The Wildflower Moat at the Tower of London

It was a showery May 26th morning as we crossed the Tower Bridge over the Thames while watching for the first competitors in the LondonRide bicycle race to charge across the finish line just beyond. The bridge opened on June 30, 1910 after sixteen years of construction — 800 years newer than the crenellated White Tower, seen through the bridge’s struts at left, which was built by William the Conqueror in 1078 and finished after his death around 1100. The oldest castle in England, it sits behind battlements at the centre of the Tower of London Fortress, along with the Waterloo Barracks containing the Crown Jewels and the old Mint. But we were crossing the bridge to visit the moat encircling the Tower and its spectacular show of wildflowers.

On the embankment of the Thames in front of the Tower, interpretive signage greets visitors, highlighting moments in English history. This portrait of Elizabeth I (1533-1603) is a reminder that royalty has always been a point of intrigue in Great Britain, though much more dramatic than in modern times. The daughter of Henry VIII and his second wife Anne Boleyn, she was just 2 years old when her mother was beheaded by the king, the first execution of a queen of England. She would assume the throne after the 1558 death of her half-sister, Mary Queen of Scots, daughter of Henry VIII’s first wife Catherine of Aragon, and rule England and Ireland for 44 years as “Good Queen Bess”.

The Yeoman Warders – the “Beefeaters” – who guard the Tower and have apartments within the complex are also featured on signage.

The closely-shorn lawn at the Tower’s southwest corner near Byward Tower is part of the original dry moat, but a much tamer version of the wildflower moat beyond. As the sign in the photo above said, it was once used as a bowling green by the Tower’s residents; its sunny aspect mean it was also used for growing vegetables. Note the cross-shaped “arrow slits” in the fortification walls.

The moat wasn’t always dry, of course. It was fed by the River Thames, below, and extended in 1285 by King Edward I to keep potential attackers at a distance. Fifty metres (164 feet) wide in places and very deep at high tide, it was also stocked with pike to be farmed for the fortress residents. In fact, wicker fish traps from the 15th or 16th century were found by archaeologists, complete with fish skeletons. But around 1843, a deadly, water-borne infection struck, believed to be caused by the “putrid animal and excrementitious matter” of the moat at low tide. So the Duke of Wellington ordered the moat drained and turned into a defensive dry ditch or “fosse”. Dry it would remain until January 7, 1928 when heavy rain caused the Thames to overflow its banks and flood the moat, allowing photographers to briefly capture how it looked when filled with water. During the Second World War, it was used as an allotment Victory Garden for the residents. By the way, that pointed skyscraper on the south side of the Thames is The Shard, the tallest building in the UK at 1,016 feet (309 m).

We watched as a Yeoman Guard began his guided tour of the Tower in the wildflowers of the moat. Unlike those tourists who headed inside the walls, I was content to spend my entire visit in the flowers.

The 2024 version of the “Moat in Bloom” I saw was two years after the Superbloom of 2022, part of the 4-month-long Platinum Jubilee celebrating the 70-year reign of the late Queen Elizabeth II, who acceded to the throne on February 6, 1952 upon the death of her father, King George VI. Here we see the artistry of both landscape architect Andrew Grant of Grant Associates and planting designer Nigel Dunnett, Professor of Planting Design and Urban Horticulture at the University of Sheffield and founder of the seed firm Pictorial Meadows in 2003, who collaborated under Historic Royal Palaces (HRP) to transform the moat into what Grant called “a joyous shout out for change; a marker in how we can move forward in the way we think about and manage our heritage for the benefit of future generations“. In the photo below taken from the public area near the ticket entrance above the moat, we see how Grant designed the willow-edged cutouts in the moat to mirror the arched windows in Mount Legge, the northwest tower in the outer fortification wall (all the towers have names and histories). We also see the descendants of the 20-million wildflower seeds of 48 species and 16 seed mixes sown originally for Superbloom.

Long before Superbloom, Nigel Dunnett had established his reputation with the 2012 planting at the London Olympic Park; the Buckingham Palace Diamond Garden for the 60th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s accession to the throne; a 2013 redesign of The Barbican complex in London with drought-tolerant, perennial steppe species; a Gold-Medal-winning rooftop design for the 2013 Chelsea Flower Show; and his stunning ‘Grey to Green’ landscape work with the industrial city of Sheffield beginning in 2014 and continuing today, and many other projects to beautify the public realm. As for the moat, the scene below could be an Impressionist painter’s canvas! In fact, Nigel Dunnett was inspired by pointillism, especially the work of artist Georges Seurat, as he wrote on the original Superbloom design process in his Instagram account. “These brilliant and analytical explorations of colour relationships… were pivotal in the design development of the seed mixes and their spatial arrangement. The precise selection of individual colours, their proportions, densities and distributions give rise to the larger scale impression. It’s just a small leap to make the connection to meadows and naturalistic planting.” To accomplish this with technology, Dunnett used pixel diagrams as abstractions to create the colour balance and mix proportions with flower seeds.

Then it was time to take the curving path through this magical moat meadow, its exuberance held at bay by low willow wattle fencing produced by Wonderwood Willow in Cambridgeshire. Wrote Nigel Dunnett: “The 2022 Superbloom was a catalyst, a tipping point for this permanent transition of the moat, which must be Central London’s largest and most prominent ‘wilding’ project. It was great to see people down in the moat as part of the everyday visitor experience to the Tower – before 2022 these were inaccessible monotonous mown lawns.”

In certain places, perennials such as yellow-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium striatum), lambs’ ears (Stachys byzantina) and magenta Knautia macedonica flower alongside the annuals.

The white form of biennial rose campion (Lychnis coronaria ‘Alba) added its silvery foliage while lilac Scabiosa columbaria was attracting loads of bumble bees.

This is Bombus terrestris, the common buff-tailed bumble bee sharing a scabious bloom with a hover fly.

A number of benches are placed at intervals throughout the moat.

My three menfolk, husband Douglas, London-based son Doug and his partner Tommy were blown away by the beauty of the moat in bloom. And of course we needed a selfie!

