Category Archives: Public Gardens

Visiting Cougar Annie’s Garden – Part One

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Perhaps this blog actually began in the 1960s in Montreal when my husband, in his 20s and fresh out of business school and in his first real job, was invited to a party given by some young women from Vancouver where he met their friend Peter Buckland. The two men would reconnect a few years later when my husband moved to Vancouver where they both worked in the financial industy. In 1974 Peter invited Doug to visit him at Boat Basin in remote Hesquiat Harbour in Clayoquot Sound on the rugged west coast of Vancouver Island.  Doug was invited for Peter’s “World Tidal Hockey Championship”, the fourth annual edition of a rollicking game played with friends on the sandy beach.  Doug remembers meeting a little old woman who sold them eggs for breakfast. By then, Peter Buckland had known Ada Annie Lawson, aka “Cougar Annie”, for some six years, a friendship cultivated during his monthly trips to the area as an amateur prospector. Annie’s legendary life in the rainforest spanned more than 60 years and included 4 husbands (three of whom were mail order grooms she advertised for in the same paper where she ran ads for her dahlias), 11 children, a sprawling garden hacked out of mossy first-growth forest, a mail-order plant business and well-earned notoriety for being a crack shot of the cougars that terrorized her goats and whose hides brought a government bounty to supplement her sale of dahlia and gladiolus bulbs.

Cougar Annie, 1962. Photo by John Manning-Royal B.C. Museum & Archives

The award-winning 1998 book Cougar Anne’s Garden by Margaret Horsfield recounts the story of her life, from her 1888 birth in Sacramento, California to her Vancouver marriage to Scotland-born Willie Rae-Arthur, the black sheep of his family; her 1915 arrival in Hesquiat Harbour aboard SS Princess Maquinna with her opium-addicted, alcoholic husband and their three oldest children and a cow; her life as a homesteader on 117 government-deeded acres of primeval forest; her hardscrabble career as a nurserywoman and postmistress; the 1981 sale of her property to Peter Buckland; and finally her 1985 death at the age of 97. In 1987, Peter retired and moved to Boat Basin full-time.

Then again, this blog might have begun in 2016 at the Idaho Botanic Garden, when Doug relaxed with my friend, Boise garden writer Mary Ann Newcomer, while I climbed to the top of the wonderful Lewis & Clark collection for a blog I would eventually write on the garden.  As they waited for me to come down, Mary Ann mentioned an award-winning story she’d written for a 2013 issue of Leaf magazine (pgs 48-59), below, about Cougar Annie’s Garden in British Columbia. Doug chuckled and told her about his friendship with Peter Buckland and that he’d actually visited the garden and met Cougar Annie more than 40 years earlier. It was a serendipitous moment, because…..

….. it led to a May 2019 Facebook message from Mary Ann asking for contact information for Peter on behalf of a California photographer named Caitlin Atkinson, who was working on a book project on wild gardens. Since we were planning an autumn trip to Vancouver Island prior to a holiday in San Francisco anyway, we did some calendar juggling and back-and-forth emailing with Peter that resulted in all four of us meeting for a night at the beautiful Long Beach Lodge in Tofino, then checking into the Atleo River Air Services office on a dock in Tofino. bright and early on October 1st 

…. and finally preparing to climb into our chartered Cessna floatplane. We had been warned to keep our soft baggage to the bare minimum, and we added enough groceries for 2 days as well as a little bit of wine. We were heading to a paradise with no electricity or indoor plumbing, after all, so we knew chardonnay would be a welcome touch.

Then we were off, flying northeast on a 20-minute flight over the most spectacular scenery towards our destination 51 kilometres (32 miles) from Tofino.

The rugged west coast of Vancouver Island is the last stop on the North American continent. Here the breakers are massive, making Tofino a mecca for surfers. The temperate rainforest we were about to visit is part of the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nation, specifically the Hesquiat (Hesquiaht) First Nation, who have been there for some 6,000 years. Through their oral history and written Japanese records of the giant tsunami, we know that on the night of January 26, 1700, a massive 9.0 megathrust earthquake struck near Pachena Bay, not far south of Tofino.  In fact, it was thought to be just the latest tectonic collision in the Cascadia Subduction Zone as the Juan de Fuca Plate pushes under the North American Plate, since it is estimated that 13 such massive earthquakes have occurred in the 6,000 years that first nations have been here. And, of course, west coasters have repeatedly been warned to prepare for the next “big one”.

In the floatplane, Mary Ann was in the middle seat with me focusing on the view….

….. while Caitlin was smiling in the back seat.

We flew over massive tracts of forest and ….

…..sandy beaches and turquoise ocean dotted with rocky islets and dark kelp beds where rivers ran into the sea.

As we approached our landing on Hesquiat Lake, I noticed the landslides on the mountain. We would learn later that these originated in previously-logged areas high above on Mt.Seghers, and during a November 2018 rainstorm had filled the lake with debris.

I made a cellphone video to remember this flight, looking out west towards the open ocean.

Peter Buckland was at the Hesquiat Lake dock waiting for us and helped take our bags and supplies up the hill to his truck parked on the gravel road.

A short drive later, he stopped and invited us to get out and walk with him on the grand tour. He would drive our bags to our overnight accommodation later.  As we made our way under towering red cedars (Thuja plicata), he began by showing us his eagle woodshed, a sloped structure surmounted by the mythical bird that he designed and built.

This eagle woodshed was our first clue that though Peter had to be highly resourceful to live here with no modern conveniences, he was also an artist, a designer, a carpenter, a gardener, a chef and a quirky, funny, well-studied natural philosopher.

He pointed out the stump of a “canoe tree” that had later been felled, showing us the dugout shape at the wide base.  In the lexicon of indigenous people of the west coast, this old red cedar is a culturally-modified tree (CMT).


Then he showed us the little shop building near his house featuring an in situ tree stump as its facade and door frame. All the buildings at Boat Basin, including Peter’s house, the central lodge and guest cabins, were designed by Peter, who also milled and split the lumber, primarily from old-growth windfall on the property. The larger buildings were framed by renowned west coast builder and surf legend Bruno Atkey, working with local crews and with Peter as interior finish carpenter; Peter built many of the smaller buildings himself.

Inside, we stood on a floor of mortared floor tiles made of sinuous Pacific yew (Taxus brevifolia).

We made a quick pass through the house he shares with his partner, Makiko, who was away on a trip.  The woodstove here was identical to the ones we’d see later in the eco-lodge on the ridge above.

Then we headed out to sit in the autumn sunshine at the beach cabin on Hesquiat Harbour. Dahlias, below, seem to have a special place here at Boat Basin because Cougar Annie sold the tubers until she was no longer able to operate her business, even peeling them by feel, rather than sight, when she became blind.

Peter’s canoe was tucked into the driftwood…..

….. and a moon snail shell (Euspira lewisii) decorated a log.

