For Tom Morrisey and Tina-May Luker, home is Lavender Hills Farm, a 25-acre property near Orillia in central Ontario, Canada.
Here, beautiful gardens….
….. and a custom-designed, bee-friendly, 2-acre tallgrass prairie meadow (seed-drilled ten years ago by their neighbors and friends Paul Jenkins and Miriam Goldberger of Wildflower Farm) supplement the natural softwood and hardwood forests and swamp that surround their farm.
Tom – who’s been a beekeeper for 40 years – tends 20 colonies at the farm, in addition to 110 colonies he manages in outyards in the region, for a total of 130 colonies. He calls himself a “sideline beekeeper”, but, of course, at one time he was a novice. He started out four decades ago working as part of the interpretive staff at a provincial park where the focus was agriculture and apple orchards. There was also a beehive under glass at the park – an observation hive – but no one on staff knew anything about bees. So Tom took a 5-day course at the University of Guelph (Ontario’s agricultural college) in order to explain to visitors the fine points about apple pollination. Later, he moved to the Orillia area and started working in adult education at a local college.
As he recalls now, he looked around at all the farms in the area and thought, “I don’t know anything about farming, but I know about beekeeping!” So he bought a couple of colonies and began keeping bees as a hobby. After working for a while in Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources, he went travelling internationally. When he returned to Canada, he met Tina-May Luker and told her he wanted a job where he could ride his bicycle to work. He knocked on the door of commercial beekeeper John Van Alten of Dutchman’s Gold Honey (and later president of the Ontario Beekeepers Association) and offered his services. Two days later, he was hired to help manage between 800-1200 hives.
When he and Tina-May moved back to the Orillia area seventeen years ago, they bought their farm and Tom began beekeeping in earnest, with 50 colonies the first year and another 50 a year later. His farm beeyard is adjacent to the tall-grass meadow and surrounded by electric fencing to deter black bears.
The remainder are situated in a half-dozen outyards within an hour’s drive, with between 10-30 hives at each location. The outyards include a commercial cranberry bog, below,……
…..and a wildflower farm. His honey house at the farm is a converted double garage several hundred feet from the beeyard and close to the driveway so the honey supers can easily be unloaded from his pickup truck after a trip to the outyards.
That brings us to one of Tom’s favorite beekeeping gadgets, and one he devised himself. “In my pickup I put a piece of plywood with a little bit of a rim around it, sort of like a picture frame, and put some loops of wire into that, and that allowed me to use straps to tie down all my frame. It’s terrific, and only cost fifty bucks for lumber.”
Tom has another favorite piece of equipment, his “Mr. Long Arm”. That’s an extendable painter’s pole at the end of which he has fashioned something like a butterfly net made of fence brace wire threaded through the seamed end of a heavy-duty plastic shopping bag. “When it’s extended its full length of twelve feet,” he says, “I can often retrieve swarms that have settled well above me in the branches near my beeyards. The bees can’t grip the smooth plastic so I just shake them out into a brood box on the ground. No more ladders for me!”
As for those swarms, he says: “You can use that whole impulse to swarm to make more colonies of bees, if you want them. If you don’t want them, then you’ve got to be very diligent to manage your colonies so they don’t get crowded.”
Tom started raising queens a few years ago and finds it an engrossing learning experience. “It’s not something a beginner usually tackles, but at some point you get enough confidence to try it, and it’s very interesting. The whole idea is to try to select bees that have the characteristics that I like working with and to give me a supply of queens early in the season when they’re very handy to have.”
In spring, his bees find willows and red maple in the plentiful swamps around one of the outyards, where thawing occurs earlier than other places. At the farm, local basswood trees (Tilia americana), below, provide a good flow and produce excellent honey about three out of five years.
Abundant staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina) feeds the bees and the red fruit clusters provide the fuel for Tom’s smoker.
