clear: calm: 75ºF

Days of long, slow rains and cooler temperatures have revitalized the botanical Garden. Plants and flowers that seemed ready to call it a season just a week ago now have taken on richer colors. Creepers and ground covers have used the week to carpet the remaining patches of ground. Especially prominent this morning was an unnamed ground cover used extensively in the bulb garden. With its mature leaves and central veins lined in olive and its younger ones accented in shades of purple, the trailers gives the plot that once featured tulips and daffodils an exotic, tropical look.

Odd what gets noticed when a big, prominent plant is taken away. A tall spreading Peking willow tree in the Chinese Garden that likely was planted when the Chinese Garden opened a decade ago is gone. It was a favorite of mine, especially in the spring. Then the new leaves on its arching branches had that yellow-green color of a young season. As I walked around the bare earth where the tree had been, I saw what I can only describe as a bonsai rock: a flat rock, covered with old moss, and topped with what looked like a blue creeping juniper. That unusual formation also must have where it is now since the Chinese Garden opened, but until today I had never seen it. Too often, big trumps small and subtle.

It’s hard not to notice the tall scapes and the fragrant, white super-sized flowers of the Plantaginea hostas that have been flowering for the last couple of weeks. Until I checked The Hosta Handbook, I didn’t know that their trumpet-shaped flowers opened at sunset and then stayed open until late afternoon of the second day. The Handbook says the plantaginea is the only true night blooming hosta. The book goes on to say that some varieties of planteginea hostas have flowers that are over six-inches long and nearly three-inches across—a blossom size large enough to rival a Darwin tulip. The only planteginea hosta with flowers of this size that I was able to find is blooming deep in the English Woodland Garden—too far away to get a closer look without trampling other plantings. Binoculars would have helped, but carrying a camera is quite enough to lug along. A final word from The Hosta Handbook: “Hosta planteginea stands out as perhaps the most horticulturally significant hosta of the last 200 years.”

The berries on the low- growing patch of chokeberries (Aronia melanocarpa) have just begun to turn color. They will end their up as glossy black berries, but for now the top of each berry is marked with a purple six-point star. The points of the star then elongate and wrap themselves around round berries like the longitude markings of a map.








clear: sultry: 78ºF

It’s been three weeks since I’ve been to the Garden. Not intentionally, though. Travel and visits with family kept me away. When I was last here in late July, summer was in full control. Plants and gardens looked as their planners and keepers intended – lush, full, and perfect. Crowds clogged the walkways, cars had to use overflow parking lots, and tour operators brought busloads of visitors. Much has changed.

Crowds are noticeably thinner. Since so many schools no longer wait until after Labor Day to open, I think most families are finished vacationing and have settled into their fall routines early. Then too, August is not a month of botanical spectacle. The beds and gardens of spring bulbs, irises, azaleas, and daylilies have all had their day. A visitor to the Garden stopped us as we were leaving and asked, “I have an hour. What should I see?” Except for the roses that have been blooming continuously since May and the magnificent water lilies, the Garden in August has no focal point of flowering that would dazzle a first-time visitor.

I looked at cleomes with stalks that had more seed pods than flowers, hostas whose leaves had been sun-scorched and withered by too many hot days and cannas that had grown ever taller without producing more flowers. I made a game of trying to find one flower that had been able to shrug off the heat and drought of summer. I found one: the lantanas. When other summer flowers were at their prime, I overlooked the lantanas. They are easy to miss since often they are used at the edges of beds to draw the eye to the star performers at the center. Now though, lantanas stand out. Their nosegay-like flower heads that change color as they age trim the plants with color. As a bonus, the lantana heads are favored landing patches for the tiger swallowtail butterflies that have suddenly appeared.

The season of daylilies has passed. Here and there, we saw the odd flower in bloom, but the spectacle of massed color is gone. Gone too are the annual daylily sales of the Garden and of the local daylily society. I was sorry that I was away for both because even though I know I needed none, I know I would have bought some anyway. It’s time to look back at the pictures of daylilies that I’ve been taking since the middle of June and pick my Top Ten of 2005. As always, my picks are subjective, personal, and strongly biased against doubles and slated toward those that have flowers with pinched piecrust-like edges. My favorite of the 2005 season was Susan Weber – a creamy, almost white variety with ruffled and fluted petals painted with a color that looks like black cherry preserves. The daylily was developed by Doc Branch at Great Lakes Daylilies in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In no particular order, my other picks are House of Orange, Will Rogers, Prima Donna, Aztec Priestess, Heated Star, Opera Elegance, Wedding Band, Green Flutter, and Bellerive Belle.

When I started visiting this botanical garden, visitors were given a map that listed the points of interest. Go here. Don’t miss that. But, the Garden keepers had no rules to govern the behavior of visitors while they were here. That has changed. Now “For the Enjoyment of All,” the brochure given to visitors has a list of don’ts: no picnics, no lawn furniture, no coolers, and no dogs or other pets, and no bare chests or feet. Visitors are also reminded not to collect live plants, flowers or fruits. Recently a sign was posted on at the entrance to the Garden reminding folks that firearms are not permitted inside. Now, within the last month these signs have appeared in some of the beds. I’m not sure what to make of all this rule making. Very likely, each of the rules must was made because one person at one time did something that aggravated another person or a keeper of this Garden. Apparently in the view of those who run this Garden, written rules work better than self regulation or just plain concern “for the enjoyment of others.”

The garden under construction that I thought was to be the Ottoman Garden isn’t. This morning I spotted a new sign at the edge of the construction site that said the space was to be filled with the George Washington Carver Garden. “This Garden,” the under construction sign says, “will be a place of reflection and learning with a life-sized sculpture of Dr. Carter by acclaimed African-American sculptor Tina Allen.” The Carver Garden looks far from finished, but the sign says it is slated to open in mid-October. I wonder where the Ottoman Garden is to be. Open space is fast disappearing.

We spotted an unusual bird house high in a tree that drapes over the lake in the Japanese Garden. The house looked to be made of cedar. Unlike any other bird house I’d ever seen, this one was long and deep. It was a shaped like a rectangular box about two feet high and a foot deep. Without a clue of what the box was intended to attract, we guessed everything from bats to hawks. We should have thought of ducks. I checked the web when I got home and found pictures of a similar "nest box." It is intended to be used by a wood duck next spring. I learned that there is a wire-cloth ladder inside the box to be used in due time by the fledglings. When their mother judges the time is right, she will leave the box and call to the fledglings. One by one, they will climb the ladder to the opening at the top of the box, step out on the perch, and then jump into the water to join their mother.