Readers who know my interest – and the name of this blog – know I love to focus on colour. But meadows are also a great passion with me, tracing back to my childhood on Canada’s mild west coast. I talked about this at the beginning of my 2017 two-part blog on Piet Oudolf’s design for the entry garden at the Toronto Botanical Garden: “Piet Oudolf: Meadow Maker“. More than anything else, this is my favourite style of garden, its wildness as vital as its colour associations. Nigel Dunnett also felt this attraction as a child: “From as long as I can remember, I have been inspired by the wild; by the experience of nature. It’s an emotional response. Some of my earliest memories are of being in beautiful flowering meadows, or woodlands in the spring full of wildflowers, and it’s these more intimate or human-scale associations that perhaps made a stronger impression than big dramatic wide landscapes and scenery. That emotional response was, and is, strongly positive: provoking hugely uplifting and joyful feelings.” Below we see various colours of California poppy (Eschscholzia californica) along with blue cornflowers (Centaurea cyanus).

I was fortunate to be in the moat when the poppies and cornflowers, below, were at their very best.

Here we see annual yellow corn marigolds (Glebionis segetum formerly Chrysanthemum) with the California poppies and cornflowers.

We were all competing to see who could get the best photo of…..

…. bumble bees on pollen-rich corn poppies (Papaver rhoeas).

Mauve and white corncockle (Agrostemma githago) is one of my favourite annuals. In fact, I grew it from seed in a big pot this year, along with corn poppies.

In places, the path was marked by drilled bamboo posts threaded through with rope.

A profusion of scentless Mayweed or chamomile (Matricaria inodora) along with oxeye daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare) created drifts of starry white throughout the moat. White bishop’s flower (Ammi majus) had not yet started to bloom here, but I saw that beautiful umbel as the star of another Pictorial Meadows seed mix garden at the Royal Botanical Garden Edinburgh in late August 2022, next photo.

I think this meadow was my favourite part of our visit to RBG Edinburgh. It is the Classic mix in the Pictorial Meadows brochure.

Back to the moat. Circling the northwest Mount Legge fortification tower built in the 13th century, it’s interesting to contrast it with The Shard, built eight centuries later. The blue flowers at right are blue thimble-flower (Gilia capitata). In the original Superbloom seed mix, Nigel Dunnett used washes of blue flowers to recall the water of the original moat fed by the River Thames.

Here is another view of this combination.

Is it possible I love Gilia capitata?

A little further down this path, some grasses have made their presence felt, creating a softening of the wildflower scene. Although most of the original Superbloom annuals have reseeded in the subsequent two years, additional reseeding and top-ups are now managed by the Tower of London garden team.

Gilia capitata from California is very attractive to the European buff-tailed bumble bee, Bombus terrestris. For me, this is yet more evidence of a scenario I’ve found in my photographic journey over the past three decades: bees need protein and carbohydrates, they don’t check the native provenance of plants when they’re foraging for food. Protein is protein; sugar is sugar. Obviously, a large population of native plants will appeal to the pollinators that co-evolved in the ecosystem. But if the ecosystem is degraded, i.e. if urban development has scattered native plant communities, bees will secure food from whatever plants are available.

Historic Royal Palaces is keen on messaging about pollinators in the moat. This year’s flowering is still the “ghost of Superbloom”, but as Nigel Dunnett notes the plan is “for the final transformation into a biodiverse habitat landscape based on native plant communities to happen in 2025.

Oxeye daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare) attracts short-tongued pollinators, including various types of hoverflies.

I was delighted to see plantain (Plantago major) in the moat, because even as an invasive weed at the edge of my meadows in Canada, it attracts lots of bees seeking pollen.

Corn poppies (Papaver rhoeas) are a mainstay in the moat – as they are in fields of Europe, and as they were in the battlefields in John McCrae’s famous World War One poem. “In Flanders fields, the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row,/That mark our place.

Though the initial soil for Superbloom was engineered for the site and free of weed seeds, two years on the odd adventitious weed species has found a home here, like the yellow sow-thistle (Sonchus arvensis), which was also attracting its share of pollinators.

Corncockle (Agrostemma githago) and corn poppies (Papaver rhoeas) make fine companions.

Biennial blackeyed susan (Rudbeckia hirta ‘My Joy’) was just coming into bloom.

Here and there, violet larkspur (Consolida ajacis) towered over the wildflower tapestry.

Though they have no nectar, poppies offer abundant pollen, like this California poppy (Eschscholzia californica) feeding a marmalade hoverfly (Episyrphus balteatus).

Shirley poppies are a special seed strain of corn poppy, Papaver rhoeas featuring different colours, like white, pink (below), lilac and bicolour, some with semi-double petals and no black blotch near the stamens. They were selected originally by Reverent William Wilks, vicar of the parish of Shirley, England, who spent several years beginning in 1880 hybridizing the wild poppies in the fields near his garden to obtain the strain of poppies bearing his name.

Interpretative signage keeps visitors informed of Historic Royal Palaces’ plan for the moat.

Small scabious (Scabiosa columbaria) is a big draw for pollinators.

The buff-tailed bumble bee (Bombus terrestris) is Europe’s most common bumble bee.

Meadow sage (Salvia pratensis) is a clump-forming perennial that prefers well-drained soil in full sun.

Nigel Dunnett specified the biennial viper’s bugloss, Echium vulgare – another bee favourite. Here it grows with corncockle (Agrostemma githago).

The Tower of London is famous for its six raven guardians, an institution believed to have started with Charles II who insisted the birds be protected and thought the crown and Tower would fall if they flew away. But this magpie does not have any official duties and has staked out its own priority seating in the north moat.

Look at the lovely flower of corncockle (Agrostemma githago), so pretty despite being very poisonous. In the 19th century it was a common annual weed of roadsides, railway lines and wheat fields and it likely made its way throughout the world as part of exported European wheat.

Although cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris) was mostly finished in England when we were there in late May, a few plants popped up in the moat, right.

Annual corn flower (Centaurea cyanus) also comes in mixes that contain blue, white, pink and purple flowers – all are foraged by bees.

When I was at the Chelsea Physic Garden the day before visiting the Tower of London (here’s my blog), they had used annual lacy phacelia or purple tansy (Phacelia tanacetifolia), below, in a mass planting as bee forage for their hives. Despite being a native of California, it is a strong polllinator lure.

Here a buff-tailed bumble-bee enjoys foraging on the unusual caterpillar-like inflorescences of Phacelia tanacetifolia.

Signage helps visitors understand the possibilities of the moat, beyond its origin as fortification.

A lovely combination of pink California poppy (Eschscholzia californica) and meadow sage (Salvia pratensis).

Marmalade hoverfly (Episyrphus balteatus) on pink California poppy.

