Each spring, I look with admiration on my drifts of an Ontario native plant that asks so little of me, but gives so much in return: Polygonatum biflorum, smooth Solomon’s seal. Its tapered shoots emerge in April in my north-facing back garden, where the clumps under the black walnut tree that looms over my sideyard pathway are surrounded by the tiny flowers of the bulbous spring ephemeral Corydalis solida.
By mid-late May, looking back towards my garden gate, the corydalis has disappeared but the Solomon’s seals stand three feet tall.
It’s still early in the garden when they flower, the grasses in my deck pots still just inches high.
The colony in the back corner of the garden grows near a Tiger Eyes sumac and has as its neighbour fall monkshood (Aconitum carmichaelii ‘Arendsii’), not yet visible. Both enjoy the same shade-dappled, slightly moist, humus-rich soil.
It’s a testament to the travelling power of Solomon’s seals that they do sometimes subsume other plants. This ‘Ballade’ lily tulip – one of my favourites – is resisting.
But nothing keeps Allium hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’ from rearing its pretty head.
My garden features a number of invasive plants – some native, like ostrich fern (Matteucia struthiopteris), others enthusiastic exotics, like my lily-of-the-valley, aka ‘guerilla of the valley’ (Convallaria majalis). (I’ve written about that pest before in my blog about making a perfumed garden party hat!) But Solomon’s seal is up to the challenge and can stand its ground.
One that didn’t fare so well in competition with the Solomon’s seals was wild geranium (G. maculatum), shown below in a photo from a previous spring.
At the Toronto Botanical Garden, blue Amsonia tabernaemontana, shown in the background below, makes a pretty companion for Solomon’s seal.
I love the way the pearl-drop flower buds of smooth Solomon’s seal open, curling up their green tips like dainty skirts.
In November, the leaves turn yellow-gold.
Solomon’s seal and other woodland lovers were featured in ‘Shady Lady’, one of #Janetsfairycrowns from 2021, which I blogged about last year.
My next-door neighbour grows smooth Solomon’s seal as well; it met with the approval of the resident male cardinal.
Finally, speaking of cardinals, here’s a tiny video made in my garden featuring smooth Solomon’s seal with my regular choristers, cardinals and robins.
In this third edition of my blog series on some of my favourite trees and shrubs, I’m taking a meander through the genus Acer, the maples, specifically those native to eastern North America. And what better way to start than with the spring flowers of the iconic red maple (Acer rubrum)? Always one of the first species to show colour, this tree in Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery was sporting its fuzzy male or staminate flowers on its bare branches on March 31, 2010…
…. with a closer look here. Red maple flowers are an important early source of pollen and nectar for native bees, hoverflies (like the one below) and honey bees.
Red maple trees, sometimes called “swamp maple” for their propensity to grow in damp sites, are generally dioecious with male and female flowers on separate trees, but occasionally a tree will contain flowers of both sexes, but on separate branches. Some trees have even been seen to fluctuate yearly between male and female flowers – something botanists call gender inconstancy. This article titled ‘The Sex Life of the Red Maple’ by population biologist Richard Primack in Harvard’s Arnoldia magazine recalls that this gender variation has been called a “polygamodioecious” breeding system. Female or pistillate red maple flowers look like dangling, ruby-red earrings with their curved stigmas. I photographed these April 9, 2010.
I found our spring-flying polyester or cellophane bee (Colletes inaequalis) foraging for nectar in red maple flowers on April 22, 2016. However, the length of the stamens and stigmas has suggested to botanists that some red maples may also be wind-pollinated, i.e. not entirely dependent on insects for reproduction.
When I hike through the 4700-acre Torrance Barrens (my local ‘sacred place’ on Lake Muskoka) in early spring, it’s always a joy to see the red maples, their red flowers contrasting with the rugged, grey gneiss outcrops.
And at our own cottage property in Muskoka, I only have to look out the window to see one of our own wild red maples coming into bloom alongside its faithful companion, the white pine (Pinus strobus).
Red maple leaves are green in summer as they absorb sunlight to synthesize the sugars the trees need to survive. The species is well-known for being intolerant of alkaline soils, and leaves often appear “chlorotic” or yellowish in those conditions. The particular array of the leaves in the canopy is often reflected in its autumn colour, with more exposed parts of individual leaves turning red, while shaded portions turn yellow.
The winged fruit or seed key of all maples is called a ‘samara’.
