For me, autumn is a time of richness as the gardening season nears its end in an explosion of pigments and seedheads. Those pigments, in particular, have always fascinated me and I made a concerted effort to use brilliant fall foliage colours in my own garden design. So today’s fairy crown, the 26th, features the fall leaves and fruit of shrubs and trees in my Toronto garden in early November, including Japanese maple (Acer palmatum), Washington thorn (Crataegus phaenopyrum), burning bush (Euonymus alatus ‘Compactus’), barberry (Berberis thunbergii ‘Rose Glow’) and, draped down my front, a compound leaf of my black walnut (Juglans nigra).
Every year is a little different in terms of the parade of colour. Here you see my Japanese maple showing off its regular autumn leaf change as the burning bush hedge turns colour. In the pollinator garden, the ‘Autumn Joy’ sedum seedheads are ruby-red, but the fothergilla haven’t begun to change yet. The columnar red maple (upper left) that the city chose for my boulevard (I asked for one that turns red) has taken on its disappointing dishwater-yellow. Red maples, of course, don’t always turn red in fall.
In this photo taken a different year, the fothergilla in the pollinator garden is a rosy-apricot. That’s catmint in the front giving a nice glaucous contrast with Russian sage and echinacea seedheads adding structure.
From across the street, my neighbours see my garden through the fan-shaped yellow leaves of my second boulevard tree, a ginkgo (G. biloba).
The Japanese maple (Acer palmatum) I planted in front of my living room window decades ago is a great joy to me. It’s the straight species with green leaves – in Japan it would be a common forest tree. But in my garden, since there are no drapes on my front window, it forms a lacy curtain from spring (when bees buzz around the tiny May flowers) to fall. In very late October or the first week of November, the foliage turns a range of rich hues from yellow to apricot, scarlet and crimson.
The leaves are delicate, their branching exquisite. It’s no wonder they were the subject of the renowned Japanese woodblock artists like Hiroshige and Kuniyoshi.
As I’ve written before, my Japanese maple’s brilliant autumn colour lights up my living room in early November….
….. enhancing the glass witches’ balls I’ve suspended from the window frame.
And, of course, the leaves also provided me with an appropriate costume and landscape for my little geisha.
If there’s a saying that “good fences, good neighbours make”, it can also apply to hedges – which was how I ended up making this hedge in my front garden more than 30 years ago. (My current neighbours are lovely!) Today, environmentalists tend to shun burning bush, given its invasive tendency in milder regions, but my hedge produces very few seedlings, unlike the Norway maples in my neighbourhood which are a scourge. And this neon display in autumn is truly amazing.
My belly dancer’s costume was made from the leaves of my burning bush hedge.
Though there’s no fothergilla in my crown, it is definitely a big part of the fall colour in my front garden. In this photo made just before Halloween, you can see one of my shrubs has turned a rich burgundy-red beneath the Japanese maple.
The richer, more moisture-retentive soil in my pollinator island tends to produce orange and gold colours in the three fothergilla shrubs there.
Look at those colours! Who needs the spring flowers….
…. though they are lovely, if short-lived, in late May.
And, yes, I did harvest my flamenco dancer’s multi-colored skirt from my fothergillas.
Turning colour a little later in the front garden is my paperbark maple (Acer griseum) with its red trifoliate leaves.
Moving into the back garden, you see Boston ivy (Parthenocissus tricuspidata) cloaking the driveway gate. I didn’t plant this vine, nor did I plant all the Virginia creeper vines that pop up throughout the garden. That’s Mother Nature’s role and she’s very enthusiastic about it (!)
I confess that I wanted the Washington thorn tree (Crataegus phaenopyrum) in my garden long ago purely for its multi-hued fall leaves.
But it turned out to be a wonderful tree for bird life – IF the birds can out-compete the squirrels for the fruit. The robin, below, managed to do that, but so have cedar waxwings and cardinals.
Here you can see the range of autumn colour in the foliage of Washington thorn.
When we bought our house in 1983, the native black walnut tree (Juglans nigra) on the property line between us and our next-door neighbour was already mature. In the 39 years since then, it has hosted raccoon families in the crook of its trunk, carpenter ants in its bark and countless cardinals practising their song in its branches.
Our bedroom sits right under the tree, but we seemed to have missed the obvious ramifications of putting a skylight in our ceiling – particularly when windy nights in September roll around and the roof is pummelled with billiard-ball-sized nuts. Though the skylight has proven strong, we’ve replaced two car windshields since the tree’s branches — and nuts — extend far over the driveway.
The walnuts are enjoyed by the neighbourhood squirrels….
….. but the natural dye in the husks creates an unbelievable mess.
The arborist has told us the tree has rot in the trunk, but my neighbour and I have had it cabled and pruned away some of the branches over our houses to reduce the nut fusillade. It is our tree, after all, it gives us shade and we feel a duty to keep it – thus its inclusion in my 26th crown.
I don’t really notice the ‘Rose Glow’ barberry (Berberis thunbergii) in my back garden until it turns rich crimson-red in autumn – then it’s a show-stopper. It’s another one of those shrubs that environmentalists shun – especially in milder U.S. regions where it seeds around freely. I haven’t seen one seedling in my Toronto garden.
I have a fairly new addition to my back garden: a little sassafras tree (S. albidum). which I wanted especially for its fall colour. This autumn – admittedly one of the best for colour in many years – it has begun to display the reds, corals and yellows for which it is known.
Those colours, by the way, are on leaves that exhibit three distinct shapes: elliptical; mitten-like and three-lobed. This is what they look like on my light table.
