Tag Archives: spring

Casa Loma’s Woodland Wildflowers

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Exactly 10 years ago today, I had one of my best spring garden visits anywhere. Except it just happened to be right here in Toronto at one of our biggest ‘tourist attractions’, Casa Loma.  But back on May 12, 2011, I didn’t bother staying inside the castle (which I had toured many times) and instead went right out to the garden. I passed by the Asian-themed garden with its pretty azaleas…..

….. and walked down the slope past the bright-magenta Rhododendron dauricum.   For geology fans, this hillside is actually the ancient shoreline of Lake Ontario’s Ice Age predecessor, Lake Iroquois.

I slowed down completely as I came to the staircase near the bottom, where native Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica) were at their very peak.

Virginia bluebells might be one of the northeast’s most splendid springtime sights!  Like many of our native spring wildflowers, they’re ‘ephemeral’, meaning after they flower and set seed, they just die back completely… until next spring.

I had a destination in mind, and it was the Woodland Garden with its beautiful paper birches and a spectacular underplanting of some of the best spring natives, as well as a few delicate Asian groundcovers that added their own charms.  Here we have Virginia bluebells with lots of lovely ostrich ferns (Matteucia struthiopteris).

An ascending path made from grit and flagstone slabs takes you back up the Iroquois shoreline so you can enjoy all the shade-lovers. Here we have the three principal actors:  Virginia bluebell (M. virginica), yellow wood poppy (Stylophorum diphyllum) and ostrich ferns.  (Note how much bigger the wood poppy’s flowers are than that confusing, weedy, invasive doppelgänger with the small yellow flowers, greater celandine, Chelidonium majus.)

I love yellow-with-blue in the garden, and this is one of the finest duos!

Ontario’s provincial floral emblem, shimmering-white, showy trilliums (T. grandiflorum) add to the display.

Virginia bluebells are also lovely with yellow merrybells (Uvularia grandiflora).

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I’ve never identified the buckeye seedlings that were popping up in this planting, but given it’s mostly native, perhaps Ohio buckeye (Aesculus glabra)?

There were also epimediums in this garden, like the red-flowered E. x rubrum you can see at the bottom left, below,

… and here, with Virginia bluebells.

Yellow-flowered Epimedium x versicolor ‘Sulphureum’ was featured in the woodland as well……

…. and orange-flowered Epimedium x warleyense ‘Orange Queen’.

Finally, a pure-white trillium with E. x versicolor ‘Sulphureum’.

Whoever said it was terrible to garden in shade?

*****

If you want to read more about spring designs for shade, have a look at my blog on the Montreal Botanical Garden’s fabulous Jardin d’Ombre, A Shade Garden Master Class.

April Snow

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Winter. It’s never really over until the fat robin sings… at least 50 times.

We’re always reminded of that in April when mother nature says, “Here, have another helping!” 

We had snow last night in Toronto, quite a lot for mid-April. I went out with my camera as I often do early in the morning after an ice storm or dusting of snow leaves the spring flowers shocked but photogenic.  My Tulipa fosteriana ‘Orange Emperor’ bowed down – humiliating for an emperor.

Tulipa praestans ‘Shogun’ seemed less martial arts this morning, more ‘shivering’.

Sweet little Iris aucheri ‘Ocean Magic’ looked like Arctic Ocean magic….

…. and Muscari latifolium wore a tiny white toque.

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Hyacinthus ‘Gipsy Queen’ looked like she wanted to move her caravan somewhere warmer.

Lovely Narcissus ‘Golden Echo’, my new favourite daffodil whose virtues I extolled here last year, hung her head sadly.

Snakeshead fritillaries (Fritillaria meleagris) seemed less than impressed.

Miss ‘Beth Evans’ (Corydalis solida) swooned. I’m not sure why, her kin come from northern Europe – she should be used to this spring trickery!

In the back garden, the resident cardinals were quiet – why sing when you can stay warm in the cedar hedge?

