overcast: breezy: 60ºF

They’re here. The plants that will stay in this botanical garden’s main display beds all summer are in. These beds, close to the entrance to the garden, will be seen by tens of thousands of visitors before giving way to the garden’s fall display of mums.


Most of the plants that fill the beds are bedding-plant sized – each about a big as ones sold in quart-sized plastic pots. Most aren’t blooming yet so the beds look sparse. The browns of the soil and shredded leaf mulch still dominate the space. As I return each week though, I know I’ll see less and less soil.

This year the color scheme is hot – neon oranges and greens dominate. The shorter plants in front are lantana: a variety called ‘Patriot Classic Firewagon.’ It’s one in a series designed by Proven Winners to thrive in dry, hot summers. Behind the lantanas are ‘Profusion Orange’ zinnias. Their colors shift from the yellow side of orange to its burnt-red side. Like the lantanas, the Profusion series is touted as being able to ignore heat and drought. Unlike most other zinnias though, Profusions are not supposed to collect powdery mildew on their leaves. Backing the lantanas and zinnias are the limes of sweet potato vines and distinctive yellow-veined leaves of the orange-flowered Pretoria cannas. To accentuate all that’s bold and bright are two Abyssinian banana trees (Ensete ventricosum) with maroon-colored leaves. By August, I think either the sweet potato vines or the bananas will be king of the bed.

The Ottoman garden that opened less than two years ago has been redesigned. The blowsy, helter-skelter look created by planting flowers of different sizes that bloom at different times and then self-seed or spread unchecked is gone. The garden that once looked as though someone had mixed a dozen packets of seeds in a pouch and scattered them over the ground has been replaced by a formal garden of a dozen rectangular flower beds and a formal walkway lined with columnar junipers. To make the space even more regal, the patio arbor at the front of the Ottoman garden now has a throne chair decorated with sinuous carving. Any of the English Tutors would have felt right at home.


Lost in all this tidying up though is what I thought was the essence of an Ottoman Garden: “Westerners tend to think of gardens as the well-planted, beautifully tended and orderly areas that we know from trips to France's Versailles Palace [and] Britain's Royal Botanical Gardens . . . This seems to be such a totally Western concept that has yet to be adopted in Turkey,” so says an article in the Turkish Daily News. Whether the garden as it is now or was then is the “real” Ottoman palace garden I can’t say. I can say that the arrangement of plantings and of space in the 2008 version of it is much less engaging than it used to be.

When I was growing up, Memorial Day was called “Decoration Day.” At a Memorial Day service I attended at a national cemetery a speaker said the commemoration began when a few women aside a day to lay flowers on the graves of Union and Confederate solders. Later all servicemen and women were so honored. Now families remember all of their loved ones by putting or planting flowers on grave sites. In my family red geraniums were the flowers of choice. Nothing but peonies would do for my in-laws. This morning I saw another flower used to remember the dead: a white iris labeled “Species Iris (Iris Albicans). Origin: Saudi Arabia.”

The sign doesn’t say it, but I found that the flower is more commonly called the ‘White Cemetery Iris.” According to the Texas A&M Extension website, this iris has decorated gravesites for centuries – first in North Africa, then Spain, and finally in the United States. Tradition holds that even if this plant has purple blooms when grown in a home garden, the flowers will gradually turn to white if it is moved to a gravesite.

Each summer this botanical garden surprises me with some flower I’d never seen nor heard of before. In years past they were the silver Dichondras that trailed from pots hung on lampposts or the finger-like petals of purple Scaevolas or the breeze-teasing pink and white blooms of the Guaras. This year it’s a flower labeled Spurge (Euphorbia hypericifolia) ‘Diamond Frost.’

On the web, the descriptive word of choice for ‘Diamond Frost’ is “airy.” This relative of the poinsettia that looks more like Baby’s Breath from a distance has been winning horticultural awards from Dallas to St. Paul for four years now. Individually the flowers are spare resembling an off-kilter airplane propeller. When massed though -- splendid.