Designing with and celebrating fall-colored plants and shrubs is my way of expressing my appreciation for nature’s yearly preparation for winter, as it cycles through the yellow/orange “accessory” carotene pigments in the leaves of certain species to harvest and synthesize as much sunshine as possible, once the ‘green’ pigment chlorophyll breaks down in cooler temperatures. Red colour is from anthocynanis. According to the USDA, “Anthocyanins absorb blue, blue-green, and green light. Therefore, the light reflected by leaves containing anthocyanins appears red. Unlike chlorophyll and carotene, anthocyanins are not attached to cell membranes, but are dissolved in the cell sap. The color produced by these pigments is sensitive to the pH of the cell sap. If the sap is quite acidic, the pigments impart a bright red color; if the sap is less acidic, its color is more purple. Anthocyanin pigments are responsible for the red skin of ripe apples and the purple of ripe grapes. A reaction between sugars and certain proteins in cell sap forms anthocyanins. This reaction does not occur until the sugar concentration in the sap is quite high.” Because the reaction requires light, you often see leaves (or apples) fully exposed to sun that are red while those parts that are shaded stay green or yellow, like these Boston ivy leaves on my fence.
I love making the leaf montages that celebrate these pigment changes, like the one below from leaves in my garden.
A few years ago I even held a photography show called “Autumn Harvest” featuring a number of my leaf montages.
Finally, this week as I walked out onto my front porch and gazed into my garden, this is what I saw– a multi-hued tapestry that shows that nature is the best designer of all. It’s my reward for a gardening season that began seven months ago with the first snowdrops and will soon come to an end with the first hard frost.
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My year of fairy crowns is soon drawing to its wintry finale. If you missed a few, here they are:
At this point in a Toronto winter, with loads of snow remaining on the ground and most days still well below freezing, it is such a joy to watch the bird life in my garden. There isn’t the chirpy avian soundtrack of spring, not yet, but the flash of cardinals zooming at full speed right into their nest in the big cedar hedge, the busy foraging of juncos, the darting to and fro of chickadees – it’s all a pleasure. Over the years, I’ve observed the birds here in my garden through my large kitchen windows; at the cottage on Lake Muskoka; in various public gardens; and in the nearby cemetery where I photograph trees and shrubs. In doing so, I’ve compiled a visual record of how gardens can attract birds without using bird feeders. Here are some ideas.
Conifers for Shelter and Food
Birds need places to nest and take shelter in winter, if they’re not migrating. My garden has two eastern hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis) at the back of the garden that I planted in the 1990s. They’re not beautiful, they developed multiple trunks and lost limbs and look a little ragged, but the birds do love them, like the male cardinal below.
Between my next-door neighbour’s property and mine is a large white cedar or arborvitae (Thuja occidentalis) hedge. This might be the very best garden habitat for birds. We keep it sheared so its growth is dense, helping to protect its inhabitants from the weather and predatory raptors. I’m always amazed that the birds know exactly where their home is inside this long leafy condominium, and fly at very fast speed right at it, disappearing into the lacy branches. (That purple birdhouse is more for looks – the birds haven’t taken up residence
In autumn, I see birds eating the arborvitae seeds, too, like the house sparrow below.
At our cottage in Muskoka just a few hours north of Toronto, chickadees, below, pine siskins and loads of other birds forage in the white pine trees (Pinus strobus).
Song sparrows with their wacky, beautiful melodies use the pine trees too….
…. as does the occasional ruffed grouse.
Fruit
There is nothing that attracts more birds to a garden than the fleshy fruit of trees and shrubs. Of course, that can be a negative if you’re trying to harvest your own grapes or cherries and need to net the fruit to deter birds as it ripens. But in my garden I have a few excellent woody plants whose fruit is dedicated to the birds. The first is crabapple – in my case, a weeping Malus ‘Red Jade’ over my pond (that sadly has likely lived its last summer, with increasingly intractable viral blight). Its small fruit and proximity to the water has always made it an extra-special treat, for robins….
…. and northern cardinals.
I have a pair of large, native serviceberry shrubs (Amelanchercanadensis) that are a cloud of white blossoms in early spring followed by summer fruit that ripens from red to blue. It’s quite delicious, but I rarely get to pick a handful before the fruit has been eaten by robins….
…… or sparrows….
….. or cardinals, like this one tucking into a fruit on my deck railing.
My Washington hawthorn (Crataegus phaenopyrum) is a favourite tree. Though its late spring flowering is not exactly an olfactory treat, its mottled autumn colour and abundant clusters of red fruit (haws) make up for it. The fruit seems to need some cold weather to reduce the astringency, but I love watching the robins on it….
….. and the cedar waxwings, below. However, it’s usually my garden’s intrepid squirrels that finally strip the tree clean.
Staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina) is one of the most abundant native shrubs in the northeast, but it can be problematic in a garden. In short, it suckers far and wide. Though I grow a select cultivar called Tiger Eyes (‘Bailtiger’) featuring chartreuse foliage followed by lovely, apricot fall colour, it has the same tendency to pop up in surprising places quite removed from the main plant. That’s it below with another bird-dining favourite, white flowered, alternate-leaved dogwood (Cornus alternatifolia) behind it. It is my favourite shrub of all; I cannot recommend it highly enough where it is native, i.e. throughout much of eastern North America. Interestingly, my neighbour’s pale-pink beauty bush (Kolkwitzia amabilis) on the far right, an Asian native, has seeds that feed many birds in winter
Cornus alternifolia produces clusters of dark-blue fruit that are consumed quickly in early summer.
As for the Tiger Eyes sumac, lots of birds enjoy rooting for the seeds in the fuzzy red fruits, including blue jays….
…. and the cardinal family that lives in the hedge adjacent to it.
I made a little video of the male cardinal foraging on my sumac. (It’s not easy to hold my little, old Canon SX50 zoom camera steady from my kitchen window, which is 40-50 feet away from the sumac, so I’m always happy when I can capture a scene like this).
