I’ve been meaning to write this blog for years, but it took a global pandemic – and the fact that this is National Pollinator Week – to spur me into action. Because in a pandemic we need essential workers, and on this planet there are no workers more essential than pollinators. Think of it: in all flowering plants not pollinated by wind (grasses and many trees are wind pollinated), bees, buterflies, moths, birds, beetles, ants and other insects are responsible for transferring pollen from a flower’s male anthers to the receptive female stigma, ensuring fertilization of the ovum, the creation of fruit and later the ultimate dissemination of seed. Without pollinators, the world as we know it would be as it was more than 135 million years ago: boring. No need for colour, since grasses and birches and pines don’t need to wear flashy hues to have the wind disperse the pollen the produce. No need for flower fragrance, since the wind doesn’t need to be lured to flowers like moths to a nocturnal species. And wind pollination is so wasteful! Look at how many male white pine cones fall to the ground in the evolutionary effort to pollinate the receptive female cones. (This is my dock on Lake Muskoka north of Toronto, by the way).
No, insect pollination was a giant step forward, beginning with plants that looked vaguely like modern magnolias, likely fertilized by beetles. (I couldn’t find any beetles so substituted honey bees on Magnolia grandiflora, below).
Bees evolved initially from wasps. The earliest honey bee ancestors emerged in Asia roughly 120 million years ago. Bumble bees arrived on the scene between 30 and 40 million years ago. Modern honey bees and bumble bees, like those below on globe thistle, are the descendants of an ancient lineage of insect pollinators
As gardeners, we sometimes forget that there was a time when the natural world did not revolve around us. It got along just fine without Homo sapiens. In fact, there are quite a few people who think earth fared much better without humans, but then consciousness and evolution have given us the ability to perceive our achievements and actions with feelings of pride tempered by a growing sense of guilt. Climate change, conservation, overpopulation – they are all serious issues today, but that’s not what I’m focusing on here. Instead, I’d like to write a little love letter to the workers in earth’s most essential essential service: pollinators. Goodness knows I’ve spent enough time courting them over the past three decades and more. Here’s one of my Toronto Sun columns from 1997.
And here’s a story I proposed and wrote on urban beekeeping for the now-shuttered Organic Gardening magazine in 2012.
Researching nectar- or pollen-rich flowers for beekeepers for that story and finding very little in current literature launched a multi-year focus on honey bees and their favourite plants. Out of it came a quite spectacular poster……
….. and the occasional magazine cover.
In time, I amassed such a large inventory of honey bee imagery (like the forget-me-not, below) that I decided to create an online photo library devoted just to them. If you’d like to have a browse, it is located here.
My beekeeping pal Janet Wilson out in British Columbia drove me to her hives in a blackberry thicket on a farm, and let me photograph her checking on the hives.
When I was on safari at Kicheche Camp in Laikipia, Kenya in 2016, I loved spending time with the camp’s beekeeper William Wanyika, and learning how he does his work.
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At Toronto Botanical Garden, I photographed the beehives and the student beekeepers….
….. and later that year I returned to photograph the honey harvest.
I enjoyed paying attention to nectar guides, the markings that plants have evolved to show pollinators exactly where to look for nectar and pollen. The European horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum), below, is an excellent example. Flowers with fresh nectar exhibit a yellow blotch; as the markings darken from orange to red, the bee knows that the flowers are old and no longer yielding nectar.
But as much as I appreciate the work that honey bees do, I have always understood that in North America, European honey bees (Apis mellifera) are very much domestic agricultural animals. They may be feral in places warm enough for them to overwinter, but in much of the continent they must be “kept”. Wild bees, or native bees, on the other hand, have co-evolved with our North American flora. Many of them are adaptable to a number of different plant species; they’re called “generalists”. Here is a montage I made of native North American bees and butterflies on native North American plants.
Other bees are “specialists”, requiring the nectar or pollen from one, or just a few, types of plants. The North American squash bee (Peponapis pruinosa) is one of those, spending its short life acquiring food from the flowers of native squash plants, like the one below.
On vacation in Arizona, I was interested in the specialist native Diadasia australis bees who forage solely on opuntia cacti, like this Engelmann’s prickly-pear (Opuntia engelmanii).