We sat nearby as Peter talked about the property, its history and geology while sipping a glass of fresh water pouring from a carved cedar flume.

Then it was time to take the boardwalk that Peter built atop Cougar Annie’s old path from the beach. I looked up and saw evergreen huckleberries (Vaccinium ovatum) creating a lacy understory to ancient cedars….

…. and down at the deer ferns and salal flanking the boardwalk.

We stopped at a massive cedar, below, and Peter pointed out how it was in line with two other huge cedars whose roots reach down to bedrock, while shorter trees around have roots in gravel sediment left behind by glaciers. “So when there’s a tsunami every five or seven hundred years, it’s not a wall of water like Japan (Fukushima), just a rising tide. The water sits for a half hour or so then it all wants to go out at once”, he says. “That’s when all the damage is done, and the trees growing in the gravel are undercut. That explains why these trees are so much older than the surrounding ones.”

Next he pointed out a fallen log acting as a nurse log for a dated 500 year-old cedar.  The log fell because the tree was cut down to make a dugout canoe, evidenced by the missing portion immediately above the stump. The relationship distinguishes it as one of a few sites in North America showing physical evidence of human activity prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus.

Then we came to the long pergola that Peter built leading to Cougar Annie’s 5-acre garden. He designed it in a manner “to trick the eye”, making it gradually wider in the distance and altering the board size to overcome the effect of diminishing perspective. (The next day, he’d demonstrate that for me.)

When Peter bought the property from Annie, she was 93-years old, nearly blind and had not maintained the garden for a long time. He spent years using a chainsaw to reclaim the various beds and borders — like the garden below, with its driftwood whale sculpture — from the encroaching rainforest, in order to attract visitors to this heritage garden. Six lawn mowers are scattered around….

….  to mow the salal, salmonberries and Annie’s heather that now forms a rampant groundcover.

A wooden wheelbarrow was rotting into the mosses.

And there was the lovely ruin, Annie’s house, where, incredibly, she raised all those children, ran her business, and even found space for the post office counter. We would come back the next day to explore more here.

We stopped at a raised mound of heather where Annie buried three children who died as infants and two of her husbands, Willie Rae-Arthur, who drowned in 1936, and George Campbell, a reportedly abusive man who died in 1944, so the story goes, ‘while cleaning his shotgun’. Peter told us of plans by Annie’s descendants to bring her ashes up to Boat Basin next year for an interment ceremony. So confining was this life that, one by one, her children fled the homestead as soon as they were of age, except for a few sons who stayed to help their mother, one drowning tragically in Hesquiat Harbour in 1947.

Our next stop was a nearby stand of 95-year-old hemlocks. Inspired by Makiko’s tales of Japanese forests where urban people come to sweep the mossy carpets below, Peter is turning this into the Boat Basin version. As he talked, it occurred to me that our stay here in this towering rainforest perfectly embodies the Japanese concept of “forest bathing” or  shinrin-yoku.

And then he smiled as he guided us towards……


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…. the Japanese-signed entrance…..

….. to his sushi table. Peter milled this astonishing 4’ wide x 5” thick x 25-foot slab out of a big yellow cedar (Cupressus nootkatensis). Imagine being invited to an omakase feast right here!

Beyond the sushi shelter is a tranquil, moss-carpeted Japanese garden, with Peter’s Shinto gates at the far end. In a 2004 article in Pacific Rim Magazine, the former curator of the David Lam Asian Garden at the University of British Columbia, the late Peter Wharton, said: “There is an Asiatic strand throughout the landscape in terms of geology and vegetation. To me it makes absolute sense both now, and even more so in the future, when I think the cultures of western Canada and the countries of the Pacific Rim will be even closer than they are now.” 

As we walked on, I caught a movement in the trees and pointed my camera up, but the spotted owl had turned his head away from me, then flew quickly off.

Peter looked north to Mount Seghers on Hesquiat Lake, drawing our attention to the logging landslides on its flank. This peak played an interesting role in early exploration of the west coast of Canada, for it was noted and named on August 8, 1773 by the Spanish explorer Juan Pérez, the first European to record a sighting of Vancouver Island. From aboard his frigate Santiago, he called it Loma de San Lorenzo. Had Pérez gone ashore there rather than staying on ship and trading Spanish spoons for sea otter skins and sardines with the local Hesquiat in canoes, or had he gone ashore at Haida Gwai a few days earlier rather than greeting twenty Haida braves who paddled out in their canoes to trade gifts, there might be a very different North America now. But Juan Pérez neglected to declare the formal Act of Possession. Five years later, Captain James Cook, a veteran sea captain arrived nearby on HMS Resolution becoming the first European to sight both the east and west sides of North America. (To read more about the explorers of the west coast, including Quadra and Vancouver, have a look at The Land of Heart’s Delight: Early Maps and Charts of Vancouver Island by Michael Layland.)

Heading up towards the ridge, we stopped at Annie’s museum….

….. containing artifacts from the Boat Basin Post Office……

….. and bulb labels and Annie’s pruning saw.

As we came out into a gravel clearing, I looked down to see black bear scat filled with fruit, possibly native Pacific crabapples (Malus fusca) which turn soft in autumn.

Peter stopped at his Shake Shack to demonstrate the use of his froe or shake axe. I made a video of him making the cedar shakes that are so prevalent on the property.

This might be a good place to include a map of the property, showing where we were at that point(red arrow). Our destination now was the top of the ridge above where we would find our cabin and the central hall.

Then we set out along the boardwalk under mossy, leaning trees…..

…… past the skunk cabbages I remember so vividly from my British Columbia childhood….

…… and drifts of deer fern (Blechnum spicant).

We climbed up, up, up and I looked back down towards three staircase runs flanking a mossy rock outcrop, marvelling that this entire journey – 700 metres (2300 feet) of red cedar boardwalk – was created by one man with a vision as passionate and tenacious as the woman who had lived her for almost 70 years.

I felt small in the midst of these forest giants, standing and fallen.

Natural rises in the land were negotiated via stairways and bridges.

I looked out over the forest here and caught a glimpse of Rae Lake. Alas, I did not make it down to the lake in our time here (blame my aching knee).

I longed to have a rest in the shelter of this cedar, harvested at some point by first nations people for its bark or boards, but kept on climbing.

At one point I turned around to gaze at the miniature ecosystem that takes hold in the slowly-rotting bole of a dead red cedar.

Finally we came out into a clearing and there was the central hall, aka the lodge, aka the Temperate Rainforest Study Centre.

I loved the Boat Basin logo cutout in the heavy yellow cedar door.

And what a clever use for an old power line insulator!

Then we were inside the hall. Measuring 50′ x 50’, it is heated by a wood stove and features a well-supplied kitchen with propane appliances turned on for each visiting group during the time they are there.  Flashlights, battery-powered lights and candles provide illumination.

After leading us to the top, Peter headed back down to the road to drive our supplies up by truck.  We explored the hall and the outer deck and marveled at the spectacular view of the property and Hesquiat Harbour.