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At the cottage on Lake Muskoka, the sumacs are all wild and their suckering doesn’t bother me, except when they try to creep into my meadows. They are not only a favourite browse for white-tailed deer but a valuable autumn-winter food for birds, including black-capped chickadees, below.
This autumn, I was surprised to see a pair of northern flickers on my old fence where the native Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) grows in a tangle. Likely on their migration route, they took turns keeping watch while their mate nibbled on the fruit. Though it won’t win any awards, I was delighted with this photo showing the male’s yellow tail feathers.
There are other good native shrubs and trees to attract birds, including Northern spicebush (Lindera benzoin), below, nannyberry (Viburnum lentago), American mountain ash(Sorbus americana), elderberry (Sambucus pubens, S. canadensis), hackberry (Celtis occidentalis), black cherry (Prunus serotina), winterberry (Ilex verticillata) and various other dogwoods (Cornus racemosa, C. sericea).
And though it cannot be recommended, don’t be surprised to see birds eating mulberries (Morus alba) in older neighbourhoods where these European trees were planted long ago. It’s estimated that more than 60 bird species eat the fruit of mulberry trees– much to the chagrin of those who have to clean the purple stains off their outdoor furniture!
Flower Seeds and Weeds
Without a doubt, in my experience the best garden plant for providing nutritious seeds for birds is purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea). I caught these goldfinches foraging in the Piet Oudolf-designed entry border at the Toronto Botanical Garden one autumn.
When I posted the video below on Facebook back in 2015, it was eventually shared almost 2 thousand times. My message? Don’t deadhead your echinaceas!
Here is a flock of goldfinches on my own pollinator garden echinaceas in October 2021.
Goldfinches also love coreopsis seeds, like those of C. lanceolata.
Rudbeckias also offer seed for birds. These goldfinches are on cutleaf coneflower (Rudbeckia laciniata).
In fact, my photo of a goldfinch on that native perennial was featured on a recent cover of The American Gardener magazine.
Canada or creeping thistle (Cirsium arvense), below, may be a pesky, invasive European weed, but there’s no doubt that goldfinches enjoy it – and help to spread it far and wide!
My meadows on Lake Muskoka attract many different birds to feed on flower and grass seeds in late summer and autumn. Wild beebalm (Monarda fistulosa), my most abundant perennial, attracts goldfinches, below, and chipping sparrows frequent the paths to eat fallen seeds, including those of my big prairie grasses: big bluestem, switch grass and Indian grass.
Ornamental grasses offer seeds for birds, provided they have a place to perch. The sparrow below stood on leadplant (Amorpha canescens) while eating seeds of switch grass (Panicum virgatum).
At the Montreal Botanical Garden, I enjoyed watching house sparrows foraging on the dark seeds of the ornamental millet Pennisetum glaucum ‘Purple Baron’.
Other good choices for seed include oaks for acorns and beech and hickory trees for nuts.
Needless to say, many trees also offer a variety of insects for birds, especially important for springtime feeding of nestlings. Oaks are recommended as a top genus by entomologist/ecologist Douglas Tallamy because of the huge number of insects that feed on them, up to three hundred.
Nectar for Hummingbirds
I’ve already written a blog on good plants for hummingbirds but I made this little video to add some nectar sweetness to this post. It features the ruby-throated hummingbird, which is the only native Canadian hummingbird east of the Rocky Mountains.
Water
Everything needs to drink, and birds are no exception. So while I don’t have a bird feeder, I do offer water in the form of my old pond. When I dug it in 1987 I had dreams of aquatic plants with gorgeous flowers, and I did grow waterlilies and floating plants for a while. But marauding raccoons were a constant irritant and eventually it was too difficult to lift out heavy pots to store for winter, since the pond is just a few feet deep. So today it’s a giant birdbath and water fountain (must fix the pump!) surrounded by too many weeds and prone to algae in summer, but it is so popular with the birds I cannot imagine my garden without it. Here it is with a pair of juvenile robins drinking and bathing.
Cardinals love the pond, too. This is a male and female pair in spring.
And here are cardinals bathing – such fun to watch (from a distance).
I have seen some sweet birdbaths in gardens, like the one below, but a pond fulfils that objective very nicely.
Dead trees and Snags
If you enjoy watching woodpeckers, you’ll know that they often frequent trees that are diseased or damaged, like the red maple below being visited by the hairy woodpecker.
Some are even dead – like my poor ash tree (Fraxinus pensylvanica), a victim of emerald ash borer a few years ago. But I left the base of the trunk in place, mainly because it would have cost a fortune (more) to cut it to ground level, grind the roots and repair the fence. It has become a stop on the foraging route of the woodpecker in the video, below.
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Without foliage on the trees, winter is a good time to observe birds in the garden. On days when the local Cooper’s hawk, below, is searching for a tasty feathered meal, I am usually alerted by the persistent warning squawks of blue jays. It was a thrill to see this raptor perched in my crabapple tree.
This week, I watched chickadees, cardinals and dark-eyed juncos, below, eating the seeds of my next-door neighbour’s beauty bush (Kolkwitzia amabilis). A big, beautiful, old-fashioned Asian shrub, it also attracts lots of pollinators in June.
But spring will be here before we know it, and the robins will be searching for worms among my flowering bulbs….
… and in the lawn.
And Madame Cardinalis cardinalis will find a flowery forsythia in which to dry off and groom her feathers after a spring dip in my pond, while being serenaded by Monsieur Cardinalis cardinalis high up in my black walnut tree. I cannot wait!
