rain: light breeze: 55ºF

Spring came. Now it’s gone. Since I was here last Saturday, the blossom stems of the tulips in the large display gardens have been cut off leaving just the bloated leaves. The only spring color left is from the pansies that were interplanted with the tulip bulbs last fall. The one spring bulb I especially wanted to see but never found was ‘Pink Flush,’ a new all-pink daffodil mentioned in the botanical garden’s magazine. Disappointingly, the variety must be so new or so rare that I couldn’t even find a picture of one the web.

For weeks now the water level in the four and a half acre lake in the Japanese Garden had been getting lower. Last week we asked a garden regular whether he knew why. He told us it had to do with some repair work on the wooden drum bridge and the installation of yet another Dale Chihuly outdoor glass sculpture. The sculpture was to be hung under the semicircular bridge and then lit with small spotlights.


Since the Chihuly show opens tomorrow, we returned to the Japanese Garden to see what had been done. The water level in the lake now is nearly back to normal and the Chihuly glass work is in place. Like other Chihuly works, this one is eye-catching. It’s a tangle of red-orange contorted glass branches bundled together in a triangular shape. The glass piece and it’s reflected double immediately become a focal point in this garden that encourages visitors to look inward. Yet the Chihuly piece, despite a color that mimics the flamboyance of Girard ‘Hot Shot’ azaleas, feels as though it belongs here. I think its placement helps to tone down its flashiness. By hanging the piece under the bridge rather that dangling it like a beacon from a branch in a tall tree, the sculpture is partially concealed and bit mysterious. Aside from aesthetics, I like that this piece is far the entrance to the garden. It becomes a special treat for visitors who go this deep into the garden.

Ever since I spotted the Wollemi Pines that were planted outdoors, I’ve been watching them to see if they would recover from winter. Two trees were planted at the edge of a bank of forsythia near the dry garden and a third was set deep inside the English woodland garden. The tiny trees, each only about two feet tall, didn’t survive the winter. All retain their original shape. Their branches and needles are intact, but they are brown and lifeless. Another Wollemi Pine planted inside the temperate glasshouse is thriving.

Several newly installed benches in the Japanese Garden gleam in the rain. The rain gives their unfinished surfaces a varnish-like sheen. The metal plaques on the benches say “Jensen Fine Furniture Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.” The Jensen of Jensen Fine Furniture is Russell Jensen. Jensen is a cabinet maker whose unassuming, yet ambitious goal is to “create the most beautiful and well crafted furniture to the best of my ability.” The bench in the garden is made of high quality kiln dried teak. The joints on Jensen’s benches are all “traditional joinery such as dovetail and mortise and tendon.” The result is simplicity and grace and beauty. A bench made with such care by Mr. Jensen costs $3200.

For a couple of years now, the keepers of this botanical garden have been experimenting with growing Asian Mayapples in the English Woodland Garden. This garden is mostly shade with soil enriched from decomposing leaves. There are plenty of the ordinary native mayapples growing here in lush wild colonies, but the Asian varieties get more pampering. They are grown under wire cages to protect them from munching squirrels and rabbits and are mulched heavily in winter to keep them snug. The most spectacular of these exotic mayapples is named ‘Spotty Dotty.’ The leaves are lime-green marked with irregularly shaped dark green spots that look like moles or blood blisters. Plant Delights, a nursery that sells ‘Spotty Dotty,’ describes the leaves this way: “If you secretly admired kids with the measles when you were young, this type of variegation is for you.” I can’t wait to see what the flowers look like.







overcast, then clear skies: light breeze: 60ºF

The Dale Chihuly glass exhibit opens next weekend. The botanical garden has been preparing for the expected crowds all winter. A new entrance plaza complete with toll booths and turnstiles is in place. A new restaurant is nearly ready. The gift shop is well-stocked with books about Chihuly. On the botanical garden’s web site, visitors now can buy advance tickets to the show.

Chihuly’s exhibits in botanical gardens in Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, Columbus, and London have drawn record crowds. At the Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden near Miami, attendance tripled during the first month of the Chihuly show. School visits were up, as were bookings for weddings, receptions, and corporate meetings. Best of all, the keepers of the Fairchild said, the botanical garden broadened its appeal “beyond its traditional set of older, generally more staid fans” to include “even the most unreachable group of all - the 20-30-something fashionable crowd.”

Will similar crowds throng to see the Chihuly exhibit at this botanical garden too? Whenever I think of preparation and crowds, I remember Pope John Paul II's visit to St. Louis in 1999. The newspapers predicted traffic jams extending fifteen miles in all directions from downtown. Some suburban schools closed so that kids would not be trapped in buses stalled on side roads for hours. Mass transit lines planned to operate 24-hours a day to accommodate the expected crowds. Hospital emergency rooms were geared-up to deal with a thousand extra patients each day the Pope was in town. The city was ready. The Pope arrived. The next day the newspaper reported “After weeks of warnings about enormous crowds, bumper-to-bumper traffic and tight security, St. Louis in the end was a city braced for hundreds of thousands of papal spectators who never made it to the show. The pope got here Tuesday, so where were the huge crowds and the traffic jams?. Traffic reporters and law enforcement agencies agree that the roads . . . were virtually congestion-free most of Day 1 of Pope John Paul II's visit. Some likened it - perhaps appropriately - to a Sunday morning.”

I’m sure the planners of the Chilhuly show at this botanical garden think of that Papal visit and then quickly dismiss thoughts of any similarities. Still, with millions of dollars likely already spent, the members of the board must be feeling like the president of the board of the botanical garden in Miami did just before the Chihuly show opened there: ''We didn't know if we built, they would come. Our hearts were beating fast a couple days before it opened.”