From here I could see red cedar, yellow cedar, amabilis fir and lodgepole pine. I’m sure there were more species in this complex forest ecosystem, so different from the monoculture second- and third-growth forests planted by the timber companies to “replace” the old-growth they cut down.

When we had our bags and groceries, Doug made us all a sandwich lunch, then we made our way up the path through the forest to our cabins.  Ours was #6 – the honeymoon cabin!

There was a rusty mirror and I decided a rainforest selfie was in order.

Huckleberries and salal made me feel as if my own little garden was pure west coast!

This was the view from behind our platform bed. Not bad, eh?  I quickly made up the bed with provided sheets and sleeping bag blankets and stowed our clothes on the shelf.

Further up the path from our cabin was our own “outhouse with a view”.

As I wandered back towards the central hall, I heard a familiar tapping from the forest. A hairy woodpecker was working its way up an old hemlock.

As the sky darkened, we chopped vegetables, sautéed mushrooms and barbecued steak. Peter joined us for dinner by candelight.

It had been one of the most magical of days: a very special opportunity to share a little slice of this majestic part of Canada. After washing the dishes in water heated on the woodstove, we said good night and headed up the path toward our cabins. It was time for bed.

Continued in Part Two 

***********

To enquire about booking a trip to Cougar Annie’s Garden and the Temperate Rainforest Study Centre, visit the Boat Basin Foundation Website.

Portland’s Japanese Garden: A Haiku in Green

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When it comes to garden styles, I prefer a meadow:  buzzing with bees, fluttering with butterflies and alive with birdsong.  That is how I’ve designed my own Ontario gardens, with a view to native plant ecology and inclusion of insects, birds and wildlife. It doesn’t mean I don’t love visiting all kinds of gardens: Elizabethan knots, formal rose gardens, vegetable patches, wetlands and colourful perennial borders. But the most interesting, from an intellectual point of view, is the Japanese Garden, which represents ancient Shinto (Zen gardens) and Buddhist philosophy.

In my three decades of garden travel, I’ve visited Japanese gardens in Kyoto (Tenryū-ji, Ryōan-ji, Saihō-ji, among others); at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew; Chicago Botanic Garden; Brooklyn Botanic Garden; Denver Botanic Garden; Missouri Botanical Garden; the Tea Garden at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco; Montreal Botanical Garden; Vancouver’s UBC Botanical Garden; and The Butchart Gardens in Victoria. But the finest of all – and reportedly the most authentic garden outside Japan– is the Japanese Garden in Portland, Oregon.  It even inspired me to write a little haiku…

Last September at this time, I was there with a group of women I’ll call “the golf widows”. Each year, our husbands (college classmates) get together somewhere and while they tee off, we see the local sights. One of the highlights of our Portland-Bend visit was this early morning tour, courtesy of garden member Gail Carr. It was my second visit, but it had been more than 15 years since I’d seen it, and a lot had changed during a $33.5 million expansion over 16 months. Foremost was the new entrance at the parking lot level in Washington Park. Designed by architect Kenzo Kuma and Garden Curator Sudafumi Uchiyama, it opened in spring 2017.  I was intrigued with the sleek, modern pool beside the ticket house, glimpsed through bamboo culms….

….. and the tiered waterfall feeding it.

From here we entered via an ornate, century-old gate…..

….. that took us up a steep hillside of old Douglas firs and bigleaf maples (Acer macrophyllum).

New native understory plantings on the hillside were created along with the pathways, and an “ephemeral” water course built to drain seasonal rainfall or snowmelt from the top to the bottom.  Said the garden of this new entrance: “It is as if visitors were setting foot on land after a voyage across the Pacific from Japan or disembarking from the Willamette or Columbia River, which were the original highways of this region.“

Horsetails and ferns combine with trilliums, columbines, salal, huckleberries and all kinds of native plants nestled among beautiful boulders.

Stone retaining walls appeared where the slope was steeper….

…. but Japanese design touches were married with the Pacific Northwest theme.

Nearing the top, we came to a handsome glass-enclosed bridge named for donor Sheila Edwards-Lienhart.

Beyond the bridge, steps led up to the new Cultural Village.

At the top, we could look back down at the impressive ascent. Visitors with mobility issues or those who don’t welcome this climb on a warm day can take a garden shuttle, which runs every 15 minutes.

We stopped in the Tateuchi Courtyard of the Cultural Village outside the Jordan Schnitzer Japanese Arts Learning Center.  As the garden says: “The Cultural Village provides a place where visitors can immerse themselves in traditional Japanese arts through seasonal activities, performances, and demonstrations in the Atsuhiko and Ina Goodwin Tateuchi Foundation Courtyard.” The perfect little garden below is called Tsubo-Niwa, which means “courtyard garden”, and features the traditional Japanese elements: stone, water and plants.

The Marguerite Drake Sculpture Terrace offers a dramatic setting for beautiful works of art.

Bonsai is an essential element of Japanese design, and the Ellie M. Hill Bonsai Terrace features some fine specimens, like this 40-yearold European beech tree (Fagus sylvatica)….

…… and this 35-year old ‘Beni-Kawa’ coralbark maple (Acer palmatum).

A shimmering bamboo allée leads from the Tateuchi Courtyard to the Nezu Gate, which is the entrance to the original garden itself and its five distinct Japanese garden styles.  Begun in 1963 on the site of what had once been the Washington Park Zoo, it was designed by Professor Takuma Tono (1891-1987) of the Tokyo Agricultural University.

The Nezu Gate is a good place to show a map of the garden and its five styles: the Flat Garden, the Tea Garden, the Strolling Pond Garden, the Natural Garden and the Sand and Stone Garden . I’ve added a yellow arrow to indicate where we are. Click to enlarge.

On the inside, you can see the compartments on either side of the Nezu Gate, which were traditionally the offices of the samurai who guarded such entrances.

 

It was early in the morning, so gardeners were going about their tasks as we walked by towards The Flat Garden. As you can imagine, pruning and shearing is a non-stop task in a large Japanese garden, where symbolism is entwined even in the shape of the plants.

In Japanese design, the journey is meant to be contemplative, thus small vignettes like this water basin with its bamboo spout, which I borrowed for my introductory haiku.

The Flat Garden, hira-niwa, represents the evolution of the classic dry landscape style. We stood on the veranda of the Pavilion, observing the scene. The mossy islands in the sea of raked granitic Japanese sand represent a sake cup and a gourd.

This century-old weeping Japanese cherry (Prunus x subhirtella ‘Pendula’) would be lovely to see covered in pink blossoms in early spring.  Note the careful support of the branches.

We walked to the other side of the Pavilion.  Designed by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill and built in 1980 from Alaskan cedar (Chamaecyparis nootkatensis) with a long wall of shoji screens, it is used for garden functions.

Rock selection and positioning is carefully considered in Japanese design.