In the past week, a few tidbits of information came across my desk. One was that the National Garden Bureau declared 2018 to be “The Year of the Tulip”. Well…. yawn. I tend to be a bit jaded on “The Year of”…. anything. I suppose it’s my nature to be cynical (ha!), but sometimes these public relation campaigns seem to be more about pumping sales (see those “Buy Now” links in the NGB’s right hand column? they lead to a Pennsylvania bulb dealer) than recognizing a true standout plant – or, as they say at the National Garden Bureau, a “bulb crop”. Anyway, it is spring, and I love tulips (that’s my front garden last spring from a previous blog, below), so okay, I’ll dial back my cynicism. YAY tulips! It’s your year! Party like it’s 1999!
The other tidbit that crossed my desk was a press release from the Toronto Botanical Garden, below.
This was BIG NEWS and more than 3 years in the making, thanks to the inspiration and impetus from Executive Director Harry Jongerden and the design and consulting skills of Forrec Ltd., W. Gary Smith and Lord Cultural Resources. From the initial meeting I attended in January 2015, when the TBG unveiled its “Integrated Conceptual Proposals”, to the three community input meetings hosted by the TBG and its consultants and landscape architects and the City of Toronto, below, to May 2018’s announcement, it represents a massive leap for our little jewel of a botanical garden.
My sincere wish is that this brave new parks/not-for-profit partnership gets all the financial resources it needs to create a magnificent, world-class garden in the fourth largest metropolitan city in North America!
So, given how prone I am to dubiously connecting one thing with another – and given that it IS spring – here are some fabulous ideas for tulips courtesy of the Toronto Botanical Garden and my 10-year archive of photos there, since the year it renamed itself and gave us so much inspiration on its 4 acres, soon to be 35 acres!
Plant them with daffodils!
This should be obvious, but it’s amazing that more people don’t interplant and underplant tulips with daffodils. The TBG is all over this idea, and here are some of the prettiest examples, starting with tiny daffodils (I’m going to guess ‘Tête à Tête‘) under the Darwin Hybrid tulip ‘World Peace’.
What about Tulipa ‘Orange Emperor’ with Narcissus ‘Thalia’?
If you like butterfly or split corona daffodils, try Narcissus ‘Printal’ with ‘Orange Emperor’.
Speaking of the Fosteriana tulip ‘Orange Emperor’, it plays a big spring role at the TBG. Here it is at the start of the Piet Oudolf-designed Entry Border with Narcissus ‘Professor Einstein’. So sturdy!
And this charming duo is Tulipa ‘Tom Pouce’ and Narcissus ‘Golden Echo’.
Plant them with grape hyacinths & real hyacinths!
If you’ve been to Holland’s Keukenhof Gardens in springtime, you’ll be familiar with those “rivers of blue” grape hyacinths (Muscari armeniacum). You can do that in your own garden, you know. When you’re planting your tulips, give them little rivers or lakes or even puddles of blue companions, like this. The light pink tulip here is ‘Ollioules’, the purple is ‘Passionale’, and the double narcissus is ‘Cheerfulness’.
Years ago, I found this duo at the TBG: Tulipa saxatilis ‘Lilac Wonder’ and Muscari armeniacum. Nice, right?
And look at this sumptuous vignette: Tulipa ‘Fire Queen’ with blue grape hyacinths (Muscari armeniacum and the emerging chartreuse foliage of golden tansy (Tanacetum vulgare ‘Isla Gold’).
I wish I had a name for the early tulip planted under the ‘Crimson Queen’ Japanese maple with its deep-red emerging leaves, below. But given that it’s interplanted with early-season hyacinths, it’s bound to be a single early tulip like ‘Couleur Cardinal’.
This little species tulip T. turkestanica seems right at home with fragrant hyacinths….
….as does the species T. humilis var. violacea.
Plant them with summer snowflake!
I don’t see a lot of summer snowflake (Leucojum aestivum) – which, despite its name, blooms in mid-spring, not summer – used in gardens, but it can be very pretty as a tulip companion. Here is L. aestivum ‘Gravetye Giant’ with ‘Daydream’…..
…. and in a more shaded position enhancing Tulipa sylvestris, the woodland tulip.
Pair them with emerging shrubs!
Why waste the drama of dark-leaved shrubs like Weigela ‘Wine & Roses’, when you can surround it with Tulipa ‘Queen of Night’? The peach tulip here is ‘Menton’, the white is ‘White Triumphator’.
Fothergilla gardenii is a spring-flowering native northeastern shrub that’s wonderful in combination with mid to late-season tulips. Here it is at Toronto Botanical Garden this spring.
Don’t forget that colourful coniferous shrubs can pair up nicely with tulips, like Tulipa ‘Purple Dream’ with the lime-gold foliage of dwarf golden arborvitae (Platycladus orientalis ‘Aurea Nana’).
Combine them with spring-flowering perennials!
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Then there’s Bergenia or ‘pigsqueak’ (why? I don’t know). This cultivar is ‘Eden’s Dark Margin’ and it’s been paired with Tulipa ‘Ice Stick’ and a dusky purple hellebore.
As an aside to ‘Ice Stick’, I found this little Kaufmanniana hybrid to be quite attractive to bees at the Toronto Botanical Garden.
The amsonias flower early and look great with late tulips. This is Amsonia orientalis with a white-edged tulip I believe is the triumph tulip ‘Kung Fu’ and the blowsy double early tulip ‘Monte Orange’.
And I love this serene combination of blue Siberian bugloss (Brunnera macrophylla) with Tulipa ‘Spring Green’.
…. and variegated Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum x hybridum ‘Striatum’) with Tulipa ‘Exotic Emperor’.
Cushion spurge (Euphorbia polychroma) is one of the earliest perennials and combines nicely with tulips of all colours. Shown below is pink ‘Ollioules’.
Combine them with Ornamental Grasses!