But out on the street, the sparrows kept up their spirits, and reminded me to keep mine up, too. After all, April snow showers bring (back) spring flowers, right?

Narcissus ‘Golden Echo’

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Every now and then, I find a plant I adore and decide it needs a little homegrown public relations campaign. This long, cool spring with its attendant air of strange melancholy courtesy of Covid-19 was the backdrop for the month-long flowering of a little daffodil I originally saw at the Toronto Botanical Garden in 2012. This is Narcissus ‘Golden Echo’, paired with the lovely yellow-throated pink Triumph tulip ‘Tom Pouce’.

I made a note of how much I liked the daffodil and finally ordered 2 packages of 25 last summer from my friend Caroline deVries’s company FlowerBulbsRUs (she also has a wholesale business for designers and retail outlets). Come November, I wore my fancy, paint-splattered, rubber clogs and proceeded to dig my bulbs into my front yard meadow/pollinator garden.

This is what happens when your box of bulbs takes a photo of you in your 1980s car coat with the broken zipper that has stained more fences with you – and planted more tulips and daffodils – than you care to recall.

Fast forward to April 29th this spring and the bulbs in my little pollinator island.  This was a full month after the first species crocuses emerged on March 20th, followed by a blue sea of Siberian squill (Scilla siberica) and glory-of-the-snow (Scilla forbesii) in April. I wrote in praise of all the “little bulbs” in an earlier blog this spring. The following day, I made my first portrait of Narcissus ‘Golden Echo’.

The daffodil world has its own rules, traditions and famous breeder names, many of them in England and Ireland. But there are notable North American personalities who have produced the so-called American Hybrids. One of those was Oregon’s Grant Mitsch (1907-1989), who bred ‘Pipit’, ‘Accent’ and ‘Dicksissel’. But it was Brent C. Heath, below at his farm and business Brent & Becky’s Bulbs in Gloucester, VA, who crossed the European jonquil or rush daffodil (Narcissus jonquilla)  with an old Irish long-cupped daffodil ‘Ballygarvey’ (pre-1947) to come up with the sweet ‘Golden Echo’ daffodil I’ve fallen in love with this spring. It’s the one filling the rows in the thousands below. Though he had grown it for more than a decade, it was registered in 2014 and won the Wister Award the following year.  Brent is the third generation of mail-order bulb farmers at the farm his grandfather started in 1900; now his son has become the fourth generation. Becky is president of Heath Enterprises, Ltd. I’ve known them both since I joined Gardencomm (Formerly the Garden Writers Association) more than two decades ago.

On May 2nd  of this cool, long spring, the little Greek windflowers (Anemone blanda ‘Blue Shades’) were fully-open pools of lavender and the Tulipa praestans ‘Shogun’ had come into flower. Both complimented ‘Golden Echo’ beautifully.

When I decided to remove the old dwarf conifers that had grown too big for this island and replace them with a suite of perennials that would attract pollinators (here’s my video of a full year in the garden, made before planting ‘Shogun’ and ‘Golden Echo’)…..

…..adding lots of spring bulbs was just a seasonal bonus. (However, I did see honey bees gathering pollen from the crocuses early on and I’ve written about native cellophane bees on my Scilla siberica.)  But mostly it’s just to add preliminary colour to a garden I consider my gift to the neighbourhood.

In fact, that day I introduced myself to two women taking their daily walks at an appropriate, self-isolating distance from each other. As one snapped a few photos, they told me they loved seeing my garden change over the weeks since late March.

Here we see that fabulous apricot-gold ‘Shogun’ tulip with ‘Golden Echo’ and the purple-blue highlights of windflower and grape hyacinth.

Meanwhile in the main garden on the other side of the path, the big Fosteriana Tulipa ‘Orange Emperor’ was adding to the orange theme, just as the pink hyacinths were fading.