As we headed back towards the other gardens, I noted another lovely stone water basin…

…. and a handsome lantern.

Japanese maples are planted everywhere, of course. They are called momiji in their native land.

But even though native Japanese plants occupy the understory here, they are sheltered by trees of the Pacific Northwest forest, like the massive Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), below.

We passed under a wisteria arbor, its concrete posts textured to appear tree-like. Many of the old cobbles in the garden originally paved Portland streets before being replaced by asphalt; they are recycled in the pathways here. In the distance, you can see the……

……. Sapporo Pagoda Lantern, set in a niche under towering red cedars (Thuja plicata) and Douglas firs.

Standing 18-feet tall and more than a century old, it was a 1989 gift from Portland’s Japanese sister city, Sapporo.  They were joined in 1959 just a few years after President Dwight Eisenhower established the Sister City Program. As they celebrate the 60th anniversary this year, the garden notes that the relationship reminds us “that the Pacific Ocean acts not as a barrier but a bridge between our two countries”.

The lantern’s five stories symbolize earth, water, fire, wind and sky.  And the stones set in moss at its base represent a stone map of the island of Hokkaido.


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We walked through the Tea Garden which contains an inner garden, a middle garden and an outer garden. The teahouse itself is managed by the Kashintei Kai Tea Society which offers workshops and ceremonies in chadō, the “way of tea”. Tea culture, of course, is a fundamental part of Japanese life.

This is a lantern in the Tea Garden.

I loved this mossy niche in the Tea Garden. Evidently some of the polished shingle stones in the garden were collected from the beach at Ecola State Park, my last blog.

This was one of my favourite vignettes: a green machiai, traditionally used as a sheltered waiting place before the tea ceremony. I loved everything about this….

…… including the handsome tied bamboo fence.

This mossy lantern added to the serenity of the Tea Garden….

….. as did this suikinkutsu stone basin and bamboo fountain.  Sound is important and the gentle splash of water adds to the tranquility of the Japanese garden experience.

Then it was time to explore the two ponds in the Strolling Pond Garden, chisen kaiyu shiki teien.  The upper pond is viewed from a moon bridge….

…. looking out over a beautifully landscaped body of water.  So many shades of green! The mound-shaped shrubs in this setting have special symbolism as well; they are meant to suggest moss-covered stones.  During the Edo period (1603-1867), feudal lords or daimyo displayed their wealth with strolling pond gardens.

The handsome bronze finials on the moon bridge begged to be caressed.

Two bronze herons or cranes stand in the shallow, forever fishing.

Then we walked along the zig-zag bridge, or yatsuhashi.  Designed to trick evil spirits that might be following you, it took us past beautiful koi…..

…… swimming along past ferns and Japanese iris in spring…..

….. towards the spectacular lower pond.

I’m sure there is symbolism here in the placement of the lantern and the stones.

I loved the way the maple-framed lantern reflected in the water.

The Heavenly Waterfall occupies the former bear den of the Washington Park zoo. In 1997 it was damaged by a winter storm and subsequently rebuilt at a greater height.

Isn’t this an enchanting scene?

We walked on towards the Natural Garden, passing a gardener sweeping the moss. This is a familiar scene in Japanese gardens, one I’ve photographed in Kyoto, too.

A deer-scarer fountain, shishi-odoshi, clacked its warning as we passed.   (Be sure to watch my video of the various water features at the bottom of this blog.)

For some visitors, the Natural Garden is a favourite place to appreciate a less controlled, contemporary way of gardening in the Japanese style, called zoki no niwa.   Although Professor Tono designed this originally as a moss garden, the terrain did not lend itself to that concept, and it was reimagined later as a place where visitors could rest and reflect on the seasons of a garden and life.

The stone paths here are works of art in themselves…..

….. taking visitors past natural water courses and onto the mossy hillside beyond.

Near the bottom, a stream runs under a lovely arched timber bridge……

….. topped with cement and edged in slender stickwork.

A little further, an angled stone path traverses water reflecting the trees and sky.

The Natural Garden features little nooks and crannies where visitors can sit, rest and reflect.

Being on a hillside there are lots of stairs in this garden, like these lovely stone-edged stairs ascending past a mossy bank.

Vine maple (Acer circinatum) is a beautiful Pacific Northwest tree that is used extensively in the Natural Garden.

Our visit was nearing an end and it was time to climb up the last set of stairs from the garden to arrive at the….

…. Sand and Stone Garden.  This classic walled dry landscape garden in the karesansui style reminded me very much of the famous Edo Period rock garden at Kyoto’s Ryōan-ji.  Using carefully placed rocks set in raked gravel according to the principle of yohaku-no-bi, meaning “the beauty of blank space”, both encourage contemplation.

The stones tell a story inspired by designer Takuma Tono’s reading of the Jataka Sutra, a 2,000 year old Indian tale about seven tiger cubs thrown into the sea as a test of courage by a tigress. The raked stones represent the waves in the seas.

The cubs are saved from starvation when Buddha, arms outstretched, offers himself to them as food; they consume him and are saved.  It is a lovely fable with a happy ending, and a fitting end to my tour of the Japanese Garden.

But before you leave, enjoy the splash of water from the garden’s many water features and fountains. Arigatō Portland.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XzQbAyFiYk&t=17s

Evoking the Prairie at Chicago’s Lurie Garden

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It was with great joy that I stepped into Chicago’s Lurie Garden last August. It didn’t matter that my companions numbered in the hundreds (garden communicators from all over North America at the annual Gardencomm symposium) – as long as they didn’t get in my shot!   And it was the perfect time to visit, with the Lurie evoking in a romantic, chaotic way the wildflower-spangled prairie that once stretched across sixty one percent of Illinois (21.6 million acres), before the arrival in the 1830s of homesteaders and the John Deere tractor that broke up the tallgrass sod to plant beans and barley.  No, the Lurie Garden is not a prairie recreation, and it’s certainly not ‘country’, given that it occupies five leafy acres of 24.5-acre Millennium Park in the heart of downtown, framed by some of the tallest skyscrapers in North America.

But when you see the artful tumble of some of the tallgrass prairie’s iconic natives, such as spiky rattlesnake master (Eryngium yuccifolium)….

…. and towering yellow compass plant (Silphium laciniatum), its common name alluding to the belief of pioneers that its leaves always pointed north and south,…..

…… mixed with other perennials and lush ornamental grasses in the Meadow section of the garden nearest Monroe Street, it certainly feels like walking into an August prairie in the middle of the city.

It was spring 1914 when poet Carl Sandburg wrote his ode to Chicago.
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders

And it was the last line of that first verse and the nickname it lent Chicago – City of Big Shoulders –  that landscape architects Gustafson Guthrie Nichol lit on in the late 1990s when they conceptualized the space that would become the Lurie Garden.   Those “big shoulders” became the 15-foot high shoulder hedge, an L-shaped living wall separating the garden from the busy footpath to the Frank Gehry-designed Jay Pritzker Music Pavilion (see the steel roof angles) and Great Lawn in the space beyond.