I adored this soft Tulipa ‘Silverstream’ and Carex combo from 2009, and some of those, variegated, colour-variable tulips still pop up, though the carex is long gone. But that’s the funny thing with carex. The brown New Zealand species like C. buchananii and C. comans often look pretty much the same in spring even when they’ve died in winter, so they make good tulip companions.
This is Deschampsia caespitosa with the burgundy-yellow, late tulip ‘Gavota’ and dark ‘Queen of Night’. I think this is stunning.
And you can weave tulips like a colourful river through grasses, as was done with these double-flowered tulips ‘Pink Star’ and ‘Monte Orange’ through emerging Calamagrostis brachytricha.
Fill their dance cards with pretty cousins!
Sometimes, certain tulips just seem to go well together, and the TBG has created some lovely combinations over the years. This pair is tulip royalty ‘Fire Queen’ and ‘Pretty Princess’.
In the same bed along Lawrence Avenue is a delicate pairing of purple Tulipa ‘Rem’s Favourite’ with pink ‘Playgirl‘.
Those romantic hues are used to lovely effect in Nature’s Garden, in the combination below of the triumph tulip ‘Synaeada Blue’ with two luscious parrot tulips, ‘Negrita Parrot’ and ‘Pink Vision’.
Playing a double striped against a single striped with similar colouring works with the double late tulip ‘Cartouche’ and the triumph tulip ‘Carnaval de Rio’ (aka ‘Canada 150’).
I thought this was a very clever combination of fringed tulips, with one colour reversing the other. The red is ‘Flamenco’; the yellow is ‘Davenport’.
And sometimes you have a tulip so beautiful, like luminous, yellow ‘Akebono’ (a double sport of the Darwin Hybrid ‘Jewel of Spring’), below, that anything looks good with it, including ‘Orange Emperor’ and ‘Purple Dream’.
You can riff on a cultivar name and get pretty combinations, like ‘Apricot Delight’ with ‘Apricot Impression‘ (both Darwin Hybrids).
I am very fond of pink and yellow combinations in spring, and this vignette from 2016 was one of my favourites: ‘Rosy Delight’, ‘Design Impression’, ‘Jenny’ and yellow ‘West Point’. (It should be noted that spring weather will often accelerate certain tulip types or delay others, and what combines one spring might be sequential the following spring – the luck of the draw.)
I may be a subtle meadow girl the rest of the year, but I don’t mind a boisterous spring garden party. How about this double-flowered tulip duo: yellow-orange-red ‘Sun Lover’ and ‘Double Negrita’?
Or this sunny party act: ‘Fire Wings‘and the late double ‘Sundowner’, with its changing sunset hues.
In truth, I love all tulips. After 5 months of winter, we all want a little party of colour, I think, and tulips offer an easy way to celebrate. Here’s a multicolour party, courtesy of the TBG.
Many of these tulips are in plantings donated by my friends Mary Fisher (the Mary Fisher Spring Garden near the shop) and Bob & Anne Fisher and other family members (the Ruby Fisher garden) near the fence in the Oudolf entry border. Hurray to them! And, on that cheerful note, I’d like to raise a glass – a tulip glass with a long stem – to Sandra Pella and Paul Zammit and the gardening staff of the Toronto Botanical Garden on its lovely tulip displays. And also a toast to Harry Jongerden and a much-expanded garden with a much-expanded vision (and hopefully, a much-expanded gardening staff)!
Finally, I would like to send out a little shout to the woman who supplies many of the Toronto Botanical Garden’s spring bulbs, my friend Caroline de Vries. If you’re Canadian and looking to buy excellent-quality bulbs at a very good price, check out Caroline’s company https://flowerbulbsrus.com/. It’s where I buy my bulbs!
Of the three January 2018 weeks we spent touring New Zealand on the American Horticultural Society’s “Gardens, Wine & Wilderness” tour, without a doubt my two favourite outings were our overnight voyage on Doubtful Sound in Fiordland and the day we hiked the Hooker Valley Track under the country’s tallest mountain, Aoraki Mount Cook. That’s not to say I don’t love gardens, but for me there is simply no garden that compares with the one that nature conjures in places that we have not disturbed. So it was with great excitement, a few hours after lunching at Ann & Jim Jerram’s lovely Ostler Wine vineyard in the Waitaki Valley that we found ourselves standing beside Highway 80 on the shores of Lake Pukaki, staring in awe at the majestic mountain in the distance. Every camera and cellphone came out.
You can see why the Māori of the South Island called their sacred mountain Aoraki, or “cloud piercer”. (I’ll tell you more of their founding legend later.)
We continued driving Highway 80 (aka Mount Cook Road) along the shore of Lake Pukaki on our way into Aoraki Mount Cook National Park. As at Queenstown, we saw invasive “wilding conifers” along the shore – in this case, lodgepole pines (Pinus contorta), left, from western North America. Introduced into New Zealand in 1880, the trees were intended to “beautify” the lakeshore but have invaded throughout the Mackenzie Basin.
Like Lake Louise in Canada’s Banff National Park, Lake Pukaki appears turquoise because its waters consist of glacial melt from the mountains we’ll see over the next 36 hours. In the meltwater is superfine “rock flour” or “glacial milk” consisting of rock that has been pulverized into fine powder by the grinding action of ice as the glaciers melt and retreat.
Though I wouldn’t really understand the hydrology here until I came home and studied maps, we then drove over a small stream wending its way out into Lake Pukaki’s northern shore. This, I would learn, is a channel of the Tasman River, which empties both the Hooker glacier and massive Tasman glaciers in adjacent mountain valleys in the park. Now at the height of New Zealand summer, it was not a big flow, but I imagine these braided channels roar in springtime when the gravel floodplain accepts the snowmelt.