At home, I have come to know my local native vernal or spring bees, like the polyester bee (Colletes inaequalis), shown below on early-flowering willow (Salix).
But I’ve been bemused in the past few weeks by native bees paying no attention whatsoever to my native plants and instead finding their sources of carbohydrates and protein in the nectar and pollen of non-native plants, such as the bicoloured sweat bee Agapostemon virescens working the wine-red flowers of European knautia (Knautia macedonica) in my garden, below….
… and a plethora of native pollinators, including the Eastern tiger swallowtail, avidly foraging on my neighbour’s Chinese beauty bush, Kolkwitzia amabilis, below.
But some plants don’t need pollinators. While I was videotaping the June plants above, the birds were squabbling noisily over the first ripening serviceberries (Amelanchier sp.) nearby. (I photographed the one below on the High Line one June.) I was curious that in all my years observing my serviceberries and their clouds of tiny blossoms, I haven’t seen any pollinators attending the plants. How could I have such an abundance of early summer fruit? Scientists have shown that several species of Amelanchier have evolved “apomixis”, bypassing sexual reproduction, meiosis and cell division entirely – thus no need for insect fertilization. In apomicts, the ovum in the flower divides parthenogenically.
I adore bumble bees (Bombus species), and I’ve spent years trying to identify the ones I see in my gardens and even the species I encounter during my travels. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that I have a large photo inventory of bumble bees online. Below is my favourite of all, the brown-belted bumble bee (Bombus griseocollis). Isn’t that the perfect name?
And I do have a soft spot for Toronto’s (un)official bee mascot, the bicoloured agapostemon (A. virescens), shown here foraging on purple coneflower in my garden.
Though many people dislike them for their wood-boring trait, particularly if it happens to their pergolas or sundecks, I love watching carpenter bees (Xylocopa virginica) using that strong tongue to bore into the corollas of certain flowers, like the Nicotiana mutabilis, below. Biologists call that “nectar robbery”, i.e. the bee is effectively bypassing the evolutionary pact between bee and pollinator to gain the reward without transferring pollen from one flower to another.
At the Toronto Botanical Garden, where I’ve contributed my photography as seasonal galleries, I spent a few seasons tracking pollinators on the plants, and made a musical video to celebrate them.
My city garden in Toronto was designed as a pollinator garden, too. It contains both native and non-native plants. I’ve shown this video a few times in my blog, but here it is again throughout four seasons.
And at my cottage on Lake Muskoka, I look upon almost every plant in my meadows, garden beds and planters as a chance to invite bumble bees, solitary bees and hummingbirds to sup on the mostly native plants I provide for them. (Please note that the vernonia should be V. noveboracensis).
So to celebrate National Pollinator Week, I would like to encourage all of you to think about your relationship as gardeners to the natural world. Should your garden really be all about you and what you like? Or do you agree with me that we should also consider that….
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.
*********
Please leave a comment. I’d love to know what you think of the Lurie, too!
When the newspaper cartoonist and trailblazing conservationist Ding (Jay Norwood) Darling (1876-1962) established the National Wildlife Federation in 1936, he had conservation as his goal. “Land, water and vegetation are just that dependent on one another. Without these three primary elements in natural balance, we can have neither fish nor game, wild flowers nor trees, labor nor capital, nor sustaining habitat for humans.” Ruthie Burrus’s Austin garden meets those critera, and an NWF sign proclaims her intention for all visitors to see.
But it’s not really necessary to read the words on the sign, for you can discern Ruthie’s intent based on the masses of pollinator-friendly plants flanking the long driveway at its start near the road…..
…. and the painted lady butterfly nectaring on the mealycup sage (Salvia farinacea)…..
…. and the honey bee foraging on the blanket flower (Gaillardia pulchella)…..
…. and the cottage garden-style matrix of self-seeding, mostly native wildflowers and grasses.
For structure, Ruthie has used the “it plant” that we saw in almost every Austin garden, the beautiful whale’s tongue agave (A. ovatifolia).
Not every plant is native – brilliant, bee-friendly corn poppies (Papaver rhoeas) have been incorporated, and self-seed regularly.
But the Texas natives do attract their share of pollinators, including this beautiful pipevine swallowtail butterfly nectaring on Hesperaloe parviflora, or red yucca.
