Norfork Botanical Garden

I toured the Norfolk Botanical Garden the day after the Lewis Ginter which I posted about yesterday. The weather was still cool and cloudy but I was surprised at the difference being on the shore and a little further south meant. Quite a range of plants highlighted the visit.

There were the normal spring beauties like May Apples (left) and purple flags (on the right surrounding a Great Blue Heron sculpture).

Roses like cooler weather too. They are better now (and then again in the fall) than in the heat of summer. The yellow ones against the rough block wall relieve the harshness of its new construction.

But the rhododendrons stole the show - similarly to the peonies at the Lewis Ginter. I captured the phases of the clumps of flowers unfurling from tight buds. Don’t rhododendrons have the classic shape of a bouquet fit to be carried in a formal procesession?

There was glass sculpture by Craig Mitchell Smith displayed in the garden. My favorite was the blue jelly fish in the conservatory.

And what about a vine with white flowers unfurling - tight spirals expanding to gentle curves.

To end this very full post - enjoy the graceful curves of an aging tulip and spunky columbines. 

Magnolia Plantation and Gardens

There is always a lot to do at Magnolia Plantation and Gardens (near Charleston, SC). When I was there in late April, it was still cool. That meant that there were still a few camellias but the azaleas and irises were blooming too. There was plenty of activity to see from the boat tour through the old rice fields: lolling alligators, hunting herons/water birds and plenty of duckweed to reduce mosquitos (even though it was too cool for insects to be very active anyway). The huge live oaks with graceful veils of Spanish moss (all the tour guides emphasized that it is not Spanish and not a moss…it is an epiphyte native to the Americas) were everywhere. The gardens were a contrast of natural, formal, and escaped vegetation. It was obvius they had been gardens for a long time and still constantly changing - both from the efforts of gardeners and the natural environment of the place. There were crepe myrtles that were growing quite happily among dense natural vegetation that had taken over at the edge of one garden area. I posted about the peacock at Magnolia Plantation last week. I took so many other pictures that it was difficult to pick the 25 in the slide show below. Enjoy!

3 Free eBooks - April 2013

The Internet has a growing number of online books…and many of them are free. This is my monthly post highlighting 3 that I have enjoyed most this past month.

Gray, Asa. The Forest Trees of North America. Washington D.C., Smithsonian Institution. 1891. This is really the plates prepared for a book. The work was done between 1849 and 1859. It is available in PDF form here. The first three images hooked me for the rest of the volume: magnolias and tulip polar. The tulip poplar in our back yard is just getting ready to bloom…and the image captures the look of the tree quite well.

Redoute, Pierre Joseph. Les Roses. Paris, De L’Imprimerie de Firmin Didot. 1824. There are actually three volumes available on the Internet Archive: 1817, 1821, and 1824. All three contain pages and pages of botanical prints of roses. I was prompted to look for these books when I saw a reference to them in May Theilgaard Watts’ Reading the Landscape of Europe.

Sale, Edith Dabney Tunis (editor for James River Garden Club, Richmand). Historic Gardens of Virginia. Richmond, William Byrd Press. 1923. Available from the Internet Archive here. The book includes the birds-eye view of many gardens as well as a few vistas from ground level. It is tempting to see how many of these gardens still exist!

Learning Threads

Have you ever noticed how learning something new leads to learning tangential things - totally unanticipated at the beginning? It has been happening to me quite a lot lately.

One day this past week I listened to the introduction for the Aboriginal Worldviews course on Coursera and became intrigued by the indigenous worldview that values integration of knowledge more than specialization. I happened to be enjoying Reading the Landscape of Europe by May Theilgaard Watts on the same day and was intrigued by the way she combines geology, botany, zoology, history….and sees it all by careful observation of the landscape. I’d just finished the chapter on France and was so intrigued by the section on roses that I looked on the Internet Archive for the artists she had mentioned from the 1700s ….and found their works plus others. I remembered that my father planted hybrid tea roses along the driveway of our new house in the 60s (one for each member of the family) and wrote an email to him asking if he remembered their names. What a thread: indigenous world view to landscape reading to roses to family history!

It is so much easier to follow a tangential thought now than it was 20 or 30 years ago. A trip to the library or bookstore might have yielded some information  back then but it took so much effort that many threads were simply dropped. And I can remember making the effort and being disappointed by the lack of information the library had on its shelves.

How is this ease of finding exactly the information desired - in seconds - impacting the way we learn? We have an enormous wealth of resources. Are we enlightened by them or overwhelmed? It is natural to be both. I willingly accept the risk of being overwhelmed as the price for finding what I want to know shortly after deciding I want it.

Today - I am celebrating the adventure of following threads for as long and as deep as I want.

Roses and Rosemary

Usually ferns or baby’s breath is used in the filler around long stem roses. My sister recently chose to buy flowers that completed the color of the roses and then trimmed the rosemary plant in the garden to add extra greenery. It looked great and adding the rosemary smell to that of the roses was very appealing as well! Rosemary is now on my list to plant in my garden in the spring.

I am babying the rosemary I kept in a pot on my deck through last summer…so I might be able to just plant it as soon as the weather warms enough in Maryland.