Moments later, we arrived at the 164-room Hermitage Aoraki Mount Cook Hotel that would be our home for the next two nights. Built in 1958 and extended several times, this is the third incarnation of the mountainside hotel. The original, built in 1884 by surveyor and Mount Cook ranger Frank Huddlestone, was sited further into the valley near the Mueller Glacier. It was taken over by the New Zealand government in 1895. As visitors started pouring into the region, the hotel could not keep up with the demand for rooms, and was also subject to seasonal flooding, which ultimately destroyed it. In 1914, a second hotel was erected; it would host four decades of guests, including a young Edmund Hillary and his climbing mates who bunked here during their 1948 ascent of Mount Cook. Five years later, he and Sherpa Tenzing Norguay would be the first to summit Mount Everest. After a 1957 fire destroyed the second Hermitage, the current one was built by the New Zealand government, under the aegis of its Tourist Hotel Corporation (THC) which also owned other tourist properties. In 1990 the THC was sold to a private corporation. Our room was on the 5th floor of the rear wing and had a floor-to-ceiling view of Aoraki Mount Cook.
It had been a long Day 12 of our tour, starting in Dunedin with a morning stop in Oamaru before our wine lunch in the Waitaki. After a delicious dinner (appetizer below), shared with hundreds of other mountain tourists, we hit the sack. Tomorrow there would be a valley hike – and plants!
My Hooker Valley Track Hiking Journal
10:00 – The next morning, we left The Hermitage (roughly the red square), cheating a little by getting a lift in our tour bus (which cuts off the first few miles and at least a half-hour walk) to the campground, shown at the first yellow arrow, below. Our destination, Hooker Lake – the second yellow arrow – didn’t seem far on the map, but it’s a good hike, as you’ll see.
10:17 – Armed with a lunch we’d scrounged from our breakfast buffet, off we went in the fine, mid-January summer weather on the Hooker Valley Track (Kiwi for “trail”).
10: 21 – Soon we were passing through matagouri shrubland. Dark and prickly, the other name for this riparian native is wild Irishman (Discaria toumatou).
10:26 – Through the thorny matagouri branches, the massive southeast flank of Mount Sefton appeared. Called Maukatua by the Māori, it’s the 13th tallest mountain in the Southern Alps at 3,151 metres (10,338 feet).
10:28 – Look at all these amazing golden Spaniards! What? You don’t see any Spanish tourists? No, golden Spaniard or spear grass (Aciphylla aurea) is the name for the sharp-leaved plants stretching across this meadow. Now we could clearly see Mount Sefton and its neighbour to the right, The Footstool (2,764 metres – 9,068 feet).
10:30 – The meadows were spangled with snow totara (Podocarpus nivalis), also called mountain totara. A much-hybridized evergreen, its progeny appears in temperate gardens throughout the world.
10: 32 – The track features three suspension bridges, two of which were rebuilt in 2015 to divert them from areas prone to flooding or avalanches. This was the first bridge. From here, you could just spot……
10:34 – …..Mueller Lake as it spilled its own meltwater from the Mueller Glacier just beyond into Hooker River below the bridge.
I walked (bounced?) across the bridge behind my husband who was holding onto his Tilley hat in the fierce valley wind. I was very proud of him. He is not a gardener, and a 3-week garden-wilderness tour of New Zealand might not have been the first item on his bucket list when we contemplated this trip in 2017, but he was enjoying it very much – provided the wine flowed at dinnertime!
10:39 – Here was Griselinia littoralis, aka kapuka or New Zealand broadleaf, an evergreen that normally grows as a tree. Though its Latin name indicates a preference for the seashore (littoral), we are really not far from the Tasman Sea in this mountain valley. (And here I must offer my thanks to New Zealand plant wizard Steve Newall, who helped me identify many of these endemic treasures. Have a read about Steve in this piece by my Facebook friend Kate Bryant).
10:41 – That long berm at left, below, is the moraine wall of Mueller Glacier.
10:44 – We passed a few invasive plants in the first meadows, like foxglove (Digitalis purpurea), below.
10:50 – I passed my phone to my husband and asked for a portrait….of my best side. Like some 70,000 other New Zealand tourists, I wanted to have a record that I actually made this hike.
It was much warmer than I thought it would be, and I adopted my customary “I thought this was a glacier hike?” clothing modification, the same strategy used a few years ago in Greenland to hike the boardwalk through the alpine meadows to the UNESCO Ilulissat Icefjord site.
11:01 – Okay, back to New Zealand. Forty minutes after we began our hike, we crossed the second suspension bridge, known as the Hooker Bluff bridge. The scenery here can only be described as spectacular.
11:02 – Now we saw the Hooker River spilling into Mueller Lake.
11:05 – After crossing the bridge, the river was on our right side. Though small, it was powerful, its crashing cascades seeming to echo off the nearby mountain walls.
11:06 – I was so transfixed, I stopped for a few minutes to make a recording.
11:07 – Along the path, one of the golden Spaniards (Aciphylla aurea) had toppled over under its own weight. You can see the umbellifer flowers and strange leaves against the stem
11:08 – A moment later, I saw one pointing towards Mount Sefton’s lofty glaciers.
11:11 – And three minutes after that, I stopped to mourn that I had not been here a month earlier to see the flowering of the iconic Mount Cook lily, Ranunculus lyallii, the world’s largest buttercup, below. It was collected by and named for Scottish botanist David Lyall (1817-1895) who had travelled as ship surgeon around New Zealand and the Antarctic from 1839-41 on HMS Terror. (Terror was later lost with all hands, along with HMS Erebus, in Canada’s Arctic during Captain John Franklin’s ill-fated 1845 expedition to find a shortcut from Europe to Asia. After years of searching, both shipwrecks were found in 2014 and 2016.) In assembling Flora Antarctica containing Lyall’s plant collections, his friend, English botanist Joseph Hooker (1817-1911), noted that the New Zealand shepherds called it the ‘water-lily’, an appropriate name since it is the only known ranunculus with peltate leaves. (It was Joseph Hooker’s father, William Hooker, for whom this valley and glacier were named by Julius von Haast in his geological survey of the Southern Alps in 1863.)