The red maple below in Section J in Mount Pleasant Cemetery is one of my favourite trees in autumn. You can see some of that mixed fall colouration here….
…. and also below in my arrangement of leaves I picked up below another tree. Notice how different these leaves are from the green ones above and others later in this blog. Red maple is known for having a wide diversity of leaf shapes.
The tree has been a sentimental favourite of writers and naturalists. In his journal, Henry Thoreau wrote this on September 25, 1857: “The red maple has fairly begun to blush in some places by the river. I see one, by the canal behind Barrett’s mill, all aglow against the sun. These first trees that change are most interesting, since they are seen against others still freshly green — such brilliant red on green. I go half a mile out of my way to examine such a red banner.”
But some red maple cultivars have been selected specifically for their biochemistry in producing a reliable show of red fall colour, like the tree below (possibly Red Sunset) which has carpeted the ground in the cemetery after an overnight freeze.
Contrast that uniform colour with the leaves of the straight species, below.
In fact, there are so many mature red maples in the cemetery that I have photographed specimens featuring all-gold, all-yellow and all-red fall leaves, below. Note the serrated margins of the leaves – an easy way to tell red maple from sugar maple, which has smooth margins.
Here is a side-by-side comparison of two large red maples in autumn.
At our own cottage on Lake Muskoka, I photographed young red maples at the shore exhibiting this same colour difference. Things like this are interesting to me because there is a general theory that (red) anthocyanin secondary pigments act as autumn sunscreens for certain tree species, allowing them to continue to photosynthesize well into the fall after green chlorophyll breaks down. Despite my efforts, I have not been able to ascertain why there is such startlingly different pigment biochemistry in this species, particularly when grown on the same plot of land where pH is not therefore a factor. My own theory, backed up by a few speculative references, is that it has to do with sex of the tree: red leaves on males, yellow leaves on females. (Oh, by the way, voracious local beavers cut down these scrubby little red maples. Beavers don’t care about biochemistry, only housing.)
Speaking of the cottage, this is our best red maple in autumn, as seen from indoors. (And that’s my homemade botanical lampshade.)
It doesn’t surprise me that Acer rubrum is considered to be the ‘most abundant and widespread deciduous tree species’ in eastern North America. If you hike in our local Muskoka, Ontario woods in May, the little seedlings appear everywhere, including with spring ephemeral wildflowers such as trout lily or dogs-tooth violet (Erythronium americanum), below. This photo is also a good illustration of the “opposite branching” habit of all maples.
Here it is amidst wild strawberries (Fragaria virginiana) and other native plants.
In the same forest, on the same day, we find a sugar maple (Acer saccharum) seedling. Note the smooth margins and the opposite branching.
Sugar maple’s flowers are unlike those of red maple; they are ‘perfect’, meaning male and female flowers are on the same tree. Here you see mostly male flowers with their dangling anthers, but also a few female flowers with the curved stigmas. Sugar maple also flowers later than red maple.
In autumn, sugar maple trees colour early, often with salmon-scarlet leaves covering an entire tree but sometimes with many hues at once, as you see below in my photo from Mount Pleasant Cemetery.
Between them, red maple and sugar maple produce the most vibrant autumn colours in northeastern forests. One year, a relative with a small plane took me up above the forests of Muskoka. Looking down, this is what I saw: a spectacular combination of red maple and sugar maple, with birches and aspens offering yellow contrasts. Oaks would change colour later.
In the ravine in the park at the end of our street in Toronto, the population of native sugar maples, in fall colour below, struggles to survive against the incursion of exotic, invasive Norway maple (Acer platanoides), at right. That European maple takes on yellow fall colour later, along with its normal coal tar spot disease which is visible on some of the leaves.
On the boulevard in front of the pollinator garden at our house in Toronto, we have a columnar tree that I ordered as “red maple” with its presumably spectacular fall colour, to go along with the ginkgo at right. Imagine my disappointment when those red leaves turned out to be dishwater yellow. Across the street is a Freeman maple – more on that one below.
The ginkgo and red maple on my boulevard were replacements for the 100-year-old silver maple (Acer saccharinum) tree that had dominated our view and given us shade for all the years we’d lived in our home… until 2007. That’s when the city’s water department came through the neighbourhood upgrading the plumbing. I looked down from my 2nd story windows at the workers having their lunch one day.