I made a lot of little nosegay bouquets this spring, including these ones on May 6th. ‘Golden Echo’ is in the one on the right, along with the pure white Narcissus ‘Stainless’ and the peach-trumpeted ‘Pink Accent’.  In the arrangement on the left are snakeshead fritillaries (Fritillaria meleagaris), Rhododendron ‘P.J.M.”, Siberian bugloss (Brunnera macrophylla) and the wonderful white Triandrus daffodil Narcissus ‘Thalia’.


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Meanwhile, in the main garden on May 6th, ‘Thalia’ was the star, along with the first flowers of the big Darwin Hybrid tulip ‘Pink Impression’.  And, of course, ‘Golden Echo’.

On May 7th, I zeroed in on this pretty pairing: ‘Golden Echo’ with the fascinating flowers of the broad-leaved grape hyacinth (Muscari latifolium) from the mountains of Turkey. The dark-blue flowers on the bottom are fertile; whereas the azure-blue flowers on the top are sterile.

May 13th saw me including ‘Golden Echo’ in a tiny bouquet along with the clove-scented Tazetta Narcissus ‘Geranium’, the lovely, orange-flowered lily tulip ‘Ballerina’ and the first blue forget-me-nots (Myosotis sylvatica). In the background are a few sprigs of forsythia. ‘Geranium’ is a personal favourite daffodil, one I included in a blog titled White Delight: Four Perfumed Daffodils to Tempt You.

By May 17th, you can see the green leaves of lily-of-the-valley (Convallaria majalis) – or, as I call it ‘guerilla-of-the-valley’ – at the bottom right of this photo. Indeed, it is hugely invasive in my garden, but I tolerate it creeping around everything since it doesn’t seem to affect the emergence of the summer perennials. And, of course, I did make good use of it the years I used it to decorate the hats I wore to our botanical garden’s spring party.

It’s funny;  I thought I wanted white daffodils exclusively in my garden, like ‘Accent’ in the foreground, but the soft yellow of ‘Golden Echo’ isn’t as obtrusive as the ballpark-yellow of some of the early daffodils like ‘King Alfred’ and ‘Carlton’. It fits into my multicoloured scheme very nicely, with forget-me-nots creating little clouds of pale-blue.

By May 22nd , my Fothergilla gardenii shrubs began to open their white, bottlebrush flowers.

Though the ‘Shogun’ tulips in the pollinator island were long gone by then and the flowerheads removed (I always leave the foliage to ripen and turn yellow in order to feed next year’s bulb), little ‘Golden Echo’ was still flowering bravely amidst the emerging leaves of echinacea, rudbeckia, salvia and sedum.

On May 23rd, I photographed it with the first flowers of Camassia leichtleinii ‘Caerulea’, a bulb that is as short-lived in flower as ‘Golden Echo’ is long-lived.

In fact, if the cool Covid spring of 2020 had not given way to sweltering temperatures this week, I believe sweet ‘Golden Echo’ might have flowered for another week or so, since the bulbs put up new flower stems that bloom sequentially, rather than all at once. Nevertheless, I was delighted on May 23rd to make my final bouquet featuring Brent Heath’s lovely little hybrid daffodil, along with lily-of-the-valley, common grape hyacinths (Muscari armeniacum), camassia and sweet-scented Burkwood’s viburnum (V. x burkwoodii).  By my count, that was almost four full weeks in bloom.

That night, it graced our outdoor table and the sixth take-out Covid meal we ordered from local restaurants to support them – and to give me a break from cooking. Hopefully, the restaurants will be back in business completely soon. I know that ‘Golden Echo’ will be back next spring, and the springs after that.

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To order Narcissus ‘Golden Echo’ in Canada, visit FlowerBulbsRUs. If you order before August 31, there’s a discount built into the price and free shipping for orders above $75.

To order it in the United States, visit Brent & Becky’s Bulbs.