The north side of the moat offers a good view of the 20 Fenchurch Building, nicknamed the “Walkie-Talkie” for its shape. This is the building which, as it was under construction in 2013, reflected the sun in such a way as to melt the metal of a Jaguar car parked beneath it, forcing the developers to erect a permanent sunshade of horizontal aluminum fins. The north part of the Tower complex behind the battlements is the site of the Waterloo Block and the Jewel House containing the well-protected Crown Jewels. For Superbloom, the north moat was fitted with speakers to create a sensory experience beyond the floral show. Musician Erland Cooper was commissioned to create a soundtrack, which he called “Music for Growing Flowers”.

Along with the corn poppies and California poppies, the moat seed mix contained seeds of Viscaria oculata, the small, lilac-purple flowers at bottom right.

Some plants I photographed don’t appear on the original seed lists but were happily luring insects, like what I believe is a yellow sow-thistle (Sonchus spp.) below. The purple cranesbill in the background is Geranium pyrenaicus.

Circling around to the eastern moat, at the corner we pass through The Nest, an organic willow sculpture by Spencer Jenkins that frames the view of the Tower Bridge.

Yellow buttercups (Ranunculus acris) and purple knapweed (Centaurea nigra) can be seen in the wildflower mix here.

The hardworking willow wattle fencing – nearly one kilometre in length by Wonderwood Willow – keeps the meadow from subsuming the grit path here. According to Andrew Grant in an article in Landscape: The Journal of the Landscape Institute: “We were after a palette that would complement the stonework: colours, textures and form found around the Tower, yet were low in energy in terms of construction, were low carbon and (where possible) were from a renewable resource. As a principle, the use of concrete was banned across the project.” 

Wrote Nigel Dunnett of the east moat: “Here the Grant Associates masterplan introduced areas that were more intimate and playful, with smaller paths bringing people into more intimate contact with the flowers. The use of natural materials and the rustic forms of the woven willow structures created a wonderful foil for the flowers.”

On the plantings in the east moat, Nigel Dunnett wrote: “The plants here were placed at low density around the path edges, and then the seed mixes were sown around them – it’s a technique I’ve used a lot to give some definite structure of deliberately-placed plants amongst the more spontaneous nature of the seed mixes. I used plants with a sensual character here – plants with tactile textures or aromatic plants. One of the most effective was Purple Fennel – the dark-leaved clumps were really effective early in the summer as the seeded plants grew up around them.” The swirling composite-wood pathway takes visitors towards the dragonfly sculpture by Quist.

Signage in the east moat recalls the allotment gardens of the past.

Even in my own meadows on Lake Muskoka north of Toronto, Canada (see my blog here on “Gardening Wild”), plantain (Plantago major), below, in the east moat, is a superb bumble bee plant in spring.

Brass and copper dragonflies fly over the moat, but the future plan is to bring real dragonflies into the moat with water features, as you see in the next photo.

This sign appears at the exit, presumably to greet visitors who might enter from the castle. But it promises a future for the moat: “We aspire to recycle rainwater to support flowering marshes, ponds, areas of food-related flowers and much more.” Fortunately a London-based son means we can and will revisit the Tower to see the development of this magical place. But I’m so delighted I experienced this late spring wildflower chapter in 2024.

Meet the Poppy Family!

I’m not sure that all my readers know that my main bit of low-paying work for the past several decades has been ‘stock photography’ of plants, gardens and pollinators. In short, wherever I am – in public or private gardens – I like to photograph plants and label them later with their correct botanical names. Then… maybe… there’s a .00001% chance that some publisher or editor will be looking for JUST what I have and pay me a huge sum to licence it for their book or magazine. (Haha). There aren’t many people in North America doing exactly what I’ve been doing and those who do would tell you that this is not the best way to support yourself in life.

But back to the botanical names. One of my favourite plant families is the Poppy Family, i.e. Papaveraceae. Though most of us know what a “poppy” is with its silky petals, the family is actually very large and diverse with 760 species in 44 genera featuring annuals, perennials, shrubs and small tropical trees. Taxonomists have worked to help us understand how their genealogy fits together, placing the genera into subfamilies, tribes and sub-tribes. DNA sequencing has resulted in many favourites, like bleeding heart, being shuffled from one genus into a new one.

I have been fortunate over the past three decades to photograph many of these plants, including Chinese native noble-flowered birthwort, Corydalis nobilis, below, arching over North American native yellow wood poppy, Stylophorum diphyllum, seen in mid-May in the Shade Garden at Montreal Botanical Garden.  I wrote a blog about this fabulous garden.

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FUMARIOIDIAE

Let’s start with the subfamily Fumarioidiae, tribe Fumariae, subtribe Corydalinae. They used to have their own family, Fumariaceae, but they have now been ‘lumped’ by the APG (Angiosperm Phylogeny Group) into Papaveraceae.  With their bilaterally symmetrical or zygmomorphic flowers, they don’t look much like poppies, do they? But that’s the thing about DNA. You can have cousins that don’t look anything like you; nevertheless if you go back far enough in the family tree, you share great-great-great-grandparents. To set the mood, below is a little scented nosegay of Corydalis solida, a bulb native to moist, shady woodlands in Europe and Asia. It grows like a bandit beside my garden path and also throughout my ‘lawn’, but it dies down quickly like most spring bulbs.

First up is Adlumia fungosa or Allegheny vine. My friend Marnie Wright, whose Bracebridge, Ontario garden I blogged about years ago, grows this one over a rustic arch.

Capnoides sempervirens or pink corydalis, grows seemingly out of the ancient banded gneiss rock at our cottage on Lake Muskoka, north of Toronto, which is how it got its other common name, rock harlequin.

Corydalis species….. where to start?  Let’s go alphabetically with the beautiful Corydalis flexuosa below. I photographed it in the Himalayan garden at Vancouver’s VanDusen Botanical Garden. In 2020, I wrote a 2-part blog about this fabulous garden in springtime.

Then there is Siberian corydalis or noble-flowered birthwort, Corydalis nobilis.   Like many Papaveraceae, it is a spring ephemeral, enjoying moist rich soil in dappled shade, then retreating after its flowers wither.

Corydalis quantmeyerana hails from Sichuan. This cultivar is called ‘Chocolate Stars’ but I couldn’t see much brown colouring in the foliage of the plant, which I photographed at VanDusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver.

