filtered sun: breezy: 35ºF

Chihuly lingers. The glass of summer stays until New Year’s Day. Bright flowers and extravagantly shaped and colored glass each has its season. That season has past.

Inside the shelter of the Linnean glasshouse, the smaller camellias (Camellia sasanqua) have started to bloom. Just in time for the holidays a variety called ‘Yuletide’ is filled with flowers. The single, ribbon-red blooms and tightly packed buds are backed by glossy green leaves. ‘Yuletide’ promises to stay blooming long after yuletide ends.

After the leaves fall, trees that stay green get noticed: hollies and pines, especially. But then, there is the tropical-looking ‘Bracken’s Brown Beauty,’ (Magnolia grandiflora), an evergreen magnolia with tough leather-like leaves that are glossy green on one side and cocoa-powder brown on the flip side. By spring many of the leaves will be tattered and cold burned, but most stay in place until a new crop takes their place.

Rarely have I seen insect damage to the Brown Beauty leaves. It’s likely because the leaves are just too tough for bugs to bother with. So I was surprised to see a leaf on the young Brown Beauty in the English Woodland Garden marred by the trail of a boring insect that worked along the central vein for a while and then made its way to the edge. These kinds of winding tunnels are the work of leaf miners on columbines. Maybe they like a change of diet sometimes.

Finally it's come. The white, cold-hardy camellia ‘Lushan Snow’ has started to bloom. A few of the petals on first flowers look a bit frost burned because the buds were so slow to develop and open. Nonetheless, a camellia blooming in mid-November in the mid-West deserves applause.

For the first time in many years, there will be no fruit on the winter berries (Ilex verticillata) this winter. Part of the crop went to feed the flocks of robins that were passing though the botanical garden in early fall. I think the rest were taken by the resident birds. I noticed this morning that the keepers of the botanical garden stopped restocking the many bird feeders in the bird garden. That meant that the birds had to find other nearby places to feed. It seemed odd to see the hedgerow of winter berries that borders the bird garden completely stripped. Last year, the row was a blaze of vibrant red ‘Jim Dandy’ and ‘Red Sprite’ winterberries all winter and well into spring.

Here they go again. Labeled Snowdrop (Galanthus nivalis) with a bloom date of February, a clump of precocious snowdrops deep in the Bird Garden is in full bloom. The same bunch has been blooming here at this time for at least two years. I wonder if early blooming snowdrops are any better than woolly caterpillars at predicting winter weather.

As if one flowering snowdrop in the Mid-West in November weren’t enough, there’s another “Lost Lamb” blooming in Iowa City. Don, who writes An Iowa Garden, took a great picture of one he spotted blooming in his home garden a week earlier than the ones I saw blooming here. What’s going on here in the nothing-ever-happens heartland?








cloudy: persistent north wind: 37ºF

Fewer than ten cars were in the parking lot when we arrived just after 7:00 a.m. Oddly enough, none of the cars was parked in the choicest parking space – the first space in the first row nearest the entrance to the botanical garden. So with smug satisfaction, I took the space. I won’t do that again though, at least for a while. The space happens to be underneath a Japanese Pagoda Tree (Sophora japonica). When we returned to our car, we saw that the tree was alive with birds filling up on seeds that they were shelling from the tree’s bean-like pods and then doing what birds do. Now our car needs a wash.

On summer mornings, I often see a garden keeper dragging a long hose to the arbor where many of the hanging pots are displayed. The end of the hose is attached to a watering wand long enough to reach pots hanging from the top of the arbor. Next year though - no more watering by hand and hose. Sometime last week a drip irrigation system was installed to water the hanging pots automatically. Half-inch black PVC pipe runs all around the inside of the arbor. At places where the pots will hang, small spaghetti tubes with red emitters on their ends break from the main supply line. If all works as planned, the plants in next year’s hanging pots will never look droopy or be water-logged. But just in case the emitters clog (a problem I’ve had too often in the days when I used a drip irrigation system in my vegetable garden), I hope they’ve kept the watering wands.