There was lovely pink evening primrose (Oenothera speciosa)….
And Engelmann’s daisy (Engelmannia peristenia)…
And lemon beebalm (Monarda citriodora…
And rock rose (Pavonia lasiopetala).
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When we reached the top of the driveway, we were treated to a tamer garden surrounding the Burrus’s lovely limestone home.
Ruthie Burrus was waiting for us there, ready to tour us around.
But even here, the plant palette was chosen to attract pollinators, like the honey bee on Salvia guaranitica ‘Amistad’, below.
In the shade, surrounded by ferns, was a water trough fountain with a slow-trickling stream of water cascading to the plantings below, then recirculated.
This was Texas hill country, and the view st the back of the house over the pool to downtown Austin was spectacular.
I loved the outdoor living room, protected from Texas gullywashers by a roof, and featuring a fireplace for cool evenings.
Beautiful succulent designs filled pots and troughs outdoors.
Many homeowners are including woodburning pizza ovens in their landscapes these days, and Ruthie’s was beautifully landscaped with Phlomis and agaves.
Nearby was a sweet building that Ruthie calls her garden haus.
A large cistern — one of two on the property — gathers rainwater channelled to it via a system of drains. A pump then facilitates irrigation of the garden.
We were just leaving when I heard excited voices at the front of the house. Looking up, I saw a huge tarantula on the cool limestone wall. At the risk of anthrpomorphizing a little, it seemed to be saying, “I’m a Texas native insect too, and there’s room for all of us here!”
‘Tis the season for one of the loveliest perennial stalwarts in my little pollinator garden: woodland or meadow sage (Salvia nemorosa). Nemorosa means “growing in groves or woods.” I grow two types (both unlabelled), a deep indigo-blue that may be ‘Mainacht’…..
….and a pink-flowered one without a name (maybe ‘Pink Friesland’) that looks gorgeous with my catmint (Nepeta ‘Dropmore Hybrid’)…..
That’s the creamy, double-flowered Camassia leichtlinii ‘Semi-Plena’ with them, below.
The pink one came in a pollinator plant pack that was subsidized by the Canadian Wildlife Federation, which included it with butterfly milkweed and echinacea. And though I’ve yet to see a monarch on my woodland sages, they do attract loads of bees for their nectar and pollen, including natives like bumble bees…..
…. and fluorescent green sweat bees….
…. as well as honey bees. Look at the pollen on this little girl!
In my wildish gardens at Lake Muskoka, the ubiquitous Salvia nemorosa ‘Mainacht’ (‘May Night’) finds its own partners, like self-seeded pink musk mallow (Malva moschata)……
….. and common oxeye daisies (Leucanthemum vulgare).
Let’s look at some more late spring-early summer design ideas for woodland sage from some of my favourite public gardens. Dutch designer Piet Oudolf uses meadow sages liberally in his designs, including the entry border at the Toronto Botanical Garden. Here is Salvia nemorosa ‘Amethyst’ with wine-red Sanguisorba menziesii.
And here it is in a tone-on-tone combo with the big globes of Allium cristophii.
The honey bees from the TBG’s beehives love ‘Amethyst’, too.
I loved this combination of woodland sage with Astrantia major ‘Claret’ and red feather clover (Trifolium rubens). Unfortunately, the clover is not long-lived.
The dark wands of woodland sage make a good partner to the luscious peony ‘Buckeye Belle’ in the Oudolf border, below. Erectile Dysfunction viagra canadian has developed as the most interesting compound that can be used for various ailments just because of its active properties. These two words can thus http://greyandgrey.com/third-department-2-14-13/ tadalafil best price be utilized conversely. cialis 40 mg You can buy forzest online which is easily available over internet in the hard pill form and it should be taken an hour before sexual activity. While it rx generic viagra is true that older men might need more stimulation before he is ready for participating in sexual activity.
In the perennial border at the TBG, Iris pallida ‘Variegata’ combines nicely with Salvia nemorosa ‘Mainacht’.
At the Royal Botanical Garden (RBG) in Hamilton, near Toronto, Oriental poppies and chartreuse lady’s mantle pair up with Salvia nemorosa ‘Blue Hill’ (‘Blauhugel’)…..