After they went home, I looked at the excavation on the boulevard. How could any tree survive the kind of root cutting that this would involve?
Sadly, it did not survive (though silver maples are considered short-lived compared to other native trees.) In 2011, it received the dreaded orange dot that designated it for removal. But note the weeping area in the bark; this is called ‘bacterial wetwood’ and is caused by bacterial infection of a wound. It happens to many trees and does not bode well for them.
Silver maple trees usually bear male and female flowers separately, but can also have ‘perfect’ flowers containing both male and female organs, like the one below where you can clearly see the male anthers and female stigmas.
Healthy silver maples (they can be notoriously weak-wooded) reach a considerable size at maturity, up to 90 feet (27 m) or more. Native to a wide swath of the Northeast and Central Plains from New Brunswick and Maine to Minnesota and eastern Oklahoma and Texas, they are generally bottomland trees, preferring moist soil. They derive their common name from the silvery underside of the leaves. In autumn, the foliage turns pale yellow.
Compared to red maple, silver maple leaves are narrow and very deeply notched.
There is an attractive, naturally-occurring hybrid of red and silver maples called Freeman maple (Acer x freemanii). Named in 1969 for Oliver Myles Freeman (1891-1979) of the U.S. National Arboretum……
…… who made the first controlled cross of the species in 1933, using red maple as the female parent, it blends the best traits of both species: the form and rich fall colour of red maple with the fast growth and cultural adaptability of silver maple.
Growing 40-60 feet (12-18 m) tall with a 20-40 feet (6-12 m) spread, it has become a popular street tree in Toronto. There are also many specimens at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, below.
When I created my “leaf dancers” blog in November 2020 (see Pigments of my Imagination), I gathered small Freeman maple leaves from the boulevard tree across the street to fashion the skirts of my Maple Maypole dancers. I like to think Oliver Freeman would be amused to see them.
Finally, a little maple that grows in the shady understory of northeastern forests, including the mixed woods near our cottage on Lake Muskoka: striped maple (Acer pensylvanicum). It’s also called “moose maple” because it is sometimes the winter food of moose and white-tailed deer; squirrels and chipmunks forage on its twigs; and many birds consume the seeds. Though occasionally seen as a small, single-trunked tree, it is usually found in nature as a multi-stemmed shrub, seldom exceeding 20 feet (6 m). Taxonomically, it is the only non-Asian species in the Acer section Macrantha, or “snakebark maples”; all the other 18-21 species, e.g. A. davidii, A. rufinerve, A. tomentosum, occur in China, eastern Russia, Korea, Japan or Myanmar. The photo below shows its dainty samaras.
Its leaves have three shallow lobes and the greenish flowers are held in arching racemes. If you look very closely, you can see an early instar of gypsy moth or LDD moth (Lymantria dispar dispar) on the lower right of the leaf. In May, I still thought we’d survive the onslaught of this destructive pest; by mid-summer, it was clear we had not, as you can read in my 2021 blog.
Though there are other maple trees in North America, including mountain maple (A. spicatum), Manitoba maple (A. negundo) and black maple (A. nigrum) in the east and central Canada and bigleaf maple (A. macrophyllum), Douglas maple (A. glabrum subsp. douglasii) and vine maple (A. circinatum) in the west, I’ve included in this stroll the beautiful trees I see each year here in Ontario. Oh, there’s one more maple we see fairly often – and it’s native right across the country. My little granddaughter once confused it with the phrase “make believe”, but it is our true (if slightly stylized) “maple leaf forever”.
It’s always the week that makes November worth celebrating. I’m referring to the spectacular display in my living room in the first ten days of November when my Japanese maple (Acer palmatum) transforms itself from a tracery of green to brilliant shades of apricot, coral, gold and scarlet.
I don’t have any curtains in the front room, just the maple outside, but the jewels in my window are the blown glass witch balls I hung there eight years ago. Not to ward off bad spirits or protect my house, as is the apparent historic use of witch balls – though that would certainly be a side-benefit. Rather it’s that eye-popping contrast of the fall colour pigments of the maple (anthocyanins and carotenes) with the refracting light from within the blown glass that makes the window seem more like a dynamic art installation than a potentially kitschy folkcraft display.