In my Toronto side-yard in early spring, the borders beside the path are filled with the bulb Corydalis solida, both the lilac-purple species itself and the pink-flowered cultivar ‘Beth Evans’. They thrive under my tall black walnut (Juglans nigra) – and have also popped up throughout my lawn. I welcome them all for their short stay, before they die down in late spring.

The Dicentra genus (formerly bleeding heart) is now comprised of only North American species. Dicentra canadensis or squirrel corn likes humus-rich soil in shady rock outcrops in deciduous forests of northeast N. America.  

I found Dutchman’s breeches, Dicentra cucullaria one April in the native plant woodland at Toronto’s Casa Loma. Both Dutchman’s breeches and squirrel corn are spring ephemerals, dying down soon after blooming.

Dicentra eximia or fringed bleeding heart is native to northeastern N. America from the Appalachian mountains northward. This is the cultivar ‘Luxuriant’.

I photographed the western counterpart, Pacific bleeding heart, Dicentra formosa with sword ferns in the native plants garden at Darts Hill Garden Park outside Vancouver.

Many gardeners still mourn the taxonomic journey of  bleeding heart out of the Dicentra genus to the awkwardly-named and monotypic genus Lamprocapnos as L. spectabilis.   

I spent many hours at Toronto’s Spadina House gardens, where white bleeding heart, L. spectabilis ‘Alba’, looks lovely in spring with forget-me-nots. (See more of Spadina House at my blog exploring the colour ‘purple’.)

One of the stars of the renowned black-and-gold border at VanDusen Botanical Garden is the chartreuse bleeding heart L. spectabilis ‘Gold Heart’, seen here with Tulipa ‘Queen of Night’.

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Now let’s look at sub-tribe Fumariinae.

Common fumitory or earth smoke, Fumaria officinalis,is considered a weed in many quarters, but it’s rather sweet, especially mixed in with a chartreuse-leaved cranesbill like ‘Ann Folkard’.

Rock fumewort or yellow corydalis used to be… well… a corydalis, C. lutea, but it’s now Pseudofumaria lutea. Native to the European Alps, it is one of those easy-to-grow, graceful plants that looks lovely in light shade. And its name was changed, of course, because of DNA analysis.  I learned the word “vicariance” in reading the abstract, meaning “fragmentation of the environment (as by splitting of a tectonic plate) in contrast to dispersal as a factor in promoting biological evolution by division of large populations into isolated subpopulations”.

‘Rock fumewort’, of course, describes the alpine setting to which P. lutea is native, a trait beautifully exploited at Chanticleer Garden in Wayne, PA outside Philadelphia. In June, the gardener here mixes it with scrambling yellow sedums, mountain bluets, various alpine campanulas and the odd perennial geranium. And yes, I wrote a 2-part blog about Chanticleer.

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PAPAVEROIDIAE

There are three tribes in this sub-family, all with radially symmetrical or actinopmorphic flowers. We begin with the Eschscholzieae, and its 3 genera, all from western N. America.

First comes Dendromecon. When I photographed the Channel Island tree poppy near ceanothus at Seaside Gardens in Carpinteria, California (my blog on that lovely garden is here), it was labelled Dendromecon harfordii, below.   Three days later at the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden, I found a taller plant labelled as D. rigida ssp. harfordii.  Take your pick.

There are 17 species of Eschscholzia, but California poppies (Eschscholzia californica) are the quintessential floral emblem of the Golden State.  One of the great joys of visiting California in spring is seeing them along the road, as in Napa…

…. or with blue ceanothus in an iconic native partnership at the University of California Berkeley Botanic Garden….

…. and with other California natives like western blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium bellum) at Santa Barbara Botanic Garden. (By the way, I wrote a blog about the meadow at SBBG.)

The final cousin in the Eschscholzieae tribe is the the monotypic genus Hunnemannia, with its sole species,  Mexican tulip poppy, Hunnemannia fumariifolia. I found it at Seaside Gardens in Carpinteria, a wonderful nursery and display garden which I featured in a 2014 blog.   

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The second tribe in Papaveroidiae is the Chelidoniae.

We begin with that trickster Chelidonium majus, the greater celandine.  Why do I say that? Because in eastern N. America, this Eurasian species is often mistaken for our native yellow wood poppy, next. But when it blooms the difference is apparent for Chelidonium has much smaller flowers, as you see below. This is my garden, where it likes to hide in my ostrich ferns (Matteucia struthiopteris), that fern proof positive that native species can be every bit as aggressive as exotics.

I took yellow wood poppy, Stylophorum diphyllum, out of alphabetical order to compare it with Chelidonium, above. A denizen of shady, rich, deciduous woodland in northeast North America, it doesn’t have the invasive tendencies of its doppelgänger cousin. I love seeing it in May in the woodland planting at Toronto’s Casa Loma, with Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica) and ostrich ferns, below.

Horned poppies (Glaucium spp.) are next in this tribe, perennial plants of the rocky steppe regions of the world. In fact I found the biennial or short-lived perennial red horned poppy Glaucium corniculatum in the Central Asian Steppe Garden at Denver Botanic Garden a few years ago.  I wrote a blog about this interesting new garden at DBG.  

And the Alpine Garden at Montreal Botanical Garden is where I found an Eastern bumble bee gathering pollen in yellow horned poppy Glaucium flavum.  It’s a short-lived perennial or biennial from Europe, N. Africa and elsewhere. I also wrote a blog about this garden, in honour of its former curator René Giguère.

Hylomecon japonica, Japanese woodland poppy, is a rarity. I found it in the Shade Garden at the Montreal Botanical Garden on May 21, 2014.

Macleaya cordata or plume poppy (syn. Bocconia) is a bit of an oddball as the Papavaeraceae go.  Native to China, Japan and Taiwan, it is taller at 5-8 ft (1.5-2.4 m) than most of its kin with airy panicles of tiny flowers in mid-late summer. It is recommended for the back of the border but, caveat emptor, it spreads very aggressively via rhizomes.

Our native northeastern bloodroot, Sanguinaria canadensis, is a favourite early spring wildflower, its shimmering white flower emerging through a protective leaf which unfurls once the flower opens. It is seen below with Siberian squill (Scilla siberica) and a skeletonized autumn leaf.