Comprised of five cultivars of arborvitae (Thuja occidentalis) and hedge-friendly hornbeam (Carpinus betulus ‘Fastigiata’) and European beech (Fagus sylvatica), the shoulder hedge also echoes those other big shoulders of the towering skyscrapers behind Millennium Park.  By the way, that’s a cultivar of white-flowered prairie native Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum) in the foreground with a purple cloud of sea lavender (Limonium latifolium) nearby.

For Dutch superstar designer Piet Oudolf, the Lurie plant design was his first commission in the U.S. and his first big public garden, though later he would design the plantings for the High Line in New York (which I blogged about in June 2014), our own entry border at the Toronto Botanical Garden (which I blogged about in March 2017 including the intricate design nuts-and-bolts) and the Delaware Botanic Gardens at Pepper Creek (opening this September), among others.  When he became the perennial plant designer of the winning Lurie design team under Seattle-based landscape architects Gustafson Guthrie Nichol Ltd. (GGN) at the turn of the millennium and had his plant list prepared, he travelled to Chicago to meet with nurseryman Roy Diblik, owner of Northwind Perennial Farm in nearby Burlington, Wisconsin.  Roy had already read Gardening with Grasses, the book Piet co-authored with Michael King in 1998, one of many design books he has written; it astonished him. As he said in a 2016 interview on The Native Plant Podcast, “It was the first book I’ve ever seen about grasses intermingled with other plants. This book showed communities, how to interplant, playfulness.  It was wonderful.”

Roy Diblik, below left, recalls their first meeting in the biographical Oudolf Hummelo – A Journey Through a Plantsman’s Life (2015 ) by Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury: “I remember how he rolled out a copy of a plan for the Lurie Garden on a workbench. I could see immediately that there had never been anything like this before in the Midwest.  We went through the plants, what would work, and not work. He got me involved in producing the plants – 28,000 plants, with no substitutes. We subcontracted the growing of the easier plants and I did the more difficult ones myself.”  For his part, Piet had never seen a prairie before and Roy loved the prairie and its plants deeply, so he took his Dutch visitor to visit the Schulenberg Prairie at the Morton Arboretum, a very moving experience for Piet. So it was natural that they became more than design collaborators; they became close friends.  The professional collaboration continues today, since every two years the Lurie invites them and the landscape architects to visit the garden, inspect the plants and assess how they’re performing……

Roy Diblik, left, and Piet Oudolf, right. Photo courtesy of Laura Ekasetya

…… in a consultation that includes Director/Head Horticulturist Laura Ekasetya, below, part of the formidable all-woman team at the Lurie.

To place the Lurie in context, you can see below in this amazing July image by Devon Loerop Media the Seam, the Light Plate and Dark Plate and beyond the garden, people sitting on the Great Lawn enjoying a performance  at the Pritzker Pavilion under the airy overhead trellis containing the sound system.

Devon Loerop Media courtesy of Lurie Garden

Looking the other way in another image by Devon Loerop Media, you see Renzo Piano’s beautiful Modern Wing of the Chicago Art Institute, whose windows look directly onto the undulating garden, its sloping, prairie-like meadow and gardens and trees like some ever-changing work of modern art.

Devon Loerop Media courtesy of Lurie Garden

On a hot day last August, just beyond the bee-buzzy cloud of white calamint (Calamintha nepeta), there were young visitors cooling their feet in the water course, just out of view, that bisects the Lurie as part of the “Seam”, GGN’s evocative separation of the garden into the Light and Dark Plates. The Light Plate, left, is the sunny prairie-like side; the Dark Plate features a more garden-inspired design with many plants growing in dappled shade under black locust trees (Robinia pseudoacacia). In between on the Dark Plate side is an area called the Transition Zone, with tall plants.

The water course is part of stepped pools underlying the broad ipe wood walkway that carries visitors through the garden. But what exactly did the landscape architects intend to evoke with the Seam?  Most of the waders would not understand that this is a sophisticated means of connecting the Lurie with the underlying landscape.

Not the immense parking garage immediately below – since Millennium Park is a massive green roof, the largest in the world. Not the ghost of the old Illinois Central Railway tracks below. Rather, it evokes the swampy marshland in the delta of the Chicago River that once led into Lake Michigan just a few blocks away, atop which young Chicago grew in the early 19th century. By 1900, the river would be reversed to flow ultimately into the Mississippi River, but it was a muddy beginning for the young city that necessitated a gigantic engineering project and wooden walkways to ensure that the big-shouldered city and its citizens did not sink into the mire.  That’s the history conjured up by The Seam.

The Raising of Chicago was undertaken after outbreaks of cholera in 1854 and ’59 killed more than two thousand people. It involved the use of jackscrews to lift entire streets of buildings six feet above ground.  Below is an artist’s 1856 rendering of the plan to raise Lake Street.  Connecting historic events like this with a contemporary landscape like the Lurie is perhaps the finest interpretation of capturing a ‘sense of place’.  Read more about Gustafson Guthrie Nichol’s design rationale for the Light and Dark Plates and the Seam here.

Image – Chicago Historic Society – Edward Mendel

The plants for the wildish front section of the Lurie may evoke the prairie, but Piet prefers to call this the Meadow.  As Noel Kingsburgy wrote in Oudolf Hummelo: “At the time Piet created the Lurie Garden, it represented a new level of complexity and sophistication in his design. It drew on a number of elements that had proved successful elsewhere, but it also contained several innovations. The bulk of the planting is formed of like plants clumped together, although there is a small area of innovative intermingled planting at the southern end, known as The Meadow, where species are mixed in a truly naturalistic fashion. Its matrix of ornamental grasses including the native Sporobolus heterolepis, is broken at intervals by a number of perennial species that rise up above the grasses….” The matrix system would inspire Piet a few years later in his design for the High Line. Many of the plants in the Meadow are native prairie plants, but not all. The lovely white coneflower below is Echinacea ‘Virgin’, one of Piet Oudolf’s own introductions.

Grasses are chosen for their hardiness, beauty and architectural durability, regardless of whether they’re native species, non-natives or selected cultivars.  Here is the Meadow’s matrix grass, the lovely tallgrass native prairie dropseed (Sporobolus heterolepis).

Award-winning ‘Blonde Ambition’ blue grama (Bouteloua gracilis), below, has striking pennant-like flowers and grassy, blue-gray foliage.

Autumn moor grass (Sesleria autumnalis), on the other hand, is a European grass that Piet knew well from previous designs. In June, it’s the soft, chartreuse framework for the Lurie’s spectacular purple-blue “salvia river”, and in summer, it enhances purple coneflowers and cloudlike, white-flowered prairie spurge (Euphorbia corollata).

Here is autumn moor grass nestling the tallgrass prairie forb wild petunia (Ruellia humilis).

Grasses also frame another typical prairie denizen, nodding onion (Allium cernuum).