Kitsch. That’s what I was worried about a decade ago after impulsively purchasing a case lot of select witch balls from Iron Art in Ohio (at the time, I was allowed to place their minimum wholesale order, but they’ve since set up a retail site called Iron Elegance, and they also have a wide network of retailers). I’ve never been a fan of window coverings if there’s a view to close out – whether the lovely tree in the front garden or the panorama of the entire back garden from my kitchen window. Let the neighbours stare, I don’t care; nature is more important to me. But glass witch balls aren’t stained glass panels; as lovely as they might look, how would I hang them? I decided to go ahead and if I didn’t like the look, I could remove them. So I bought three wall-mounted metal cup racks featuring leaves and birds and a couple of small hooks for the larger middle window, then spray-painted them all dark-teal to go with the woodwork. I screwed them into my window frame, then, using fishing wire, I tied the balls at various levels in the upper part of the window. And as the sun shone through them that first November 2013, I was completely enchanted.
I have always loved the look of blown glass, but the first time I saw it used in a garden was in 2003 at my dear friend Virginia Weiler’s home in North Carolina, where the work of her friend John Nygren hung in her tree.
And during a 2008 garden writers’ tour of Portland, I was intrigued by Lucy Hardiman’s wonderful hanging glass display. I thought about how I might achieve something like this at home, but it seemed to me that the cold winters and winds in Toronto might be too severe for an outdoor display.
CORNING MUSEUM OF GLASS
In September 2008 we visited the Corning Museum of Glass in upstate New York and my love affair with glass continued. (You can read my blog about the museum here.)
From Dale Chihuly’s ‘Fern Tower’ in the lobby…
…. to the 1905 Louis Comfort Tiffany window of hollyhocks, clematis and the Hudson River, all that survives from the 44-room Rochroane Castle, built for Natchez oil and cotton millionaire Melchior Stewart Belthoover in Irvington, New York…
… to the exquisite forest glass or ‘waldglas’ drinking glasses made in northern Europe from the middle ages to the 18th century using tree and fern potash whose iron content lends the green hue…
… to the sleek, modern work of Italian and Finnish glass artists….
…. to a mosaic Mediterranean glass bowl from the 1st or 2nd century BC, I loved it all.
At the conclusion, I even had the opportunity to blow my own glass ball – with a little help from an expert.
MURANO
Two years after visiting the Corning Museum of Glass, we were in Venice and decided to tour the island of Murano with its famous glass blowing factories.
The tour was set up by our hotel with the pick-up and boat ride to the island courtesy of one of the glass furnace factories, so we were obliged to begin there. After a long, interesting tour of the firing floor, we visited all the display floors beginning with the most expensive sculptures and chandeliers at the top (nope!) and descending to the affordable cufflinks! But somehow we ended up ordering six of the most beautiful, gold-rimmed glasses you’ve ever seen, which were mailed to us weeks later. I also wrote a blog about this memorable day.
After the obligatory furnace tour ended, we walked around the small island, visiting the interesting glass museum and window shopping. I found a jewelry shop owned by a young woman busy making earrings and beautiful blown-glass bead necklaces.
One of those became my Christmas gift from Santa that year.
Walking on, we came upon this spectacular sculpture by Simone Cenedese called Comet Glass Star. Then we had one of our best meals on our entire Venetian vacation, at a little workman’s osteria on Murano.
The Magic of Light in my Window
Though ever more humble, I still find myself sitting in my living room on those days when the sun shines through the fall leaves of the maple….
…. and hits the splashes of colour in the witch balls.
I even made a video a few years back to try to explain it.
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Today there’s freezing rain outside and soon snow will be in the forecast in Toronto. On the snowy November day when I photographed the window, below, the leaves hadn’t even fallen yet.
And I recall vividly the winter wonderland look of the tree after our devastating ice storm of December 21, 2013.
Sometimes, when I have holiday lights on the maple’s branches, I stand in the front room looking out in the darkness. The witch balls even look festive at Christmas!
In late winter or early spring, I can often catch the resident cardinals in the maple tree.
At that time of year, when the tree hasn’t yet leafed out, I especially appreciate the detail and colours of the blown glass, whether blue…
…. or green…
… or a glass so clear you can see the tiny grains from the glass-making process.
And then, suddenly, it’s June and my “living” living room ‘curtain’ is back in place, its leaves energized by the power of the sun and the glass balls refracting all the light that’s left over.