…. which is also a lure for bees of all kinds.
The RBG does an interesting pairing of common rush (Juncus effusus) with ‘Caradonna’ in their wildlife garden.
At Montreal Botanical Garden, this mass planting of Salvia nemorosa ‘New Dimension Rose’ with ‘Profusion Cherry’ zinnia caught my eye.
Perhaps my favourite design using woodland sage was at Chanticleer Garden in Wayne, Pennsylvania. (Read my 2-part blog on this spectacular garden.) In their Gravel Garden, ‘Caradonna’ was combined with annual, white Orlaya grandiflora and red corn poppies (Papaver rhoeas).
The dark wands are repeated down the Rock Ledge garden at Chanticleer with other June flowers…..
…. like hot-pink sweet William catchfly (Silene armeria)…..
….and orange foxtail lilies (Eremurus) along with blue globe onion (Allium caeruleum).
Near the ponds at the bottom of the Rock Ledge, ‘Caradonna’ was used like a crescent-shaped brush stroke through rushes and Artemisia, with big ‘Lucille Ball’ alliums bobbing behind.
And finally, in the Tennis Court Garden at Chanticleer, ‘Caradonna’ was used to provide dark accents alongside the chartreuse leaves of ‘Hearts of Gold’ redbud (Cercis canadensis), alliums and pink-flowered spireas.
Don’t you think it’s time you had meadow sage in your own garden?
Way back in mid-June, before the annual Bloggers’ Fling (with its wonderful garden tours) had begun in the DC region, my husband and I toured Washington’s beautiful Dumbarton Oaks as well as the National Mall, before driving south to see Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in Charlottesville VA. The National Mall on a steamingly hot Sunday was impressive for first-time visitors, all 1.9 miles (3 kilometres) of it. We walked from the spectacular Lincoln Memorial at its west end….
…to the sobering Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall nearby….
…and the World War II Memorial a little further on…..
…past the towering Washington Monument….
….and the White House northwest of the Mall at this point….
…all the way to the Capitol Building at the east end.
In the last half of the Mall you find the Smithsonian Institution, which owns eleven museums and galleries on the National Mall, including many gardens, but my favourite by far was the Mary Livingston Ripley Garden nestled between the historic Arts and Industries Building and the Hirshorn Museum. You can see it below in the context of the entire mall: my little red arrow points it out. (Click to open for the best view.)
As the Smithsonian explains on its website: “The Mary Livingston Ripley Garden was the inspiration of Mrs. S. Dillon Ripley, lifelong plant scholar-collector, active gardener, and wife of the Smithsonian Institution’s eighth Secretary. (They are shown together in the photo below, while on a trip to India.) Mrs. Ripley conceived the idea for a “fragrant garden” on the eastern border of the Arts and Industries Building – a location that was designated to become a parking lot. In 1978 Mrs. Ripley persuaded the Women’s Committee of the Smithsonian Associates, which she had founded in 1966, to support the garden. In 1988 the Women’s Committee recognized their founder and friend by naming the garden after her. In 1994, Mrs. John Clifford Folger of Washington, DC, and Palm Beach, Florida, initiated an endowment fund for the support and care of the garden in order that it might be preserved as it was first conceived by Mrs. Ripley. This thoughtful gift was given with the hope that others might add to the fund so that visitors would be able to enjoy the garden into the 21st century.”
So let’s take a tour of the Ripley. First of all, if I’d completed this blog back in the summer, as I intended to, I could not have introduced you to the new president of the Perennial Plant Association – and the woman who has been the Ripley Garden’s enthusiastic and education-focused gardener for almost 2 decades, Janet Draper. (And though I didn’t intentionally give her that poppy seedhead tiara, she is definitely royalty in the plant world of the northeast.)
That Janet is an obsessed plant geek becomes clear as soon as you enter the garden. Let’s start at the north entrance. See that elegant finial behind the orange flame flowers (Jacobinia chrystostephana), below? It reminded me of the Washington Monument down the mall, but Janet explained its provenance in the Smithsonian blog, and it has to do with the recently-completed renovation of the Smithsonian’s historic 1881 Arts and Industries Building.