The majority of the Chihuly glass works at the exhibit here will be tucked into and among the tropical plants inside the Climatron glasshouse. To see those, visitors will have to pay an additional admission fee. Outside though, there’s a lot to see for free. This morning, I got a sneak preview of Chihuly’s outdoor pieces. Four installations were in place when arrived this morning.





The first was visible from doors leading to the garden grounds. The piece was a collection of bolder-shaped translucent blue plastic blocks stacked up one on top of the another. The stack was placed in the center of a circular fountain. Next, I saw a half-circle of wildly curling yellow pieces topping the formal arches of the gates on both sides of the rose garden. Further on, the reflecting ponds were dotted with anchored giant bobbers of colored glass that Chihuly calls "Walla Wallas", and finally in a middle of a nearby small pond, there was rowboat, brim-full of end–of-the-spectrum colored shapes of blown glass.

At each of the installations, the glass shapes and colors and their quirky arrangements and placements caused visitors to talk, point, giggle, and take pictures. I even saw a visitor who was walking alone stop by one of the pieces, flip open her cell phone, and make a call because she couldn’t wait to pass on her pleasure. Beauty, awe, conversation, and fun: Chihuly 's come up with appealing mix.

Last week I went on about how I missed the old terracotta planter pots and how much I disliked their new plastic replacements. As I was looking for an angle to take a picture of the Chihuly blocks in the fountain, I happened to see one of the old terracotta pots that the Garden had used for so many seasons before. I’m glad it’s back and back in use again.





Lots of tulips still are in bloom – mainly the tall, single, late-season varieties. I could take pictures of them, but I won’t. I’m satiated with perfect, individual tulips. Now I just want to want to see expanses of them. I’m ready to nudge spring along. So I think are most of us. After leaving the botanical garden, I rode around my suburban neighborhood looking for plantings of late-season tulips. Except for ones I planted (‘Sorbet’ - a tall variety with over-sized white petals streaked with toned-down red flames that I saw in the botanical garden last year), all of the tulips are gone. Mid-season tulips are the preferred varieties around here. They bloom when we can attend to them. Tulips that bloom in late-April have to complete with clouds of azaleas and the azaleas win.

clouds: sharp north wind: 36ºF

Yesterday: 80 degrees; this morning: the mid-thirties. I look at daffodils and tulips while wearing a down coat zipped as high as I can get it to go and trying to keep my dripping nose wiped. The real weather doesn’t matter to me or to the crowds of visitors packing the botanical garden this morning. The month is April, and we are all asserting it is April regardless of the weather. Two weddings will take place outdoors today. A grassy section of the garden has been cordoned off for an Easter egg hunt. The Easter bunny is here to greet kids walking the grounds with their pink and purple Easter baskets. Parents pushing strollers are clustering around the entrance of the newly-openly children’s garden waiting for the gates to open at 10:00 a.m.

I watch for other signs of the garden returning to life. Some of the fountains have been turned on. Hanging baskets topped with heat-loving Cobbity Daisies have been put in place, and a few of the over-sized pots are back.

I’m disappointed with the pots selected by the keepers of the garden this year. In years past the pots – some three to four feet across and a couple of feet tall were made of dirt-colored terracotta. Cascading tiers of decorative scallops lined the sides of the pots. The pots were as interesting as the plants they held. This year the pots are just as large, but they are made of plastic decorated with faux copper patina accents. I’ve read about these kinds of pots. They are made like death masks. Molds are taken from antique, one-of-a kind Italian renaissance terracotta pots. Then polyethylene resin is poured into molds to make the knock-offs. These “aged Tuscan terracotta effect pots and containers” have lots of advantages. They are light. They don’t fade, crack, or chip. They don’t show the stains of soluble salts that leach out and eat away at the clay. Best of all, they will last forever and they cost half as much. On the downside, I think they look tacky.

Who could have planned it any better? Clumps of variegated hostas planted under a flowering crab tree have pushed themselves up just far enough to show their colors while at the same time the pink petals of crab blooms have just begun to fall.

Triumph tulips have begun to bloom. They are “the quintessential tulip,” so says the book Gardening with Tulips that I borrowed from the library.

The Triumph is the icon of a tulip in my mind’s eye; it blooms on a tall stem; it stands up to spring weather; and it stays fresh looking in a vase for a very long time. Since I usually order Triumph tulips to plant around my house, I am especially interested looking at the kinds of triumphs the keepers of this botanical garden pick to plant. This morning I saw ‘Zurel’ and immediately put it on my wish list for 2007. When mature, it’s pure white with jagged flames of watered down merlot that rise from the cup.

Zurel is the name of Dutch flower marketer that buys and exports more than 150 million cut flowers and plants to sixty countries every year. Zurel says it picks flowers to sell based on their “understanding of constantly changing consumer behaviour.” Like fashion designers, they probably use color forecasting to determine palettes of tulip colors that will be “in” a year or two from now. The ‘Zurel’ tulip is likely the result of some market research that was done a few years ago. So then, do I like ‘Zurel’ because I find the color combination appealing or did a focus group convened a few years ago decide that in 2006, I would like a white tulip with elegantly fashioned flames?

It looked like a chokecherry tree in full bloom, but I knew it wasn’t. Botanical gardens don’t usually give safe haven to things like chokecherries, chicory, or dandelions. The small tree was off the walk near the giant redwoods. The sign near the tree called it a Bird Cherry (Prunnus padus). Flora: The Gardener’s Encyclopedia, says its also called a European Bird Cherry or a Mayday Tree. It’s native from Europe east to Japan and produces small bitter fruit that only birds care to bother with. Unlike a chokecherry which I remember as having drooping spikes of flower clusters, the Bird Cherry carries its lines of white blooms on upright spikes. The flowers do have some smell, but it was too cold for them to work up a full head of scent.