There’s clover and alfalfa in neighboring farm fields and birdsfoot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus) and viper’s bugloss (Echium vulgare), below, growing wild along the country roads.
Tina-May’s borders and vegetable garden provide lots of nectar and pollen from plants like Oriental poppy (Papaver orientale), butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa), lavender (Lavandula angustifolia)……
….. and asparagus that’s gone to flower with its bright orange pollen.
In the designed meadow, masses of coreopsis give way to purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea), Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum), blazing-star (Liatris pycnostachya and L. ligulistylis). The final act, lasting from August well into October, stars the goldenrods, and Tom and Tina-May grow four species including stiff goldenrod (Solidagorigida, syn. Oligoneuron rigidum), below,
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…. rough-leaved goldenrod (Solidago rugosa)….
…..and the very late-flowering showy goldenrod (Solidago speciosa), below.
Says Tom: “Goldenrod is a good honey, very dark and somewhat strong tasting. The bees produce a bright yellow wax when they’re collecting goldenrod.” But this late flowering of the goldenrods and native asters also helps the health of the hive, as Tom explains. “There’s an expression that it’s really good to have ‘fat bees’ going into winter, meaning bees that are really well-fed. And being stimulated by a good flow of nectar and pollen allows them to make the physiological changes they need for winter. Bees in the summer, they’re flying around, they last six weeks, then they die. But in the winter, they have to sit in a hive, they don’t go out for six months, so their whole body, essentially, has to work in a different fashion.”
Most years, Tom’s colonies winter very well, with his survival rates matching or bettering the provincial average. “I make sure the bees are well fed, because that stimulates them to keep brooding up later in the season. So I feed them in the fall. And I make sure the mites are under control.” Here’s a little video* I made of Tom explaining how he checks for varroa mites. (*If you’re reading this on an android phone and cannot see the video, try switching from “mobile” to “desktop”. Not sure why that glitch occurs.)
Honey extraction begins in late July and extends well into October.
From time to time, Tom enlists the help of family members like brother-in-law Paul Campbell, seen assisting him below.
Here’s a video I made of Tom and Paul at this time in late summer moving the honey frames for extraction.
Over the years, Tom has automated his honey harvest to lighten the load, but it’s still hot, sticky, noisy work, with rock music blaring from speakers above the clatter of the hot knives of the decapping machine….
…..and the whirring of the horizontal extractor.
Here’s a video I made of the honey extraction process at Lavender Hills Farm. Because it’s hard to hear Tom over the machinery and the music, I put in a few subtitles.
Tom and Tina-May, below, are regulars at four farmers’ markets in the area….
….selling honey, mustard, honey butter, herbal soap, candles, and treats like honey straws that children love. “Farmers’ markets are a great place to get to know your customers and build a steady market for your product,” says Tom. “People want to know that you’re the beekeeper, and they want to hear stories about keeping bees, just like I’m telling stories now.”
It’s a demanding occupation with lots of tiring physical work and he gets stung “dozens of times a day, sometimes”. And the challenges are many now. “When I started,” he recalls, “There were no parasitic mites, viruses weren’t an issue, and agri-chemicals didn’t seem to be as big a factor. You could put a box of bees in the back of the farm, they’d winter all right, and you’d get a box of honey. It’s certainly changed in the past twenty years.”
One of the newest factors is small hive beetle, and though it’s been seen in the Niagara region, it hasn’t yet made it this far north. However he’s heard talk of beekeepers arranging refrigerated storage for their honey frames
But Tom is still enthralled with the whole thing. “Keeping bees is a very elemental occupation. The bees are subject to all the natural forces around them, from the plants to the weather and all the variations in between. It’s one expression of nature that you can roll up your sleeves and get right into. And that’s very enjoyable, because every year is different.”
If there’s one piece of advice he’d give to a new beekeeper, it’s this: “Get two hives, not just one, because of the chance of you either making a mistake or nature dealing you a blow that might take one of your hives, but you’ll always have another one.”