But the Māori of the South Island – the ancient Waitaha, then the Ngāti Māmoe, then the present-day Ngāi Tahu – had known the flower for hundreds of years before David Lyall arrived to botanize. They called it “kōpukupuku”. It has even been featured on postage stamps.
11:13 – A few minutes later, I felt somewhat mollified to come upon a few pristine specimens of Gentianella divisa.
11-17 – Unlike a Canadian alpine meadow in, say, Alberta, there is little bright colour in these tussock meadows under Aoraki Mount Cook. Many of the herbaceous plants tend to have white flowers, like Lobelia angulata, below.
11:19 – You can barely see the tiny white flowers of inaka (Dracophyllum longifolium), one of the common native shrubs in the Hooker Valley.
11:24 – So far, we’d been walking on crushed gravel. But now we set off across the meadow on a beautiful boardwalk. As it began, it pointed us at Mount Sefton and The Footstool, but a few minutes later, it….
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11:26 – …… veered to the right and gave us the full valley view of Aoraki Mount Cook.
11:30 – The shimmering meadow here was mostly mid-ribbed snow tussock (Chionochloa pallens).
11:32 – I was happy that I was able to identify mountain cottonwood (Ozothamnus vauvilliersii), which I had also seen in flower on Ben Lomond in Queenstown.
11:36 – Steve Newall helped me identify this lovely little community: the silver leaves of mountain daisy (Celmisia semicordata), its flowers already past, sitting in a bed of Gaultheria crassa to the left, with creeping wire vine (Muehlenbeckia axillaris) up against the rock. The tussock grass is mid-ribbed snow tussock (Chionochloa pallens).
11:37 – A minute later, we were crossing the third bridge, called the Upper Hooker Suspension Bridge. This one seemed to catch the wind and the vibrations, especially near the river banks, were very strong!
11:43 – I stopped on the path for a few minutes to absorb the sight of these wonderful meadows and shoot a short video. Here’s how they looked:
11:54 – As we approached the end of the track, I found a stand of creeping wire vine (Muehlenbackia axillaris) in flower…..
11:54 – and Raoulia glabra with its little pompom flowers.
11:55 – When I looked up from the tiny alpine plants nestled in these rocks, I couldn’t help but notice the massive boulders lying in the meadow. The one below looked like it had sheared clean off the mountain and tumbled down the scree slope. But of course it might have happened dozens or hundreds of years ago. Unless one was actually there…….
11:56 – A minute later, we arrived at our destination. Hooker Lake lay before us – a body of water that hadn’t been there at all before the late 1970s, when Hooker Glacier began its retreat. In geological terms, it’s referred to as a “proglacial” lake. It had taken us an hour and 39 minutes. We celebrated by walking along the path to a little picnic area and eating our lunch.
12:12 – With our picnic finished, I headed down to join the tourists posing for photos on the lake’s shore.
12:19 – My arthritic knee was not going to keep me from kneeling on the glacial till to capture a souvenir image of this little iceberg – aka “bergy bit” – washed up on shore. As I looked up from this little lake – melted from a glacier named for an English botanist by a German geologist – at a towering mountain – named for an English sea captain by another English sea captain – I was unaware of the sacred nature of this park.
Long before Captain John Lort Stokes decided in 1851, while surveying New Zealand, to honour his predecessor, Captain James Cook, by naming the country’s highest peak after him, the Māori of the South Island knew it as Aoraki, or “cloud piercer”. The Ngāi Tahu do not see the mountain merely as the result of millions of years of tectonic uplift as the Pacific and Indo-Australian Plates collide far beneath the surface along the island’s western coast For them it is the core of their creation myth: the mountain possesses sacred mauri. They say that long before there was an island called Aotearoa (New Zealand), there was no sign of land in the great ocean. When the sky father Raki wed the earth mother Papa-tui-nuku, Raki’s four celestial sons came down to greet their father’s new wife. They were Ao-raki (Cloud in the Sky), Raki-ora (Long Raki), Raki-rua (Raki the Second) and Raraki-roa (Long Unbroken Line). They arrived in their waka (canoe) and sailed the sea, but could not find land. When they attempted to return to the heavens, their song of incantation failed and their waka fell into the sea and turned to stone as it listed, forming the south island. The brothers climbed onto the high side of their waka and were also turned to stone. They exist today as the four tallest peaks in the area: Aoraki is the highest (Mount Cook); the other brothers are Rakiora (Mount Dampier), Rakirua (Mount Teichelmann) and Rarakiroa (Mount Tasman).
When title to the park was vested to the Ngāi Tahu in 1998, the mountain’s name was formally changed to recognize Aoraki, and all management decisions are made in concert with them to respect the environment as their sacred place. This remarkable carving by the late Cliff Whiting hangs in the park’s Visitor Centre. It depicts a fierce Aoraki and the four brothers/mountains.
Moments after kneeling at the shore of Hooker Lake, I gazed up at the sky and saw a cloud. People who study clouds call this an orographic cloud – its shape distorted by air currents that must lift in response to tall mountain peaks. But when I looked later at the photo I’d made, all I could see was the face of a fierce ancient god gazing across the sky.