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Skipping over the small Tribe Platystemonae from the Western United States (since I haven’t photographed any), we come to Tribe Papavereae with its more familiar “poppy” flowers with the ring of pollen-rich anthers and prominent ovary. Typical of the reproductive arrangement is Iceland poppy, Papaver nudicaule, below.

Moving alphabetically through Papaverae, we start with Argemone, or prickly poppies. I loved this casual design by Denver Botanic Garden’s plant curator Dan Johnson for his home garden’s ‘hellstrip’ bordering the road in Englewood, Colorado. (I wrote a blog about this colourful plantsman’s garden.) I believe it is native, white-flowered crested prickly poppy, Argemone polyanthemos with California poppies (Eschscholzia californica) for a Papaveraceae double-date.  

Way back in 1998 in my Fujichrome slide days, I photographed purple prickly poppy Argemone sanguinea. Not the best image but you get the picture.

If there is a plant genus that deserves the moniker “Holy Grail”, it is Meconopsis, especially the species called “Himalayan Blue Poppy”, Meconopsis baileyi (syn. M. betonicifolia), below.  Discovered originally in mountainous Yunnan, China in the 1880s by the French missionary Jean Marie Delavay, it was English botanist and plant collector Frank Kingdon-Ward who brought out seeds and contributed to its great popularity with his 1913 book In the Land of Blue Poppies.  Though exceptionally hardy, alas the blue poppy is not for everyone. It has very specific cultivation needs, preferring humus-rich, consistently moist, neutral to slightly acidic soil in a dappled-shade, woodland setting in a region with cool, damp summers. Thus it likes coastal British Columbia, Washington State, Alaska and cooler maritime settings on the East Coast. Plants tend to flower for one or two seasons before dying, but will seed around if conditions are good.

I have photographed blue poppies (usually in the rain) at Vancouver’s VanDusen Botanical Garden where they grow in the Himalayan Dell beneath towering giant Himalayan lily, Cardiocrinum giganteum.  I made this photo May 27, 2013.

They also greet visitors along the main path in the David Lam Asian Garden at UBC Botanical Garden, where I photographed them on May 29, 2013…..

…. and in the lovely Japanese garden at Victoria’s Butchart Gardens when I was there on May 30, 2011.

VanDusen’s collection of Meconopsis species is particularly good. If you go in late May, you might find the lovely pink form of M. baileyi….

…. and the cultivar M. baileyi ‘Hensol Violet’….

The prickly blue poppy, Meconopsis horridula  grows at VanDusen in the Himalayan Dell, too. Like many Meconopsis species, it is monocarpic, producing flowers just once before dying.

The satin poppy, Meconopsis napaulensis might be flowering in white or pale pink.

The Himalayan woodland poppy formerly included in Meconopsis has now been moved and is called Cathcartia villosa.  I photographed the one below at VanDusen on June 23, 2010 in a particularly cool spring where flowering was late.

Finally, we come to the poppies, the genus Papaver. I’ll begin alphabetically with another species that has been shuffled out of its previous home in Meconopsis, Welsh poppy. Formerly called M. cambrica, it is now Papaver cambricum.  This species grows throughout VanDusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver, both the yellow form, here with bluebells…

….. and the orange form.

Another recent arrival in the genus is annual wind poppy, Papaver heterophyllum,  formerly Stylomecon heterophylla.  Native to the coastal mountains from northern California south to Baja California, Mexico, germination of its seed is triggered by wildfires.

The Caucasian scarlet poppy (Papaver commutatum) is an annual native to Turkey, Iran and the Caucasus. The cultivar ‘Ladybird’, below, has particularly vibrant red flowers with prominent black blotches. 

Iceland poppy or Papaver nudicaule is a short-lived perennial native to a wide range of boreal regions in Europe and North America.  In California, it’s often used for spring bedding; I photographed the plants below at Hearst Castle in San Simeon on March 29, 2014.

For beginning gardeners, Oriental poppy, Papaver orientale, below, is often one of the first perennials to try.  Native to Turkey, Iran and the Caucasus, its silken petals and dark stamens add drama to the late spring-early summer garden.

The flattened stigmas of Oriental poppy extend like tentacles across the top of the carpel. This is the black-blotched, white cultivar ‘Royal Wedding’.   

Oriental poppies are part of the rich roster of late spring-early summer perennials, such as Siberian iris (I. sibirica), below. Also flowering at that time are peonies, foxgloves, Shasta daisies, yarrow, roses and a host of other possible companions.

Hybridizers have created numerous cultivars of Oriental poppy with white, red, salmon and peach flowers. There is even a double variety called P. orientale var. plena ‘Red Shades’, below.

If you followed my Covid-winter #janetsdailypollinator posts on my Social Media accounts (you can see all 144 on Facebook or Instagram by inserting that hashtag), you might recall me including one of a honey bee dusted with the black pollen of Oriental poppy, below.  Though poppies do not produce nectar, many are sources of abundant pollen for bees.

When we participated in an Adventure Canada cruise of the Eastern Arctic, my favourite activity was to scramble around the tundra photographing the plants of Nunavut and Greenland. I found the Arctic poppy, Papaver radicatum, below, at Sylvia Grinnell Park in Iqaluit. I wrote a 10-blog series on that fabulous voyage last year, beginning with Iqaluit.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place.  

Canadian army physician Lt.-Col. John McRae’s famous Second World War poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ brings us to European corn poppies, Papaver rhoeas. It was spring in Belgium in 1915 when McRae watched his best friend die in the muddy fields of Ypres, where red poppies with black centres had begun to flower. As the Canada Veterans page says: “The day before he wrote his famous poem, one of McCrae’s closest friends was killed in the fighting and buried in a makeshift grave with a simple wooden cross. Wild poppies were already beginning to bloom between the crosses marking the many graves. Unable to help his friend or any of the others who had died, John McCrae gave them a voice through his poem.

Corn poppies are used in the gravel garden at Chanticleer near Philadelphia, along with white lace flower (Orlaya grandiflora).

It was the Rev. William Wilkes (1843-1923) in the hamlet of Shirley, south of London, who noticed the first unusual variant in a field of wild red corn poppies, a flower with a white edge. That was the beginning of 20 years of his hybridization work to get the characteristics he wanted with petals ranging from white through palest pink, lilac, cherry pink, apricot, salmon, scarlet, orange and bicolours as well as semi-doubles. They became known as the “Shirley poppies”. This is a montage I made of various strains and colours of P. rhoeas.  