After I gave the witch balls their every-three-years wash last week, I watched them turning for what seemed like hours. I’m sure there’s some Galilean law of reciprocal motion about what happens when you twist a sphere suspended by a wire, but it seemed even more magical, as if they were rotating in sympathy with the fluttering leaves on the maple. So I’m ending with this magical moment, which I’ve set to music by the very generous T.R.G. Banks.
I know I promised you the second half of my orange-for-October colour treatment, but I needed a little taste of fall today. I needed a vision of October red, orange and gold before the rain and wind sweep in tomorrow and turn the delicate, tree-borne flags of autumn into sodden layers on the ground. So I did what I’ve done for more than twenty years now: I drove to Mount Pleasant Cemetery, just ten minutes from my home, and parked my car. The cemetery’s 200 acres make it one of the biggest arboretums in Canada, and its roads criss-cross under a forest of stately trees, many with labels affixed to their trunks providing the botanical and common names. It is quiet, solemn, a place to reflect on life, death, and the seasons. I have spent hundreds of hours photographing these trees in spring, summer, autumn and winter; I know them well. Here are just a few that called out to me today.
Driving down Mount Pleasant, it was easy to pick out the neon-pink of the burning bushes (Euonymus alatus) outside the iron fence.
Just inside the gate was an Ohio buckeye (Aesculusglabra) turning golden-apricot.
There are massive sugar maples (Acer saccharum) near the entrance, and they’d begun their sunset colour transformation,too.
Many species of maples were turning colour. Below is red maple (Acer rubrum) – a variable autumn-colouring species, that can turn yellow, deep red, pale orange or mottled, like this tree.
Silver maple (Acer saccharinum) had become a pretty lemon-yellow.
This tall, old silver maple, below, (that is how it has been labelled) is very unusual in that its manifesting its colour change, with red and yellow pigments keeping their distance in the leaf. I think it’s highly likely there is some Acer rubrum in its DNA, making it an Acer x freemanii specimen……
The elegant fullmoon maple (Acer japonicum) always transfixes me, especially the fringed leaves of the cultivar ‘Aconitifolium’. Today, I stood underneath the tree to soak in the deep russet and scarlet tones.
There are several wonderful, big hickories at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, and this bitternut hickory (Carya cordiformis) stands like a stately sentinel beside the handsome mausoleum.
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I was mildly shocked that in all the years I’ve photographed in the cemetery, I somehow missed the seven-sons tree (Heptacodium miconoides). This is its colourful second act, after the September flowers fade and the calyces turn a pretty rose-pink.
The leathery, witch-hazel-like leaves of the parrotia (P. persica) had taken on their mottled red, pink and orange colours, before falling on the small tombstones beneath it.
All the birches had exposed the underlying carotene pigments that turned their elegant leaves bright yellow. This is European silver birch (Betula pendula)….
… and this is North American paper birch (Betula papyrifera).
Serviceberry (Amelanchier sp.) leaves were glowing red and orange, the third season of beauty for this native, following their delicate white May flowers and tasty June fruit.
Tulip poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera) leaves had taken on gold and bronze tones.
The wind was picking up and the air was cold as I headed to my car. I gazed up at one of the magnificent white oaks (Quercus alba) turning crimson and bronze, its massive branches held aloft. Many of Mount Pleasant’s white oaks were already mature trees when the cemetery opened on November 4, 1876. One hundred and forty years ago this week.
A long October weekend in London…… Barely enough time to be a proper tourist, but certainly enough time to pay my customary visit to the Royal Horticultural Society Garden at Kew Gardens, aka “Kew”. Not to see it all, of course – that would take a very concentrated effort, especially arriving as I did in late morning and having to depart for a 5:30 pub dinner on Clarence Square in central London. But I saw enough to delight the senses, especially in a week when I also visited Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden in Cape Town!
Autumn colour was everywhere, but especially impressive in the American smoke tree (Cotinus obovatus) overhanging Kew’s Temple of Bellona.
The big tulip poplars (Liriodendron tulipifera) leading to the Orangery Restaurant had turned a beautiful golden-bronze.
Kew’s sweetgum trees (Liquidambar styraciflua) were wearing their multi-hued fall party dresses, too.
The towering black walnut (Juglans nigra) looked luminous in the afternoon sunshine, its big limbs supported with cables in its old age.
Even the umbrella plant (Darmera peltata) foliage was turning colour – a nice bonus for a marginal aquatic that flowered months earlier.
Bumble bees and honey bees were all over the single dahlias in the flower beds along the great walk, and the castor beans (Ricinus communis) made pretty partners..