And that could be the beginning of a very long love affair.
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This story is a much-expanded version of an article that appeared earlier this year in a beekeeping magazine. It’s a joy to know both Tom Morrisey and Tina-May Luker, below, with me at the Gravenhurst Farmer’s Market on Lake Muskoka this summer.
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 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.
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Please leave a comment. I’d love to know what you think of the Lurie, too!
If you’ve read my first and second blogs on our safari at Kicheche Laikipia, in Kenya, you’ll know that it is now late March 2016, on the cusp of the rainy season. We’re the last guests in this intimate 6-tent camp near Nanyuki, which will close for the season in just two days. This morning we’ve slept well and are ready for the 5:30 am knock at the tent door and the tray of coffee, hot chocolate and biscuits. Within 40 minutes of waking, we’re with our guide Albert Chesoli out on the savannah, awaiting the sunrise. As yesterday, Mount Kenya is clearly visible on the horizon; later in the day, it is almost always shrouded by cloud.
Slowly, the sky turns pink….
…. and finally, the sun rises. Though we don’t have the lovely giraffe silhouettes we saw yesterday, there’s always something interesting on the horizon at Ol Pejeta Conservancy, like these zebras grazing amongst acacia trees in the distance.
It isn’t long after sunrise when we’re rewarded with what is our best sighting in all of our safari excursions. We spot two cheetah brothers (Acinonyx jubatus), the remaining pair of three brothers born six years earlier. They are amazingly synchronized in their behaviour, heads turning at the same time….
….lying down at the same time, then meandering off through the grasses together to sit, one marking a tree to establish territory.
Albert positions our van as close to them as possible, then turns the engine off. For the next half-hour or so, we are utterly absorbed watching them in this quiet corner of Ol Pejeta. Like the cats they are, one sharpens his claws on a dead tree trunk….
…while his brother watches for prey, preferably an antelope or gazelle straying from the pack.
What beautiful markings on their faces!
Soon they begin to relax – a snooze, perhaps, in their future.
The cheetah brothers are so transfixing, I’ve been switching between still photos and video. Because of weight restrictions on the small planes, I only brought my ‘small’ camera, the Canon PowerShot SX50HS with its powerful 50x zoom lens (now replaced by the Canon SX60HS with 65x optical zoom), but it’s perfect for recording these two stunning animals interacting playfully and lovingly with each other like the bonded 6-year olds they are.
When it appears that lolling around wrestling and grooming each other, rather than hunting, is on their agenda, we turn on the engine and head back out on the savannah…..
…. but the other animal sightings this morning are somewhat anti-climatic after our cheetah experience. We decide to stop for our picnic breakfast, and Albert finds us a clearing near a spring-fed stream and prepares to sets the table.
This morning’s menu features Scotch eggs, a delicious combination of spicy sausage and boiled eggs, with crepes and mango chutney.
As I sip my coffee, I notice a little glimmer of bright-red in the grasses. It’s the tiny flower of an indigenous hibiscus, H. aponeurus. In my later reading, I discover this little flower was used by the Maasai in witchcraft!
Besides the acacias, the other predominant shrub on the savannah is Euclea divinorum, which is widespread on the African continent.
The morning has warmed up considerably and many of the animals seem to be hiding from the heat. So we drive back to camp – pronounced Kee-cheh-chay – to put our feet up for a while before lunch.
After lunch, I read on our tent porch and watch a cape buffalo at the water hole. But when I approach with my camera, he galumphs off through the mud…..
….. so I photograph the cattle egrets on a dead tree instead.
In mid-afternoon, I’ve arranged to meet William Wanyika, who not only works in the Kicheche camp administration but is the resident beekeeper, something he’s been doing for most of his life. (Photographing honey bees is one of my great passions.)
William shows me the flowers of the abundant euclea, which are providing most of the nectar flow for the bees at the moment….