I love seeing the little Spanish poppy, Papaver rupifragum var. atlanticum ‘Flore Pleno’ in my travels. Also called Moroccan poppy or double Atlas poppy, there is usually a bee rolling around in the pollen-rich stamens. Despite its Mediterranean origins, it’s quite hardy and easily grown from seed.

Finally we come to the ‘type species’ for Papaver, the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum.  That common name, of course, refers to the latex derived from certain botanical varieties of opium poppy being grown – either legally by the pharmaceutical industry, or illegally by the illicit drug trade  – for naturally-occurring alkaloids such as morphine and  codeine, among others. These are the “opiates” whose sedative and painkilling effects can also be highly addictive.  “Somniferum”, the Latin epithet for the species means “sleep-inducing”.  But most of the 52 botanical varieties of P. somniferum do not produce opiates. Czech blue poppy, though the same species name, is farmed for bread-seed, the little black poppy seeds you find on bagels and cakes. And many varieties were simply bred for ornamental purposes, not for medicinal or illicit drug manufacture. But if you want a history of the Opium Wars, etc., check out the Wiki page.

One beautiful cultivar of P. somniferum is ‘Lauren’s Grape’, below, my photo showing the glaucous, lettuce-like foliage of opium poppy. I photographed this lovely specimen in the Niwot, Colorado garden of Mary and Larry Scripter, which was designed by Lauren herself, Lauren Springer.

‘Cherry Glow’ is another beautiful opium poppy cultivar. I found a little Toxomerus geminatus hoverfly foraging on the pollen-rich stamens.

Sometimes you’ll see seeds offered for “peony-flowered” opium poppies, P. somniferum var. paeoniflorum.  The cultivar below is ‘Flemish Antique’ and is quite famous in poppy circles.

And then there is P. somniferum var. laciniatum with its shaggy petals. I photographed the pretty duo below in my son-in-law’s mom’s farm garden in Alberta.

And now, finally, I come to the end of my long, long look at the diverse Poppy Family. With its silky white petals and bright yellow stamens, Romneya coulteri, Coulter’s matilija poppy or California tree poppy, is the tallest poppy family species I’ve photographed, growing up to 8 ft (2.4 m) tall and wide.  Though I have seen this species in California, I photographed this one in the public garden in the Queenstown Gardens Park in New Zealand.   

Spring at VanDusen Botanical Garden – Part 1

One of my great joys in returning ‘home’ from Toronto to Vancouver in May or June is the opportunity to visit VanDusen Botanical Garden. Over the past decade, I’ve made eight trips to this beautiful, diverse 55 acre (22 hectare) garden, six of them in springtime, the other two in August and September. Sadly, a summer visit is still in my future!  So I’m especially familiar with the delight it offers in its rich spring flora, much of it rare in collections. Let’s take a tour together, starting with the bridge entrance from the parking lot into the new (2011) Visitor Centre. Designed by Perkins & Will Architects, it’s a LEED Platinum structure with undulating rooflines that, on a clear day (this one was cloudy), seem to echo the mountains of Vancouver’s north shore beyond.  See those little green signs on the bridge wall? They’re….

…. cleverly-designed keys to the traditional “What’s in Bloom” features that most public gardens employ, but with the location pinpointed precisely on the garden’s map. (May 27, 2013)

If you read my last blog on the delightful Alma VanDusen Garden at the far west end of the garden, you’ll know that the garden was once part of the old Shaughnessy Golf Course but was saved in the 1960s from commercial development by a determined group of citizens called the Vancouver Public Gardens Association (VPGA). A fundraising effort, spearheaded by a $1 million donation from the timber magnate and philanthropist Whitford Julian VanDusen (one-third of the capital cost of creating the garden at the time), culminated with the official opening in August 1975. Though Mr. VanDusen had to be persuaded to permit it, the garden honours him in its name. This is the map, which you can explore more easily by clicking to enlarge it.


Even before we get to the Visitor Centre, we can gaze around and see some spring-flowering plants. Below is red currant (Ribes sanguineum) in the Cascadia native garden…

…. and I love this entryway combination of pasque flower (Pulsatilla vulgaris) and yellow ‘Kondo’ dogtooth violet, a hybrid between Erythronium tuolomense and E. ‘White Beauty’.

Let’s go through the Visitor Centre with its beautiful gift shop and past the folks braving the May temperatures outdoors at the Truffles Restaurant….

…. and past the alluring plants for sale….

…. and stand for a moment on the edge of Livingstone Lake to decide which of the many directions to take, for the paths fan out from here throughout the garden and we don’t want to miss anything.

Let’s head west. That takes us right past the Cascadia Garden (named for the Cascadia bioregion) with its native Pacific Northwest plants and naturalistic water feature.

I remember skunk cabbage (Lysichiton americanus) growing along the creek in the ravine near my family’s house in the Vancouver suburbs. It was part of my introduction to nature as a child.

Here are two of the more beautiful native westerners: bigleaf lupine (Lupinus polypyllus) and an excellent variety of silk tassel bush (Garrya elliptica) called ‘James Roof’.

Western trumpet honeysuckle (Lonicera ciliosa) twines its way through oceanspray (Holodiscus discolor) in the background. The Cascadia Garden offers valuable design inspiration for gardeners interested in using the native plant palette.

These are the lovely little western shooting stars (Primula pauciflora syn. Dodecatheon pulchellum).  *All the plants in the Cascadia Garden were photographed on May 6, 2014

Abutting the Cascadia Garden is the Phyllis Bentall Garden, featuring a large formal pond and surrounding terrace. There are luscious tree peonies flowering here in late May-early June.

I love this glazed pot of carnivorous plants and horsetails, just beginning their seasonal growth here on June 1st.

I’m including this image made a decade ago in late June to show how beautiful the ‘Satomi’ kousa dogwoods (Cornus kousa) look in the Phyllis Bentall garden with their coral-rose bracts.

Continuing west, we come to the Fragrance Garden, a four-square parterre filled with perfumed plants throughout the season.  Later, sweet peas, wallflowers, honeysuckle, roses, chocolate cosmos and Auratum lilies show off their scented blooms.

The White Garden is still waking up below, on May 2, 2017, but……

….. there are early white blossoms: trillium white fringed bleeding heart (Dicentra eximia ‘Alba’) and white wood anemones (Anemone nemorosa).  Later here, there will be perfumed mock orange and white roses.

