since I saw the conservatory and surrounding gardens at White River Gardens in Indianapolis where keepers make such good efforts to help visitors understand what they are seeing, I get impatient and annoyed at this Garden where the provocative and rare often go without comment.

The lone mallard drake in the reflecting pond has been joined by two others. Still not a female in sight. In the bird garden, the purple martin 'scouts' have at last arrived. By next week I put odds on the return of the whole flock.

Knots of yellow blossoms cover the sassafras trees in the Mausoleum Garden. The tags nailed to their trunks say the trees are native to the Eastern and Midwestern States. There are aging trees mixed in with ones still not mature enough to bloom. I wonder if the old trees are the ones Shaw saw as he looked out over the Garden from his house. I wonder too why a proper Victorian like Shaw would have planted such ordinary, folksy trees in an age when the exotic was in vogue.

"Cherry Alley" in the Japanese Garden is a sheet of 'Yoshino' cherry trees (Prunus yedoensis) orchestrated somehow to bloom at the same time. The hillside of the Alley has dozens of trees planted in a sweeping half-circle. The 'Yoshino' are the prominent among the cherry trees planted to stun visitors to Washington's Tidal Basin: vast numbers of white blossoms with a nutty scent that appear before the green does to form a billowing white canopy over the grass. Yesterday I happened on a web site done by a video game programmer who is studying Japanese in Tokyo. He describes the 'Yoshinos' are "giant trees covered with popcorn. I don't know how else to describe it. It's amazing!" That it is. I know I'm coming back again in a day or two when the white is magnified by a blue sky.

One of my springtime favorites: the ornamental peach (Prunus persica 'Bonfire') is in full flower today. Clusters of pink blossoms completely outline its outstretched forked branches.

'Tiger' -- what a perfect name for this little viola planted in pots lining the steps to the pavillion in the Chinese Garden.

Somewhere inside the thick rug of Junipers that border the ponds, Pat thinks there must be a nesting hen. So far, we haven't seen her. Nesting too, but in clear view on the bank of Turtle Island in the Japanese Garden, is a Canada goose (I used to call them Canadian geese, but my mother-in-law set me right). Last week we saw her gathering materials for her nest. This week, with a watchful male balanced on one foot standing by, she has settled in.

Just over the plank bridge in the Japanese Garden are two weeping cherry trees doing what I wait all year to see. It's times like these that I wish I had taken a course in watercolor painting. For the expansive arches covered in pink, photos just won't do. Photoshop tries, but fiddling with settings and sliders isn't the same as plein air.

Pussy willows are funny this time of year. Fuzzy and plump, moving with the wind, they have a comical quality about them. They seem relieved to be freed from the formal elegance of the days when people stopped to call them "lovely."

I saw this thing nestled in among the backside of a planting of azaleas where visitors who stay on the walks would be unlikely to spot. About the size of a birdhouse, it was filled little cylinders of hollowed-out bamboo packed together like a pack of cigarettes. On the back was mounted something that looked like a rain gauge. There was no label so I can only guess what it might be--a feeding station for bees? a waystation for wasps? a trap for unwanteds?

A new tree has been planted near the north gates to the Mausoleum. I was startled to see that it was an elm (Ulmus 'Accolade'). The initials for trademark that appeared in a tiny superscript above 'Accolade' made me curious. I know there is an mature old Chinese Elm in the garden, but I thought that new elms weren't being planted because of jitters about Dutch elm disease. When I got home, I did some looking about elms in general, and this tree in particular. I learned that Dutch elm disease is caused by a fungus that clogs the cells that carry water and nutrients to the leaves and branches. When the disease hits, the leaves on a branch or two begin to wilt; then more leaves wilt on more branches. Eventually the tree dies. The fungus moves from tree to tree by roots that touch and by a bug called the elm bark beetle. As the beetles burrow into an infected tree, some of the fungal spores stick to their backs. Then as the beetles move on, so do the spores.

Dutch elm disease arrived in the United States in the early 1930s aboard a ship that carried some beetles tucked inside a cargo of logs. As the disease took hold and spread, it wiped out millions of the elm trees that shaded Norman Rockwell's America. I found out that the elm tree 'Accolade' planted in Garden is the result of breeding work going on since the 1970s at Morton Arboretum, in Lisle, Illinois, west of Chicago. According to the Arboretum's web site, Morton "has the most extensive collection of elm species in the country, and perhaps the world." In the 1980s, Morton Arboretum teamed up with the Chicago Botanic Garden and the Ornamental Growers Association of Northern Illinois to form a collaborative called Chicagoland Grows. Together, they "work with other industry professionals throughout North America to select, evaluate, produce and market new and recommended plant cultivars with proven performance under Northern growing conditions." The 'Accolde' Elm is one of ChicagoLand Grows introductions to the nursery trade. If the 'Accolade' elm in the Garden performs as expected, it will, of course, ward off fungus and insect attacks. It will have glossy dark green leaves in summer brighted to yellow in the fall. It will grow quickly to the height of an oak topping out with a fountain-like splay of branches. Let's wish it well each time we pass.