…and I ask him to talk a bit about his beekeeping while I videotape him. What a treat to have this opportunity to learn about something I’ve chronicled at home. Here’s my video – sorry about the buffeting wind.
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As we get closer to the Sweetwaters Chimp Sanctuary where the majority of lodges and hotels are, we find lots of crowded safari vehicles on the road; one driver pulls close to tell Albert about a lion sighting nearby On our way to find it, we come upon a bull elephant (Loxodonta africana) drinking at a pond. It’s clear by his partially-unsheathed penis that he has also recently been (or is about to be) urinating. From his vantage point, Albert doesn’t think he’s in musth, but with my telephoto lens I can capture him at a safe distance and later see that there are secretions from the temporal glands at the side of his head which seem to indicate that he is. If so, his urine contains much higher levels of testosterone than usual, and dribbling it around signals his musth status to other males.
Unlike the female elephants that congregate in matriarchal communities with grandmothers, daughters, aunts, female cousins and the youngest male and female calves living together, young male elephants are kicked out when they reach their adolescent years (about 14) and will live in “bachelor clubs” with other males and a dominant bull male, from whom they learn behaviour. When females are in oestrus, musth males can detect it from far away.
Once the elephant saunters off, we go in search of the lions, finding them resting in the trees near the road, likely waiting for darkness before going hunting. So we drive on.
Next we find a pair of grey-crowned cranes (Balearica regulorum) doing their courtship dance….
….and a southern white rhinoceros drinking at one of Ol Pejeta’s water troughs….
….and some newborn zebras, below. The common (Burchell’s) zebras (Equus burchellii) usually give birth during the rainy season in East Africa. The mare will separate from the herd before delivering in order to protect the vulnerable foal.
Albert points out that zebras have evolved long enough legs for a newborn that when standing behind their mothers (and combined with the visually confusing stripes), lions cannot easily detect them.
As we drive on, we see a group of safari vans parked along the road, all the cameras trained on a lioness She yawns…..
….then saunters off, and we decide we’re a little tired, too. Time to head back for a drink – the traditional safari ‘sundowner’ – before dinner.
Tomorrow, we fly home and this is our final sighting at Kicheche Laikipia and Ol Pejeta Conservancy. But I’ve collected video of a lot of the animals we’ve seen over the past few days, and put it together so I can enjoy the feel of the savannah here any time I want. I hope you enjoy watching it, too..
On our last morning, we sleep in a little (no safari drive today) and have breakfast in the main tent before packing for home.
We say our goodbyes to Andy & Sonja Webb, and Albert drives us into the little airport at Nanyuki and watches until we’re safely up in the air. These flights are often milk runs, and the sleepy passengers settle in as we head to Wilson Airport outside Nairobi via a stop at Lewa Downs, where we began our Kenyan adventure one week before.
As we fly over Laikipia, I gaze down at the landscape below us. The patchwork farm crops…..
….the wheat fields…..
…and the great forests and acacia-dotted plains of the conservancies and parks where Kenya’s magnificent animals roam free.
It is a land like no other, and one we’re so fortunate to have experienced.
Postscript: Given the vagaries of airline schedules, a total of 41 hours will elapse between awakening at Kicheche Laikipia and going to bed In Toronto. To pass some of the hours before our Nairobi-London leg, we’ve booked a day room at Macushla House on Nairobi’s outskirts, where we stayed for 2 nights more than a week ago on our arrival in Kenya from London.
We can sit and read in an easy chair….
…while enjoying the unique furnishings, like this cool owl support post….
Or sip a gin-and-tonic at an outdoor table with lunch…
…after a swim in the pool.
Eventually, it’s time to brave Nairobi’s traffic to Jomo Kenyatta airport to begin the flights home to Canada. As always, East Africa has bewitched us, its people have enchanted us, and its majestic animals have served as powerful reminders that there are still beautiful places in the world where ‘wild’ is more than just a word, it’s a covenant with nature.