‘Karl Foerster’ feather reed grass (Calamagrostis x acutiflora) may be the most commonly-seen ornamental grass in North America now, but it creates the perfect vertical accent below.  It is named for the renowned Germany nurseryman and plant breeder Karl Foerster (1874-1970) who in turn was the teacher of Piet’s own friend, the late nurseryman and plant breeder Ernst Pagels (1913-2007). Pagels introduced many plants we see in Oudolf gardens, including Salvia nemorosa ‘Amethyst’ ‘Blauhügel’ and other sages; Phlomis tuberosa ‘Amazone’; Veronicastrum virginicum ‘Diane; Astilbe chinensis var. taquetii ‘Purpurlanze’; and, in honour of Piet, award-winning Stachys officinalis ‘Hummelo’.

One of the paradoxes of the surge in popularity of American native plants and their selections is that much of the work was done in Germany and Holland. ‘Shenandoah’ switch grass (Panicum virgatum), below, with its rich red foliage, was selected by another of Piet’s friends, German plantsman Hans Simon. Here it is with the ferny foliage of Arkansas bluestar (Amsonia hubrichtii) and Agastache ‘Blue Fortune’, a superb hybrid of North American anise hyssop (Agastache foeniculum) and Korean Agastache rugosa, bred and selected by Gert Fortgens at Rotterdam’s Arboretum Trompenberg.

The ‘Blue Fortune’ anise hyssop was attracting hordes of monarch butterflies the day I was there, and the photographers in the crowd were vying for the perfect shot.

Pennisetum alopecuroides ‘Cassian’ is an excellent, hardy fountain grass named for Piet’s friend, Cassian Schmidt, director of the renowned German garden Hermannshof.

A signature plant in Piet’s gardens is airy sea lavender (Limonium latifolium), seen here with a tiny sprig of prairie spurge (Euphorbia corollata).

Nearby was a drift of early-blooming pale purple coneflower (Echinacea pallida), their pink flowers now bronzed with age. Seedheads and senescing plants, of course, are a vital part of the four-season design that Piet has promoted in his gardens, adding structure to plantings and an evocative, almost metaphorically human sense of “a life well lived” .  As he told a New York Times writer more than a decade ago:  “You accept death. You don’t take the plants out, because they still look good. And brown is also a color.”

The seedheads of Allium lusitanicum ‘Summer Beauty’, a Roy Diblik plant introduction, still looked wonderful, especially framing Echinacea ‘Pixie Meadowbrite’.

Wild quinine (Parthenium integrifolium) is a tallgrass prairie perennial whose flowerheads were slowly turning tawny.

Under the trees in the Dark Plate, the brown seedheads of Phlomis tuberosa ‘Amazone’ added a strong note of verticality.

Touring visitors through the Lurie, as Laura Ekasetya was doing here, often means explaining Piet’s philosophy, since people don’t always appreciate the beauty of plants once the flowers fade.   Birds do, of course, and seeds of many perennials offer nourishment to songbirds long after summer ends.

And even without their purple flowers, the tall spikes of prairie blazing star (Liatris pycnostachya) are simply spectacular, and will be prominent well into winter.

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But the liatris season is long, and the knobby flowers of rough blazing star (Liatris aspera) were just opening……

….. bringing native insects to nectar. This is the two-spotted longhorn bee.

The Lurie attracts a diverse roster of insects to forage on the flowers. Native skullcap (Scutellaria incana) was being visited by a lumbering carpenter bee (Xylocopa virginica), while…..

….. tall ‘Gateway’ Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium maculatum) was entertaining monarchs, as was….

….. the ‘Diane’ Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum).

In fact, monarch butterflies were even mating on the common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) that had been left in a few spots in the garden to ensure enough food for the monarch’s larval caterpillars.

Although I’m a prairie girl at heart, I finally dragged myself away from the sunny Light Plate into the shade-dappled Dark Plate. Here, the planting is less meadow-like and more refined, much as you would find in garden borders.

And I loved the chickadees that were flitting through the trees. Here’s a little taste….

The perennials in this section appreciate richer soil and a little more moisture, too. Below is Heuchera villosa ‘Autumn Bride’ with Aruncus ‘Horatio’ having formed seedheads behind. Pink Japanese anemones are at the rear.

I could smell the perfume of the summer phlox (Phlox paniculata) even before I arrived at the spot where it was flowering.   In every possible shade of pink, it was paired perfectly with Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium spp.).

Great blue lobelia (Lobelia siphilitica) made a good companion to the phlox. Summer phlox is one of those native North American perennials that enjoyed early cosmopolitan success in the 18th century when plants were collected in the “new world” and shipped to Europe. It was John Bartram who found it growing near Pennsylvania’s Brandywine River in 1732, and sent it to England, where it soon found its way into estate borders and cottage gardens throughout Europe. Though it is occasionally susceptible to disease (and voracious groundhogs in my own Toronto garden, where I haven’t seen a bloom in years), it is such a lovely mid-late summer perennial and romantically ebullient and perfumed.

In fact, it was in this part of the garden where Piet Oudolf and Roy Diblik noticed a phlox, below, that had seeded from the original planting of a named variety.   It was clear pink and exhibited excellent characteristics.  After watching it for a few years, they had it dug up in 2016 and taken to Brent Horvath of Instrinsic Perennial Gardens (IPG) in nearby Hebron, one of the midwest’s finest wholesale perennial growers.  In honour of the Lurie’s Director and Head Horticulturist, Piet named it ‘Sweet Laura.’  And as Laura Ekasetya says, “He is including this plant in the new edition of (his book) Dream Plants for the Natural Garden.”  IPG propagated cuttings in 2017 and 2018 and it is now sold locally and at the Lurie Garden’s May plant sale.

Courtesy Intrinsic Perennial Garden

As I was reluctantly leaving the garden to return to the symposium at the over-air-conditioned convention centre, I saw a honey bee landing on Geranium soboliferum, Japanese cranebill, below. It cheered me up as I was planning to return on my own later that day to meet someone special at the Lurie.

IT WAS 2011 WHEN I proposed a story on urban beekeeping to Organic Gardening magazine, which has sadly since folded.  The story featured three expert beekeepers and their shared wisdom about the ancient art and science of beekeeping. One was Michael Thompson, beekeeper for the hives on the rooftop of Chicago City Hall and also the Lurie Garden.  But beekeeping (read this Edible Chicago article on Michael and his history with honey bees) and being co-founder and director of the Chicago Honey Co-op is just one of Michael’s journeys in life; he also works with urban agriculture (including an urban orchard project), especially in parts of the city where organically-grown vegetables and neighbourhood involvement are a departure from the norm. When I was making my plans to travel to Chicago, I contacted Michael to ask if there was a chance we could meet in person.  We agreed on a time and I made my way back to the Lurie that afternoon. After arriving on his bike in sweltering temperatures, Michael donned his veil and began inspecting the hives.

