clear: easy breeze: 43ºF


A big slice of the botanical garden’s parking lot has been cordoned off. Wooden crates the size of storage rooms fill the space. Some of the crates are still sealed; others have been opened and unpacked. The sculptures for the Niki de Saint Phalle exhibit that will be here for the summer have arrived.

Several of the pieces already have been put into place inside the Garden. “#23 Basketball Player,” the action sculpture of Michael Jordan being guarded as he goes in for a lay-up, is here. When the piece was shown last summer in Chicago it was placed at the far end of an open expanse of lawn. Here too it has lots of open space around it. Behind it in the distance the half circle of the botanical garden’s geodesic dome is clearly visible. #23 faces north which let its crazed-glass, mirror-like mosaics pick up the early morning sunlight. When I arrived at about 8 a.m., the statue was a patchwork of reflected light and shadows.

It’s a good year for magnolias – both the stars and saucers. Temperatures have been consistently cool, but without the up and down spikes that prod the trees into blooming and then hits them with a freeze when they do. I took dozens of pictures trying to cage what I saw. Most turned out well. None bought back what I saw. My photos of specimen-sized trees look like pointillist patches of white. The ones I took with my macro button switched on look fine, but they’re just photos of a bloom or two, not the expanses of white and pink that I see in all directions.

The grounds around the glass and stone mausoleum where this botanical garden’s founder Henry Shaw has been entombed since 1889 had been closed for construction since last fall. With construction of improved walkways and new garden areas complete, the grounds have reopened. Just as the morning sun makes Niki de St. Phalle’s #23 sparkle, so too does it light the stylized stained-glass flowers in the mausoleum’s east window.

Since I’ve been looking for some drip irrigation tubing to lay down around the shrubs planted around the front of my house, I was curious about what kind of irrigation system the keepers of this botanical garden would use around the newly refurbished maze garden. This morning new tubing was in place. The unusual thing about the tubing used here is that it has no visible emitters – just open holes in the tube placed about a foot and a half apart. I checked the web to find out what the tubing was. My bet is that it’s a tubing called “Techline.” This is top-of-the-line stuff. The emitters are embedded inside the tubing so that from the outside just a hole and a slight bulge are visible. The emitters inside are “pressure regulated” so that they send out the same amount of water all along the line, even on slopes. The emitters are designed to tolerate particles of dirt getting inside without damaging or clogging them.

I missed seeing the pussy willows open this year. The pussy willow shrubs grow at the far end of the Japanese Garden. Earlier this year I saw a few of the catkins open, but I didn’t get by again until their soft fur had turned to fluff.

I bought an orchid today. First one ever. I’ve resisted orchids all my life: too much trouble, too much effort with too little chance of success. My wife says she likes olives, but never eats them. I’ve been the same with orchids: I like them, but I’ve never want to have one of my own. But this morning I was browsing the sale table in the botanical garden’s shop – the one where the banished orchids no longer in bloom get marked down -- and saw ‘Sharry Baby’ (Not to be confused with Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons: Sher – er – rrry, Sherry Baby). I bought it.

My orchid is an Oncidium that according to its tag was planted in October 2005 and came from Quintal Farms, an orchid grower on the Big Island of Hawaii. I know ‘Sharry Baby’ was blooming a few weeks ago because I singled it out to smell. Somewhere I read that it is supposed to smell like chocolate. It did: a semi-sweet, expensive variety. I’m not certain I’ll be able to care for ‘Sharry Baby’ the way the flyer from the American Orchid Society says I must, but I’ll try until either one of us gives up.