Spring at VanDusen Botanical Garden – Part 2

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Now that we’ve left the Sino-Himalayan Collection I toured you through in Part 1, along with the Rhododendron Walk, let’s wander through the rest of this spectacular Vancouver garden. The map is below, and if you click to enlarge it you can see the details a little better (a large map is on VanDusen Botanical Garden’s website). As I mentioned in my first blog, my photos are from four spring visits in the past decade, dates ranging from May 2nd to June 1st.

We’ll start in the Fern Dell. This is one of the many Taxonomic Collections at VanDusen Botanical Garden, filled with little Pteridophyte treasures from around the world…..

….. like Himalayan maidenhair fern (Adiantum venustum)  …..

….. and arching Japanese holly fern (Cyrtomium fortunei var.clivicolum) …..

….. and the beautiful native British Columbia deer fern (Blechnum spicant).

Walking southwest from the Fern Dell, we come to the Medicine Wheel. As the seasons change in March, June and September, visitors are invited here to participate in a Medicine Wheel Ceremony, celebrating the cycles of nature as marked by people from different backgrounds and spiritual traditions. Medicine wheels, of course, were created by many indigenous people in North America, most featuring a central stone cairn and one or more stone circles and stone lines radiating from the central point. In Saskatchewan, I visited and blogged about Wanuskewin Heritage Park which features a 1,500-year-old medicine wheel.

Nearby are VanDusen’s beehives. Since I’ve spent years photographing honey bees wherever I travel, I always spend a few minutes watching the activity around the hives.

Provided the spring temperatures are warm enough for the honey bees to fly, sharp-eyed visitors will always find them gathering nectar or pollen on the garden’s plants, like pulmonarias or lungworts, which are a particular honey bee favourite. This is Pulmonaria ‘Trevi Fountain’.

At the very southwest corner of the garden adjacent to the wonderful Alma VanDusen Garden I blogged about in April are the Meadow Ponds.  If you come in early May when not much is blooming, you’ll likely see the pink flowers of moisture-loving umbrella plant or Indian rhubarb, Darmera peltata.

But visit several weeks later and the scene has changed to include orange Euphorbia griffithii ‘Fireglow’ and yellow flag irises (Iris pseudacorus).

I love this scene adjacent to the Alma VanDusen meadow nearby, featuring red-flowered horse chestnut (Aesculus x carnea) with sweet rocket (Hesperis matronalis) and bluebells.

If you’re a kid or an adventurous adult, the Maze is always fun. Me? I prefer to focus on the monkey puzzle tree outside (Araucaria araucana), since they were part of my childhood in Victoria, B.C.

Now we’ll do a slow curve and start to walk northeast behind the Sino Himalayan Dell. In spring, VanDusen’s impressive Mountain Ash (rowan) Collection puts on a fine show. This is Sorbus caloneura, native to mountain forests of China….

….. and this is Sorbus commixta, the Japanese rowan.

The Maple Collection is excellent. I love the way moss clings to the limbs of the trees; it reminds me of my own suburban Vancouver childhood home and the lime my father was always sprinkling to try to get rid of the moss in the lawn. This is the the purple-leaf sycamore maple (Acer pseudoplatanus ‘Atropurpureum’).

And this is the chartreuse foliage of the golden Cappadocian maple (Acer cappodicum ‘Aureum’.)

There are lovely spring plantings under the maples, featuring bleeding heart (Lamprocapnos spectabilis), blue-flowered Siberian bugloss (Brunnera macrophylla) and late daffodils.

Japanese maples (Acer palmatum) have a place in the Maple Collection as well.

During my four (mostly May) spring visits in the past decade, I seem to have managed only this one pretty photo of a few of VanDusen’s famous Ceperley hybrid primroses, on the edge of Heron Lake.