The yellows of freshly fallen yellow ginkgo leaves and the dust-brown fronds of bald cypress are mixing it up on the benches and walkways this morning. Glad I was here before the squads of leaf-blowers arrived to make everything tidy again.

It’s happened. 'Winter's Star' -- the first of the cold hardy camellias has bloomed. The flowers have a simple shrub rose-like shape with petals that shade from reddish pink to a blush. At the flower center is a nest of yellow anthers. Like all of the other late, fall-blooming camellias developed by Dr. William Ackerman at the U.S. National Arboretum, 'Winter's Star' has two parents: one is the white flowering, winter tough Camellia oleifera. The other is the Camellia sasanqua ‘Showa-No-Sakae,’ a more showy camellia with a true pink flower and petals to spare. From the looks of the flower buds on two other cold-hardy varieties, I think I’ll see white camellias in flower next week.








overcast with layered clouds: breezy: 42ºF

A hard freeze two nights ago took out all of the roses planted away from the shelter of buildings. The rose bushes look just as they did a week ago – filled with buds and lots of roses in full bloom. Now though, every rose that had color then is dirt brown now. They look papery thin like herbarium specimens or flowers pressed in a scrapbook. When I touched a few petals though, I found they were still soft and pliable.

The cardinal and cypress flowers (Ipomoea x multifida) along the east side of the botanical garden got a late start this year. Nonetheless once they got going, they covered their support trellises with soft fern-like leaves and a sprinkling of their intensely red, pentagon-shaped trumpet flowers. I used to grow cardinal vines when I lived in a sunny place. Now that I live in shade, I like to keep tabs on the ones growing here at the garden. Low temperatures weren’t as gentle on them as they were on the roses. The vines went from lush green to black. In other week I’m sure they will be pulled down and composted, but for now they make a good final curtain for summer.

While summer gardens are ending, the season of the witch hazels has begun. From now through early spring, one or another of them will be in flower. This morning, it’s the lemon-yellow Eastern Witch Hazel (Hamamelis virginiana). A half dozen trees are blooming at the southern end of the botanical garden. I almost missed seeing the yellow flowers because the yellow colors of the fall leaves did such a good job of camouflaging them. In a week or two all of the leaves will have dropped leaving the trees to the flowers.

I expected the newly planted cold hardy camellias to have bloomed by now. I’ve checking them every week, but until this morning nothing much seemed to be happening. Now the buds are swelling. Several blooms have nudged their way through their protective bud scales and are starting to show a bit of color. Both the foliage and the flower buds have shrugged off the freezing temperatures of the past week. In fact, the cold seems to have been a wake-up call for the flower buds. By next week, I think I’ll see the pink camellia ‘Winter’s Star’ in bloom.

Odd happenstance: On a whim, I stopped at a neighborhood nursery on the way home to have a look around. I thought maybe I could find a couple of frost-bitten hostas at a good price. Few interesting hostas left this late, but what I did find was a healthy ‘Winter’s Star’ Camellia that had just begun to bloom. Putting aside questions like why this small nursery would even have such usual plant and how they hoped to sell it for more than $50, I was happy to get to see a cold hardy camellia in bloom a week before I expected.

It’s November just after a first-rate freeze and I find an orange poppy blooming in the rock garden near the Climatron. It’s named Papaver oreophilum. I looked up oreophilium. It means mountain loving. This poppy is native to the Caucasus Mountain range in Southeastern Russia. I found a mounted specimen of a poppy collected there in 1873 by a Russian plant hunter named N. K. Sredinsky on this botanical garden’s website. I also checked the blooming history the poppy and saw that for the last two years it never bloomed in November. It’s just not supposed to be blooming now. April maybe, May for sure, and sometimes July. Never now. At times like these I wish I knew enough science to try to figure out why.