12:20 – Okay, back to earth now. I didn’t bring my ultra-zoom camera with me on the hike or I could have captured the front wall of Hooker Glacier. As it is, I enlarged one of my images to show the glacier and its calving wall. If you’re looking to see sparkly-white, gleaming glaciers, you’re in for a shock here. As my friend Andy Fyon, retired head of the Ontario Geological Survey, says: “Active alpine glaciers can be a bit like a child. They revel in the rough and tumble life and in getting dirty! That is not the same for continental glaciers, which enjoy staying clean.”
12:30 – Looking at the upper part of Aoraki Mount Cook, below, you can see the summit partly obscured by a cloud. I’ve also drawn in the south ridge that was recently renamed the Hillary Ridge. The closest of the mountain’s three peaks, Low Peak (3599 metre – 11,808 ft) was first summited in 1948 via the southern ridge by a foursome that included Edmund Hillary, Mick Sullivan and Ruth Adams and their guide Harry Ayres, Three years later, Hillary, along with Tenzing Norgay, would become the first person to summit Mount Everest. But that 1948 ascent of Mount Cook came with attendant drama, for when the foursome went on to attempt the nearby peak La Perouse (out of my photo to the left or west), Ruth Adams’s rope broke and her 50-foot slide down the slope left her unconscious with several fractures. Hillary would contribute the first chapter to the gripping account of that rescue.
In fact, some 248 climbers have died attempting to climb Aoraki Mount Cook. Summiting is a considerable achievement in the world of couloirs and cirques and belays. I enclose the following video to demonstrate the skill needed. I estimate that I screamed “Oh, my god” or words to that effect a dozen times and averted my eyes at least 20 times. Put on your crampons and fasten your carabiner…..
12:38 – Heading back to the hotel now, we took a little side detour up to a few small tarns, which is alpine for glacial pond.
12:46 – The Upper Hooker Suspension Bridge was just as bouncy and windy on the return trip.
12:55 – We walked at the base of Mount Wakefield, which separates Hooker Valley from the Tasman Valley to the east.
12:59 – A small footbridge at the Stocking Stream Shelter took us over the Hooker River with its milky rock flour.
1:20 – Looking down a little later, I saw a drift of Parahebe lyallii.
1:35 – And creeping over a rock was one of the “bidibids”, Acaena saccaticupula.
1:53 – I saw my only Hooker Valley butterfly, the common copper, foraging on New Zealand harebell (Wahlenbergia albomarginata).
2:12 – Coming towards the end of the hike, I made a critical mistake. Weary now and gazing across the meadows at what looked to be a direct route back to the Hermitage, I said, “Why don’t we get off this winding path and go straight back across the meadow?” My husband, trusting soul that he is, reluctantly agreed. Neither of us knew that the only people who ventured this way were mountain bikers. With our tired legs, the spongy soil and long grass of the meadows made the last stretch seem never-ending.
2:14 – In the meadows in front of the hotel were a few lupines. Despite now being on the noxious aliens list, these invaders are quite famous for their massive spring show in the park.
2:19 – Parts of the meadow turned into dried-up gravel stream beds that are clearly part of the seasonal drainage patterns of the rivers here.
2:21 – I found another famous New Zealand mat plant, scabweed (Raoulia australis), growing here.
2:37 – And finally, 4 hours and 20 minutes after we began our hike, we arrived back at the sign-post near the hotel.
3:00 – As we kicked off our hiking shoes and collapsed onto our beds in the 5th floor room with the great view of the mountains, we cracked open a bottle of the Gëwurztraminer we’d bought at Ostler Vineyard the previous day. A glass of chilled wine never tasted so good.
9:30 – And later, after dinner, as the light dimmed in the sky, I looked out on Aoraki Mount Cook with something akin to affection. Like the Māori, I sensed its spirit infusing this spectacular landscape.
9:43 – And as the sun shed its last rays on its snowy peak, I gave thanks for the pilgrimage we had made to be close to it.
I was reminded today, as I drove through Mount Pleasant Cemetery, then home again, that this particular time in June is resplendently white in blossom. Seriously, there are white flowers everywhere! Let’s start in the cemetery with this rather rare shrub, Oriental photinia (P. villosa). A member of the Rosaceae family, it has lovely yellow leaves in autumn.
The fountain-like Van Houtte spireas (Spiraea x vanhouttei) were almost finished, but I managed to find one little branch that hadn’t yet browned.
Kousa dogwoods (Cornus kousa) were looking paricurly lovely with their creamy-white bracts.
Japanese snowball (Viburnum plicatum) was beautiful, too.
There were peonies in my favourite memorial garden at the cemetery, including this lovely single white.
Deutzias grace the cemetery, and I was interested that although there were matching Lemoine deutzias (D. x lemoinei) on either side of a grand tombstone, just one of the pair was attracting bees, lots of them. Only the bees know why the other shrub wasn’t attractive.
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And the black locusts (Robinia pseudoacacia) were dangling their pendant flowers from the tall branches like tree-borne wisteria. Tonight, those flowers will perfume the air around them with their honey fragrance.
When I pulled into my driveway at home, I was greeted by a little regiment of tall, double-white camassias (C. leichtlinii ‘Semi Plena’). I don’t normally plant double flowers, preferring to nurture the bees with single blossoms, but they were in a mislabelled package a few years back, and I do enjoy that they come into flower after the single blue Leichtlin’s camassia.
And as I looked out my kitchen window to the far corner of the garden, I admired one of my very favourite spring shrubs, the big pagoda or alternate-leafed dogwood (Cornus alternifolia) wtih its layered branches. It was doing a lovely pas de deux with my neighbour Claudette’s pale-pink beauty bush (Kolkwitzia amabilis).
Here’s a closer look at those abundant flower clusters. I do love this native shrub.
And those are my June whites for today. Now all we need is a bride!