So I dug into my vast slide collection and scanned an image from June 2003, to show the impressive colours of the Ceperley hybrid candelabra primroses a little later in the season. According to Douglas Justice of UBC Botanical Garden, these beautiful, moisture-loving primroses (like some of VanDusen’s Asian species rhododendrons) originated in Stanley Park gardener’s Alleyne Cook’s collection in the Ceperley Picnic area of the park. They are a mixture of hybrids (he called it a “hybrid swarm”) involving at least four Chinese candelabra primrose species: gold-flowered P. bulleyana, deep-pink P. pulverulenta, yellow  P. helodoxa  and magenta P. beesiana (some sources call this a subspecies of P. bulleyana).  When these species hybridize, they produce a spectacular mixture of orange, yellow, salmon, pink and mauve-flowered primroses.

Butterbur (Petasites hybridus) is an unusual Chinese perennial found near the Maple Collection.

There’s a good collection of lindens or limes. This is Korean linden (Tilia insularis).

Vancouver is famous for its Japanese cherries and on May 2, 2017, I enjoy standing under a white cloud of Prunus ‘Shirotae’, or the Mount Fuji cherry.

VanDusen displays Canadian-bred cultivars of plants, celebrating the heritage of botanists like Frank Skinner (Hyacithiflora lilacs, roses, honeysuckles), Isabella Preston (Preston lilacs), Felicitas Svejda (Explorer roses, weigela, forsythia), Percy Wright (crabapples, roses) and the UBC Botanical Garden Plant Introduction Program (‘Mandarin’ honeysuckle).

One special introduction is ‘Eddie’s White Wonder’ dogwood, a hybrid of Eastern flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) and the western native Nuttall’s dogwood (Cornus nuttallii).  This is a branch from the oldest living specimen of the cultivar, bred by British Columbia nurseryman Henry Matheson Eddie (1881-1953) in 1945. Eddie made crosses in the 30s and 40s, his aim to develop a shrub combining the large flowers of the western dogwood with the rich fall colour of the eastern species. But when the Fraser River flooded its banks in 1947, the wholesale division of his family business, the Eddie Nursery Company, lost all its stock of the hybrids except for one shrub that had been moved to their farm in Richmond, from which all the ‘Eddie’s White Wonder’ dogwoods in the world have been propagated. Henry Eddie’s family donated the specimen below to VanDusen in the 1990s.

This is Weigela florida ‘Minuet’, one of Felicitas Svejda’s Dance Series introductions from 1981.

If you read Part 1 of my blog, you’ll know that R. Roy Forster was a beloved first Director of VanDusen, so we’ll take a walk past the Cypress Pond named for him. Check out the knobby knees of the cypress trees (Taxodium distichum). And look, there are little ducklings swimming in the water.

Nearby is the Eastern North America Section…..

….. with its native trees (including a beautiful and rare butternut) and understorey plants, such as these young red buckeyes (Aesculus pavia)…..
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…. and familiar to me, a Torontonian, are showy trilliums (Trillium grandiflorum) and Solomon’s seals (Polygonatum biflorum).

We’ll head southwest again via the Woodland Garden. I believe it’s in this area where there are some wonderful magnolias, including New Zealand-bred ‘Star Wars’, below.

I love seeing all these western mayflowers (Maianthemum dilatatum) or “false lily-of-the-valley” carpeting the ground under conifers.

From this area, we can reach the Southern Hemisphere Garden which contains an amazing collection of plants native to South America, Australia and New Zealand, below.

Lolog’s barberry (Berberis x lologensis) is a lovely hybrid between two Chilean species, Berberis darwinii and Berberis linearifolia.

Gunnera manicata is called Brazilian giant rhubarb and gradually becomes an immense plant here on the edge of Heron Pond.

We’ll leave the Southern Hemisphere Garden via the zigzag bridge……

….. and make our way down the path through the Ornamental Grass collection. VanDusen does a beautiful job of integrating the grasses into the garden with other plants, such as the crown imperial fritillaries under the goldenrain tree (Koelreuteria paniculata), below. At this time of spring, you can barely see the Bowles’ golden grass (Milium effusum ‘Aureum’) popping up….