And beside the Orangery, the cosmos were still putting out lots of blossoms.
As luck would have it, my Facebook friend Margaret Easter had contacted me before I left for South Africa and proposed we meet at Kew on my short stop in London on the way home to Toronto. What a great idea! I’ve done the same thing with Facebook friends in California. “Let’s have lunch together at the Orangery”, I suggested. And so we did, then trooped out with our cameras to while away a few afternoon hours.
There was no time to do the Kew Palace, sadly, even though I knew there was a great little garden behind that pretty building. During the late 1700s, it was the summer home of King George III and Queen Charlotte and their 15 children. When he developed mental illness in his later life (remember the film ‘The Madness of King George’?), it also became his sanitarium, and included strait jackets and cold baths. His granddaughter Victoria became one of England’s most famous monarchs.
We walked through the lovely Secluded Garden, which includes this pretty gazebo made of pleached lime trees (Tilia x euchlora). Inside is a sculpture.
And it was a big treat for two plant geeks to see the rare and recently discovered Wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis) without the zoo-like fence that once surrounded it. According to Kew, it is: “The only remaining member of an ancient genus dating back to the time of the dinosaurs, over 65 million years ago. This fascinating tree was only discovered in 1994, causing great excitement in the botanical and horticultural worlds.” Kew’s tree had even grown old enough to form cones.
We strolled through the elegant little Alpine House and had a look at some of the treasures Kew keeps there.
In autumn, there are many lovely fall-blooming bulbs, like the pretty Tournefort’s crocus.
Connecting the Alpine House to the Princess of Wales Conservatory was a sprawling rock garden with a surprisingly large number of plants still in flower. Margaret even found the accession label for one of her own thyme discoveries (she is a writer, speaker and holder of National Plant Collections® of thymus, hyssopus and satureja.) I liked this creeping persicaria (P. capitata), which was feeding loads of honey bees.
The Princess of Wales Conservatory is a favourite stop for visitors, especially on a cool autumn or winter afternoon, as it contains tropical plants that must be kept warm and humid. It was built in the late 1980s to replace a number of smaller greenhouses. Though opened in 1987 by Diana, the Princess of Wales, it is dedicated to an earlier Princess of Wales, Princess Augusta, the founder of Kew Gardens. The water garden inside is beautiful.
Everyone loves water lilies, of course, especially the gorgeous ‘Kew’s Stowaway Blues’ with its lush purple blossoms.
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There is a fabulous orchid collection in the conservatory, with some of the finest specimens arrayed fetchingly up the staircase to the upper level.
Upstairs, the bromeliads get misted regularly, creating the cloud forest conditions necessary for these rainforest beauties to thrive.
Outdoors again, we put on our coats and sauntered towards the enclosed Plant Family garden. On the way, I noticed that the spring-flowering sweetbay magnolia (M. virginiana) had put up a few shy autumn blooms.
Education is a prime focus of Kew and these interpretive signs mounted along the walk highlight the intersection of plant cells and useful botany, via some amazing microphotography.
The ornamental grass garden was in its lush October glory, the big miscanthus and panicum species swishing in the wind.
Outside the enclosed Plant Family garden, the sage border was at peak bloom, showcasing the fall value of these wonderful plants (many here are true shrubs).
For anyone wanting to grow salvia species and cultivars, this border is a must-see in late summer and autumn. Honey bees and bumble bees, of course, call it a “must-bee” border.
The hour was growing late, but there was time to wander inside the walled garden to see what was still in bloom.
There were penstemons, dahlias, sennas and the odd rose. Nerines are always an autumn treat, where the season is long enough.
And the students’ vegetable gardens looked quite superb!
But sadly, our afternoon was coming to a close. I looked longingly at the big Palm House, framed with the magnificent cedar of lebanon (Cedrus libanyi), but it needs at least an hour to do it justice, and wasn’t to be.
I have visited the Marianne North Gallery on every Kew trip, but that lovely haven would have to wait for another visit as well. Here’s a photo from 2008.
Just a few minutes for a stop in the plant sale area. Nothing to buy for me, of course, but I’d have loved to tuck a few goodies into my suitcase.
And is it just me, but is this not the prettiest wall ever, with its aquamarine downpipe and window frames and fall-burnished Boston ivy (Parthenocissus tricuspidata)? It was my last stop: the Kew Loo! And on that note…….