Brood and honey looked good for August, a product of the Lurie’s abundance of nectar- and pollen-rich plants (not to mention urban street trees throughout Grant Park and downtown).

Among the plants I’d noticed earlier with honey bees were Japanese anemones (pollen only, which bumble bees also collect)….

…. Knautia macedonica, which yields magenta-pink pollen…..

…. Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum ‘Diane’), which is a superb plant for native pollinators too….

…. calamint (Nepeta calamintha), which honey bees adore…..

…. and mountain mint (Pycnanthemum muticum), which attracts honey bees and other pollinators in droves.

But apart from seeing the beehive inspection, I wanted to meet Michael in the flesh here at the Lurie, to cement one more personal connection in this wonderful world of flora that we all cherish.

And after receiving my gift of Chicago Co-op honey….

…I went back into the Lurie, now comparatively empty of people.  And I thought of the friends I was with on this symposium, people I’ve come to know in the thirty years I’ve been immersed in gardens, like Helen Battersby, who co-produces with her sister an award-winning blog called Toronto Gardens…..

…. and Washington state photographer Mark Turner, who has captured with his lens every native plant in his beautiful part of the world….

….. and Theresa Forte, who writes a column for the St. Catharine’s Standard (and is a proud grandmother like me). Behind her is Portlander Kate Bryant, who generously drove me around her fair city visiting gardens last year, not long after our Lurie visit.

I’d shared a Lurie stone wall at lunch with horticulturist Anne Marie Van Nest, a longtime friend who gardens at Niagara Parks and Quebec’s Larry Hodgson, who writes, photographs and leads tours en Français to gardens throughout the world.

I thought of the people who grow all the plants and tend all the gardens, like Intrinsic’s Brent Horvath and his partner, Chicago Botanic Garden’s Lisa Hilgenberg, who manages the edible gardens there. I would meet them at the symposium dinner later that week.

And I thought of people directly related to this very garden’s design ethos, and a fun dinner in 2016 hosted by the New Perennialist himself, Tony Spencer, standing left, with me, plantsman David Leeman, special guest Roy Diblik and nurseryman Jeff Mason of Mason House Gardens. Tony also began the Facebook group Dutch Dreams, and has become a good friend of Piet Oudolf over the years.

Those are just a few of the many hundreds of people I’ve met and become friends with in three decades. As I walked through the Meadow again, looking up at the compass plants giving the nearby skyscrapers a run for their money,……

….. I thought about spring 1999, when I’d visited Hummelo and photographed Piet Oudolf on the eve of the new millennium.  He would begin the Lurie design process just a year or so later. And of this garden, about which he said in a Tom Rossiter video recently, “The Lurie Garden created a moment in my life where I stepped over a threshold and came into another idea of design. For sure it has affected my work. And it has done a lot of good in my personal experience and it’s done a lot of good in my designs, in particular to touch people’s emotions.”

If there are big shoulders in cities, there are big shouldered people in the world of gardening and design as well.  We stand on their shoulders and learn from them, and they sometimes learn from us. It is a rarified world rendered infinitely interesting by the changing of the seasons and by the way it touches our emotions. And we are all so very fortunate to live (and work) here.

Happy 15th anniversary, Lurie Gardens and Millennium Park.

*********

Please leave a comment. I’d love to know what you think of the Lurie, too!

Spring at Ontario’s Royal Botanical Gardens

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After a long winter, it always nourishes the soul to soak up spring in public gardens as they begin their season-long parade of blossoms. So, last Thursday, I paid a short visit to the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, Ontario. It’s also in Hamilton, the neighbouring city – which is what happens when you have discrete properties spanning the municipal boundary along Plains Road. There was a lovely ‘Gorgeous’ crabapple attracting bees in front of the visitor centre.

Tulips (I think that spectacular orange one is ‘Daydream’) were in full flower along the walkway.

The raised gardens here attract lots of attention, given that they’re at eye level.

I loved this combination: yellow-flowered cushion spurge (Euphorbia polychroma) with ‘Blue Ensign’ lungwort (Pulmonaria) and eastern shooting star (Dodecatheon meadia) in front.

Then I arrived at what used to be called the Hendrie Rose Garden and is now the Centennial Rose Garden within Hendrie Park, which is the new name encompassing all the gardens at this location. The roses will begin in June, of course. I must say, I miss the old vine pergolas with the clematis and pleached trees overhead, but I’m sure these black metal gazebos will stand the test of time.  And from the photos I’ve seen online, this new incarnation is going to be more inspiring to gardeners who want to know how to design with low-maintenance roses in their own gardens, i.e. using companion plants rather than seeing the shrubs all alone in a “rose zoo”.

As we walked along the edge of the forest of the Grindstone Creek Valley, I saw native redbuds (Cercis canadensis) with their branches lined in tiny pink flowers.

A little flash of yellow alerted me to a male goldfinch in an oak tree. Lots of birders come here with their long lenses!

A horse-chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) was just opening its first flowers, left, below. Did you know that this European tree has a fascinating reproductive strategy? Bees can see yellow, but not red, so the tree features a little yellow splotch on its newest flowers, the ones containing fresh nectar and pollen. As the flowers age, they turn orange, then red (right). Red is not a colour bees can detect, so they don’t bother with the old “used” flowers any more.

The Scented Garden was awash in fragrant daffodils (no labels, alas), while magnolias and perfumed Koreanspice viburnum (V. carlesii) were offering their olfactory best in the distance.

A favourite spot for me is the Helen M. Kippax Wild Plants Garden. I like its naturalistic approach to life and pollinators.

Mayapples were just coming into flower beside brilliant Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica)…..

….. which were attracting queen bees to the nectar-rich flowers, like the one below.

Our native common blue violet (Viola sororia) was putting on a pretty show.

How thrilling to see a young American chestnut (Castanea dentata), in a cage here to protect the tender shoots from voracious rabbits. Once a major eastern deciduous forest component (thought to have comprised 25-30% of hardwoods), this now endangered species suffered a massive decline because of chestnut blight, which is estimated to have killed between 3-4 billion trees in Eastern North America between 1904, when the disease was discovered, and the 1950s. Currently, the Canadian Chestnut Council is working to reintroduce trees bred to have better resistance to the blight.

The familiar flowers of wild geranium (Geranium maculatum) lit up a corner.

American red elderberry (Sambucus pubens) was in flower at the top of the Grindstone Creek Valley.

There was an informative and artful display set up to explain the role of solitary bees. I didn’t see any in residence, but perhaps it’s still early in the season.

Native bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa) was showing off its catkin flowers.

The pond featured an interesting sculpture and a good interpetive sign explaining earth’s water cycle.

Most of the gardens were still waking up. In the Medicinal Plants Garden…….

…. the only plant in bloom was pink lily-of-the-valley (Convallaria majalis var. rosea). Evidently, in careful doses, the root, which contains convallatoxin, has been used for cardiac arrhythmias and other heart issues. (The berries, however, are highly poisonous.)