… but a few weeks later, it makes a stunning contrast to the dusky cranebill (Geranium phaeum ‘Samobor’) here.

Another chartreuse leaved plant, Bowles’ golden sedge, Carex elata ‘Aurea’, shown below with Lychnis viscaria ‘Feuer’, causes understandable confusion, given the common name. Both were introduced by British horticulturist and garden writer Edward Augustus Bowles (1865-1954), who was also an important collector of crocuses, colchicums, snowdrops and snowflakes.

Not all the grasses in the garden are arranged in little vignettes, but it is fun to see the details of some, like tufted sedge (Carex elata).

Now we’ll circle back on the path through VanDusen’s renowned Black Garden. Though it’s at its best later in the season, it is still stunning in springtime, with its wine-red tulips, barberries and heucheras, black mondo grass (Ophiopogon planiscapus ‘Nigrescens’) and chartreuse highlights.

On my visit in May 2014, one of VanDusen’s volunteers named Hughie greets me and she is so perfectly colour-coordinated, I ask her to stroll through for my camera.

I adore this combination of ‘Gold Heart’ bleeding heart (Lamprocapnos spectabilis) with dark ‘Queen of Night’ tulips.

Let’s make our way west to take a quick peek at the Perennial Border. It isn’t quite as grand in May as later in the season, but there are still lovely plants……

….. like these ‘Sky Wing’ Siberian iris….

….. and attractive vignettes such as Allium hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’ and white Trollius x cultorum ‘Cheddar’ in front of the dark foliage of Ligularia ‘Britt-Marie Crawford’.

Visitors can find lots of spring design inspiration in the garden, like this Pulmonaria ‘Trevi Fountain’ with Epimedium x perellchicum ‘Frohnleiten’.

There are old-fashioned perennial favourites, too, such as pink gas plant (Dictamnus albus var. roseus).

The formal rose garden takes summer temperatures to begin to bloom, but in May, the perennial border flanking it starts out with a few narcissus….

…. before exploding in mid-late June with a purple profusion of bellflowers (Campanula latifolia var. macrantha), cranesbills (Geranium ‘Johnson’s Blue’) and catmint (Nepeta sp.)

Near the Loderi rhododendrons which launched our tour in my previous blog, hundreds of colourful tulips carpet the ground in front of British sculptor Sophie Ryder’s ‘Minotaur and Hare’, created for the Vancouver Biennale in 2009-11.  Sadly, the little blue hare that the minotaur once cradled was stolen, not once, but twice.

Tulips, of course, are a big part of spring at VanDusen, but my favourite way to use them is in combination with spring perennials, as here with pink Bergenia ‘Eroica’. If I had to guess at the tulip, which was not labelled, I’d say the single late ‘Dordogne’.

Now we come to the finale of our tour, a beautiful spectacle you’re most likely to encounter between mid-May and early June: the gorgeous Laburnum Walk.  Planted in 1975 under Director R. Roy Forster, the walk was modelled on the famous Laburnum Arch at Bodnant Garden in Wales. The long, yellow, pea-flowered trusses of golden chain tree (Laburnum x watereri ‘Vossii’) cascade over the walk, flanked by Allium hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’, pink bistort (Persicaria bistorta ‘Superba’), forget-me-nots (Myosotis sylvatica) and bluebells (Hyacinthoides x massartiana).

Isn’t this perfect?

So our tour is over, but I’d like to pay tribute to my late mother Mary Healy, who accompanied me to VanDusen Botanical Garden over the years on many occasions. The photo below is from 1988. My mom taught me about gardening, was proud of me for choosing to make it my career, and loved nothing better than to walk with me for a while; then, as she got older, to settle on a bench with her newspaper as I happily roamed the garden with my cameras. I dedicate this blog to her.

*********

If you’d like 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, NZ.

Spring at VanDusen Botanical Garden – Part 1

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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.

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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;