The garden with its curvilinear walkways was designed in 1988 by architect Hugh Newell Jacobson. It was originally intended to be a sensory garden that would be accessible even to people in wheelchairs, so there are several raised, brick beds that put the captivating plant combinations at eye level. Behind, you can see the delightful Arts and Industries Building. Though its 12-year, $55 million renovation was completed in 2016, funding was not there to open it to the general public and it is currently only open for special events.
I loved Janet’s creative plant combinations, from this bronze carex with annual red gomphrena…
….to the pink poppy mallow (Callirhoe involucrata) peeking out through a cloud of Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia)….
….to a luscious combination of alstroemerias with catmint (Nepeta x faassenii ‘Junior Walker) and ornamental grass.
Janet mixes desert species like spikey Yucca rostrata with tropicals, such as the big-leafed banana near the wall, and all grow happily in Washington’s long hot summer.
She uses old-fashioned combinations, such as fragrant lavender with anthemis ‘Susanna Mitchell’, below….
…. but also includes oddities like annual Dianthus ‘Green Ball’…..
……and unusual plants like scarlet tasseflower (Emilia coccinea), below.
By the way, unlike a lot of beautiful display gardens, Janet makes sure her visitors are not only wowed by the plants, but have the opportunity to learn their names as well.
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There are little surprises like the Tuscan kale popping up in a sea of chartreuse anise hyssop (Agastache foeniculum ‘Golden Jubilee’)…..
….and conversation starters like Solanum quitoense, or naranjilla, which definitely discourages sensory contact!
One of the showiest plants in the Ripley garden is the tropical pipevine from Brazil (Aristolochia gigantea) with its big carrion-scented blossoms. Janet loves this plant and enjoys talking to visitors about it. If you read her blog about it, you’ll understand its relationship to the American native pipevine (A. macrophylla), which is a massive vine – too big for the Ripley – but a larval plant of the pipevine swallowtail butterfly (the giant Brazilian plant is not).
But after doing some sleuthing, Janet discovered another small pipevine, Aristolochia fimbriata, that does feed the larval butterflies, and she grows it now. Thus I was delighted to see a rather tattered, elderly pipevine swallowtail taking a break from egg-laying to nectar on zinnias in an orange-themed raised bed.
Speaking of insects – and as a bumble bee photographer, – I was overjoyed to spot a local bee I’d never seen before, the black-and-gold bumble bee (Bombus auricomis) nectaring on anise hyssop (Agastache)…
….and cedarglade St. Johnswort (Hypericum frondosum).
Bumble bees make their own nests, of course, but there was also a lovely hotel for native bees in the garden.
Incidentally, that bed in front of the bee structure perfectly illustrates Janet’s deft touch, not merely with plant collecting, but with lovely design, too. Look how all that pink Achillea ‘Oertel’s Rose’ draws the eye through the scene.
Though the garden has its share of hot, sunny sites perfect for succulents (and drowsy visitors)….
…it also has beautiful shady spots, too. That’s ‘Alice’ oakleaf hydrangea (H. quercifolia) way up on top.
Look at the subtle way the brick retaining wall becomes lower at this point, and how the use of the same bricks for path and wall creates a seamless journey.
Walking toward the shady end of the garden….
….you pass the beautifully textural living wall on the right. A miniature version of some of the building-sized living walls that have become popular in recent years, it is composed of plants whose texture and colours create a living painting. In this blog, Janet explains the nuts and bolts of her first attempt, and in a second blog three years later, she expands on the process with succulents and talks about other fun ideas with topiary.
If other visitors are anything like me, they’ll want to take a rest in the shade after walking the mall on a hot summer day. And how lovely is this resting spot, with its chartreuse obelisk-decked planters flanking it?
Once again, we see Janet’s plant combination skills, with this ‘Frosted Curls’ carex punctuating a bed of luscious Asarum splendens.
Look at this spectacular border: who said there aren’t a lot of plants for shady areas?
Gazing back under the old American elms (they had been there for decades when Hugh Jacobson designed the raised beds around them), I felt that I could have spent hours in the Ripley Garden, marvelling at plant combinations and chatting with Janet Draper. But the United States Botanic Garden beckoned and it was still a good walk east towards the Capitol building. Reluctantly, I headed out into the heat and crowds of the National Mall.