Our next stop was a short drive down Plains Road to The Arboretum to see the RBG’s big lilac collection of over 700 species and cultivars. I wanted to see the early-blooming lilacs on the Kitsy Evans Lilac Walk…..

…. including the common lilac (Syringa vulgaris) which has given rise to so many cultivars over the past century.


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The Hyacinthifloras were in flower, given the early season……

….. and renowned Manitoba breeder Dr. Frank Skinner’s 1966 introduction, the compact, pink-flowered S. x hyacinthiflora ‘Maiden’s Blush’ (S. oblata, ssp. dilatata x S. vulgaris) was perfuming the path.  It’s a favourite of many lilac fans.

I headed down the slope of the Katie Osborne Lilac Garden to see what other early lilacs were in bloom.

There is now a path along the bottom of the Dell, which makes walking through easier……

…. but I must say that given that the Royal Botanical Gardens was once the International Cultivar Registration Authority (ICRA) for lilacs and has such a deep collection, I was disappointed in the attention being paid to the lilacs on the steep south slope. Pruning has been let go here and elsewhere, which has allowed many lilac shrubs to grow too tall. In some places, lilacs have died and there are now hazardous depressions where people who want to climb the hill like mountain goats can twist ankles or worse. I have been many times to the RBG at lilac time, and I’ve written about lilacs and Hyacinthifloras and hybridizer Frank Skinner in particular – see my Canadian Gardening 2008 story, below. In one memorable interview with the RBG’s former lilac specialist Charles Holetich in the mid-90s when I was writing my weekly newspaper column for the Toronto Sun, he said he was a “strong believer that lilacs should be kept pruned at between 6-9 feet”.

I understand the difficulties associated with a steep slope (and limited staffing), but it seems to be me that some of these important lilacs, below, could easily be transplanted to the empty, flat lawn at the top on the north side of the Dell, where they could be maintained as they should be.

As we headed out of the Arboretum, I enjoyed this lovely ‘Midnight’ chokecherry (Prunus virginiana), and gazed beyond it to the big, flat lawn where those ignored lilacs might enjoy a new lease on life.

With a few hours left before we had to drive north to Guelph, we decided to stop in at the newly redesigned David Braley and Nancy Gordon Rock Garden back down Plains Road.

I attended the opening in 2016 (following a 4-year renovation of the 1929 garden) but the plantings have matured in three years. While it was primarily a spring display garden in its previous life, it had been re-imagined courtesy of Janet Rosenberg & Studio as a four-season garden featuring many more shrubs and a big palette of perennials. This was the view from the top.

Nearby was a fragrant ‘Heaven Scent’ magnolia (M. liliiflora x M. veitchii).

I did find some familiar little paths on the edge of the valley slope, where I could look through flowering almond (Prunus triloba ‘Multiplex’)…..

….. to old plantings of basket-of-gold (Aurinia saxatilis) still going strong decades later…

….. and some beautiful views down to the valley through fragrant Viburnum x carlcephalum ‘Cayuga’.

But it was down on the valley floor where you get the big picture, over a sleek, sinuous water feature up towards the new visitor centre, intended to attract not just garden-lovers but year-round restaurant diners and wedding and special event revenue as well.

The water feature extends around in front of the old 1962 teahouse, which is now called the Garden House.

A beautiful bridge spans the water, which will host water lilies in summer.

Along the main garden path which takes visitors on a gentle (wheelchair-accessible) ascent back to the Visitor Centre, only a few spring perennials were in bloom.

Retracing my steps, I climbed a path at the far end of the rock garden, past a lovely Korean maple (Acer pseudosieboldianum) …….

…… and a pretty little waterfall.

There were pale fritillaries (Fritillaria pallida) peeking out from ostrich ferns….

…. and at the top of the stone steps, the reward of a ‘Valentine’ bleeding heart in flower.

We walked through the late blossoms of ‘Kanzan’ Japanese cherries in the RBG’s cherry collection to return to our car.

After a long winter, it was a joy to walk among cherry blossoms, daffodils, scented lilacs and viburnums in yet another spring at the Royal Botanical Gardens.

Early Spring Blossoms at the Toronto Botanical Garden

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I popped by the Toronto Botanical Garden this morning for a quick look at what’s in bloom. It’s been such a long, cold winter and reluctant spring, an hour in the garden was just the therapy I needed. So what did I see?  Well, in all the years I’ve been photographing at the TBG, I’ve never spied the cornelian cherry (Cornus mas) in the hedge cages in flower. With the ‘marcescent’ foliage (persisting through winter) of the beeches (Fagus sylvatica), it made a unique and lovely entrance to the George and Kathy Dembroski Centre for Horticulture, the main building.

There were loads of hellebores doing their thing. Helleborus ‘Red Lady’ is a long-time performer and has multiplied beautifully beside the stone wall of the building. I loved the sober backdrop it made for flamboyant Narcissus ‘Tiritomba’.

I found a nice assortment of hellebores under the ‘Merrill’ magnolia just opening. This is Helleborus x ericsmithii HGC Merlin (‘Coseh 810’). Isn’t it lovely?

Helleborus x ballardiae HGC Cinnamon Snow (‘Coseh 700’) was spicing things up.

And Helleborus x ballardiae HGC Ice Breaker Prelude (‘Coseh 830’) was meltingly gorgeous.

In a protected corner of the Westview Terrace, Magnolia x loebneri ‘Leonard Messel’ was in full flower.

I could photograph magnolias all day.

Containers of spring bulbs brought a welcome note of colour.

Nearby was a little reticulated iris still in flower. Though it was labelled differently, I think its the McMurtrie cultivar Iris reticulata ‘Velvet Smile’.
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On the bank where donkey tail spurge (Euphorbia myrsinites) scrambles, the variegated Tulipa praestans ‘Unicum’ was in flower.

Incidentally, the tulip season at the Toronto Botanical Garden is very long and beautiful. I wrote a long blog last year about TBG’s tulip stunning combinations.

Hyacinths (Hyacinthus orientalis) just need a little warmth to emit their perfume……

….. and even graced the path to the TBG’s big compost piles, along with daffodils.

Speaking of daffodils, I thought this one in the Entrance Courtyard was pretty spectacular. Meet Narcissus ‘British Gamble’.

The small bulbs were mostly finished, but glory-of-the-snow Scillia luciliae ‘Pink Giant’ (formerly Chionodoxa) was fading but still beautiful.

As I walked along the Piet Oudolf-designed entry border toward my car, I saw a favourite tulip, T. kaufmanniana ‘Ice Stick’ looking slender and lovely beside emerging perennials that will soon fill the garden with blossoms that will charm visitors until autumn. And I thought how wonderful each and every spring seems, to the winter-weary gardener.

PS – I will very soon get back to New Zealand… and the Argentina part of our wine tour. Promise! (Unless spring keeps beguiling me……..)