We are now beginning the Rhododendron Walk. VanDusen has a big collection of Loderi rhododendrons, Rhododendron  x loderi.  R. ‘Loderi King George’, below right, was hybridized by Sir Edmund Loder in 1901 at his famous Leonardslee Gardens in England using the white-flowered Himalayan species Rhododendron griffithianum collected in Sikkim in 1847-50 by Joseph Dalton Hooker, crossed with the pollen parent Rhododendron  fortunei.

The parentage of beautiful R. ‘Loder’s White’, below, is less clear but it’s believed to be cross that Sir Edmund Loder was sent from hybridizer James Henry Mangles, who died in 1884. It is listed as a cross between R. catawbiense ‘Album Elegans’ x R. griffithianum and ‘White Pearl’ (R. griffithianum x R. maximum). The North American Catawba genes in its stock lend this spectacular rhododendron its hardiness. These Loder rhodos were photographed on May 6, 2014.

Rhododendron griffithianum used in the Loder hybrids was one of the species collected in 1847-50 by Joseph Dalton Hooker, who would seven years later succeed his father as Director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew. He named it R. aucklandii after his friend and patron and former Lord of the Admiralty and Governor-General of India Auckland, whose name is also commemorated in the New Zealand city. But his specimen was found later to be a variant of a seemingly inferior species found in Bhutan a decade earlier by explorer William Griffith, thus was renamed R. griffithianum var. aucklandii, and would become known in the trade as “Lord Auckland’s Rhododendron”.  In writing about his discovery in Sikkim, India in 1849, Hooker wrote:  “It has been my lot to discover but few plants of this superb species, and in these the inflorescence varied much in size. The specimens from which our drawing was made were from a bush which grew in a rather dry sunny exposure, above the village of Choongtam, and the bush was covered with blossoms. The same species also grows on the skirts of the Pine-Forests (Abies Brunoniana) above Lamteng, and it is there conspicuous for the abundance rather than the large size of the flowers.

Moving along the Rhododendron Walk, we come to rose-red R. ‘Cynthia’, one of the oldest hybrids, developed around 1840 at England’s Suunningdale Nursery from the North American native Rhododendron catawbiense .  One of the joys of VanDusen’s display is the imaginative underplanting of the rhododendrons, something often overlooked in many public gardens. This is yellow fumitory (Corydalis lutea).

In other parts of the Walk, I notice lovely spring combinations like Siberian bugloss (Brunnera macrophylla) and pink fern-leaf bleeding heart, Dicentra ‘Langtrees’. Alliums are budded up for later bloom.

Under a low magenta rhododendron is a cheerful drift of eastern leopardbane (Doronicum columnae).

The Deciduous Azalea collection on the Walk features Rhododendron molle from China and Japan, underplanted with Spanish bluebells (Endymion hispanica).

Although I have photographed the popular Rhododendron ‘Hino Crimson’ in full bloom, I love the moment when it is just beginning to flower as the sea of ostrich ferns (Matteucia struthiopteris) behind are all unfurling their croziers.

The garden has a large collection of epimediums and the Rhododendron Walk showcases them nicely amidst the ferns.

Welsh poppies are seen in several places in the garden. They used to be in the Meconopsis genus but are now called Papaver cambrica.

Interspersed among the rhododendrons on the Walk are interesting trees and shrubs hailing from Asia. The redbark stewartia (Stewartia monodelpha) will bear fragrant, white flowers in early summer and its glossy foliage turns red in fall, but its rusty-red bark is its big selling feature.

I’ve seen a lot of magnolias in my time, but there are some truly special specimens in the Magnolia Collection adjacent to the Rhododendron Walk at VanDusen.  Magnolia cavalerei var. platypetala (formerly Michelia) hails from China. Its flowers are fragrant.

Now its time to veer north towards the great lawn. This route takes us past the Camellia Garden and if you time it right, as I did on May 2, 2017, you might see C. japonica ‘Goshoguruma’ with its lovely oxslip (Primula elatior) underplanting.

This is elegant Camellia japonica ‘C.M. Wilson’, introduced in 1949. Isn’t it lovely?

Nearby, I find fallen camellia petals artfully arranged in the leaves of black mondo grass (Ophiopogon planiscapus ‘Nigrescens’).

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….. including beautiful Rhododendron saluenense with a foraging yellow-faced bumble bee (Bombus vosnesenskyi).  Although I photograph bumble bees extensively in the east, VanDusen has helped me to learn about the native Bombus species of British Columbia.

We’ll make a brief stop at the Tree Peony collection and enjoy the blowsy, maroon-red blossoms of Paeonia suffruticosa ‘Hatsu Garasu’ under the brilliant chartreuse boughs of Acer palmatum ‘Aureum’. I love that this peony’s name means “First Crow of the Year”.

Most of the shrubs and trees we’ve seen along the Rhododendron Walk qualify as “Sino-Himalayan”, but now we’re going to move into the woodland section at VanDusen devoted to that region. And what better species to welcome us than the wonderful lavender-purple Rhododendron augustinii?  There is no question that this is my favourite rhododendron, and….

….. whenever I visit, I spend time just enjoying the flowers of this Triflorum Subsection species… and the occasional bee or dragonfly.

Botanist R. Roy Forster (1927-2012), below, who was Founding Curator and Director of VanDusen Botanical Garden for 21 years from its 1975 opening to 1996, (not to mention a recipient of the Order of Canada) conceived of the exciting idea of a naturalistic woodland garden devoted to species from China and the Himalayas, especially rhododendrons. He wrote about the “montane theme” of the Sino-Himalayan Garden. “Lacking a woodland, we have had to plant our own forest of young trees.”

City of Vancouver Archives

Given that the garden’s designers were working with the relatively flat aspect of the former Shaughnessy Golf Course, it would require imagination and serious earth-moving to come up with the berms and intervening valleys. “The Sino-Himalayan Garden was built on top of the existing surface using large quantities of fill, soil, and rock.”  We see that incredible hill creation below in a photo by Roy Forster from the City of Vancouver archives.

City of Vancouver Archives

Today, the many trees planted four decades ago are mature and create a woodland microclimate for the diverse taxa contained in the Sino-Himalayan Garden. Let’s tour the garden, beginning with one of the beautiful rhododendrons, below, that Roy Forster struggled at first to please. “Wind damage at times has been severe. R. hemsleyanum, a rather large-leaved species in the subjection Fortunea, was almost defoliated by wind during the winter. The new crop of leaves are smaller and it will be interesting to obsesrve if the species adapt to the new planting site. This species is endemic to Omei Shan, in S.W. Sichuan, visited by the writer in 1981. At 29o latitude, and under 1,400M altitude, this habitat of R. hemsleyanum is a mild area indeed even when compared with gentle Vancouver!”  When I see it on May 27, 2013 it looks very content with its Vancouver home.

There’s a gentle rain falling when I photograph Rhododendron sanguineum var. sanguineum in the garden on May 27, 2013. Vancouver’s rainy climate suits these Asian mountain-dwellers, many of which were moved from the Greig Collection at Stanley Park downtown.

What a beautiful grove of dawn redwoods (Metasequoia glyptostroboides), with their fluted trunks below. Often called the ‘living fossil’, fossils of this species were ‘discovered’ in 1941 in clay beds on the Japanese island of Kyushu and named Metasequoia because they reminded the paleobotanist Shigeru Miki of a sequoia. Three years later in a valley in China’s Hupei Province, a young forester named Zhang Wang collected branches and cones of a conifer he initially thought was a common water-pine (Glyptostrobus pensilis). They were ultimately determined to be the same species as the fossils found 6 years earlier and in 1947, collections of the seed were financed by Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum and distributed worldwide.

Myriad deciduous and coniferous Asian trees like dawn redwood, deodar cedar, Chinese chestnut, Sargent’s magnolia, Wallich’s pine, paperbark maple and handkerchief tree are at home in the Sino-Himalayan garden, lending shade to the rhododendrons.  Below is Taiwania cryptomerioides, one of two at VanDusen.

The dappled shade from the trees and the humus-rich soil creates perfect conditions for the rhododendron species. This is Rhododendron wardii var. puralbum, the white-flowered form of the yellow-flowered species named for the English botanist and plant explorer Frank Kingdon-Ward (1885-1958). Ward found it on one of his expeditions to China where it grows in meadows in fir and spruce forests on mountain slopes in Sichuan and Yunnan. Doesn’t it look content to be here?

White-flowered cinnamon rhododendron (Rhododendron arboreum subsp. cinnamomeum) gets its common name from the cinnamon-coloured indumentum or furry coating on the underside of its leaves.

Rhododendron cinnabarinum subsp. xanthocodon derives its specific epithet from the cinnabar-red flowers of a related species.

Look at the profuse blossoms of Rhododendron anwheiense, below. How can any hybrid improve on this lovely species?

The Sino-Himalayan garden contains beautiful maples, too. This is the golden fullmoon maple, Acer shirasawanum ‘Aureum’, native to Japan and Southern Korea.

I always thrill to the backlit, neon-pink spring foliage of this Japanese maple, Acer palmatum ‘Otome Zakura’, whose name means “maiden cherry” in English.

Siberian iris (Iris siberica) is in bloom during my visit on May 27, 2013…..

….. and lovely fringed iris (I. japonica) as well.

The garden also has a collection of viburnums, common ones like Viburnum  henryi and much rarer species like Viburnum parvifolium, below.

I love gazing at the waterfall, flanked by a pair of golden deodar cedars (Cedrus deodara ‘Aurea’) and splashing into a quiet pond. That’s the weeping katsura (Cercidiphyllum japonicum ‘Morioka Weeping’ at left…..

…. which is such fun to stand under, like a leafy curtain admitting glimpses of the water behind.

But for many gardeners who visit VanDusen in the latter part of spring, the big draw in the Sino-Himalayan Garden is the Meconopsis Dell. It’s here, in the cool, humus-rich, slightly damp soil of the dell that the Himalayan blue poppies with their alluring blue petals grow beneath giant Himalayan lilies (Cardiocrinum giganteum)…..

…. with their fragrant, wine-throated, white, early summer blossoms facing out from the top of 8-foot (2.5 m) stems.

But it’s the blue poppies (Meconopsis baileyi, formerly betonicifolia) that transfix me and most visitors. On one occasion in mid-June a decade ago, I have the pleasure of touring the Dell with Gerry Gibbens, the now-retired senior gardener in the Sino-Himalayan Garden. The blue poppies were his babies, as were all the Asian treasures in the garden at the time. But on a second visit on May 27, 2013, the weather is wet and the silky blue petals are spangled with raindrops.

There are drifts of mixed colours of Himalayan poppies, including mauve forms……

….. and one that’s a surprisingly clear pink.

Thanks to Gerry Gibbens, I admire the white form of Nepal poppy (Meconopsis napaulensis)…..

….. and deep in the shade between trees he shows me the Himalayan woodland poppy (Cathcartia villosa, formerly Meconopsis).

As I wander through the Sino-Himalayan Garden in spring, there are so many other treasures, like the cobra lilies peeking out of the understory. This is Arisaema nepenthoides.

Leaving the garden, I pass a perfectly uniform carpet of box-leaved or privet honeysuckle (Lonicera pileata), and I give a nod of thanks to Roy Forster, Gerry Gibbens and all the gardeners involved in the creation and maintenance of this exquisite Asian mountain woodland garden.

In the second half of my blog on VanDusen Botanical Garden in Springtime, coming next, we’ll visit the Fern Dell, the Alma VanDusen Garden, the Perennial Garden, the Southern Hemisphere Garden and the very special Laburnum Walk, among other places.

*****************

If you want to read about another exceptional Vancouver garden, visit the blog I wrote on UBC’s David Lam Asian Garden.

Other public garden blogs I’ve blogged about include Toronto Botanical Garden; Royal Botanical Gardens, Hamilton ON; Montreal Botanical Garden; New York Botanical Garden; Wave Hill, Bronx NY; New York’s Conservatory Garden in Central Park; New York’s High Line in May and in June; fabulous Chanticleer in Wayne, PA; the Ripley Garden in Washington DC; Chicago Botanic Garden; The Lurie Garden, Chicago; Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, Austin TX; Denver Botanic Gardens; the Japanese Garden in Portland OR; the Bellevue Botanical Garden, Bellevue, WA; the Los Angeles County Arboretum; RBG Kew in London; Kirstenbosch, Cape Town; the Harold Porter National Botanical Gardens, South Africa; Durban Botanic Gardens; Otari-Wilton’s Bush, Wellington NZ; Dunedin Botanic Garden, NZ; Christchurch Botanic Gardens;