I’ve been meaning to write this blog for years, but it took a global pandemic – and the fact that this is National Pollinator Week – to spur me into action. Because in a pandemic we need essential workers, and on this planet there are no workers more essential than pollinators. Think of it: in all flowering plants not pollinated by wind (grasses and many trees are wind pollinated), bees, buterflies, moths, birds, beetles, ants and other insects are responsible for transferring pollen from a flower’s male anthers to the receptive female stigma, ensuring fertilization of the ovum, the creation of fruit and later the ultimate dissemination of seed. Without pollinators, the world as we know it would be as it was more than 135 million years ago: boring. No need for colour, since grasses and birches and pines don’t need to wear flashy hues to have the wind disperse the pollen the produce. No need for flower fragrance, since the wind doesn’t need to be lured to flowers like moths to a nocturnal species. And wind pollination is so wasteful! Look at how many male white pine cones fall to the ground in the evolutionary effort to pollinate the receptive female cones. (This is my dock on Lake Muskoka north of Toronto, by the way).
No, insect pollination was a giant step forward, beginning with plants that looked vaguely like modern magnolias, likely fertilized by beetles. (I couldn’t find any beetles so substituted honey bees on Magnolia grandiflora, below).
Bees evolved initially from wasps. The earliest honey bee ancestors emerged in Asia roughly 120 million years ago. Bumble bees arrived on the scene between 30 and 40 million years ago. Modern honey bees and bumble bees, like those below on globe thistle, are the descendants of an ancient lineage of insect pollinators
As gardeners, we sometimes forget that there was a time when the natural world did not revolve around us. It got along just fine without Homo sapiens. In fact, there are quite a few people who think earth fared much better without humans, but then consciousness and evolution have given us the ability to perceive our achievements and actions with feelings of pride tempered by a growing sense of guilt. Climate change, conservation, overpopulation – they are all serious issues today, but that’s not what I’m focusing on here. Instead, I’d like to write a little love letter to the workers in earth’s most essential essential service: pollinators. Goodness knows I’ve spent enough time courting them over the past three decades and more. Here’s one of my Toronto Sun columns from 1997.
And here’s a story I proposed and wrote on urban beekeeping for the now-shuttered Organic Gardening magazine in 2012.
Researching nectar- or pollen-rich flowers for beekeepers for that story and finding very little in current literature launched a multi-year focus on honey bees and their favourite plants. Out of it came a quite spectacular poster……
….. and the occasional magazine cover.
In time, I amassed such a large inventory of honey bee imagery (like the forget-me-not, below) that I decided to create an online photo library devoted just to them. If you’d like to have a browse, it is located here.
My beekeeping pal Janet Wilson out in British Columbia drove me to her hives in a blackberry thicket on a farm, and let me photograph her checking on the hives.
When I was on safari at Kicheche Camp in Laikipia, Kenya in 2016, I loved spending time with the camp’s beekeeper William Wanyika, and learning how he does his work.
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At Toronto Botanical Garden, I photographed the beehives and the student beekeepers….
….. and later that year I returned to photograph the honey harvest.
I enjoyed paying attention to nectar guides, the markings that plants have evolved to show pollinators exactly where to look for nectar and pollen. The European horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum), below, is an excellent example. Flowers with fresh nectar exhibit a yellow blotch; as the markings darken from orange to red, the bee knows that the flowers are old and no longer yielding nectar.
But as much as I appreciate the work that honey bees do, I have always understood that in North America, European honey bees (Apis mellifera) are very much domestic agricultural animals. They may be feral in places warm enough for them to overwinter, but in much of the continent they must be “kept”. Wild bees, or native bees, on the other hand, have co-evolved with our North American flora. Many of them are adaptable to a number of different plant species; they’re called “generalists”. Here is a montage I made of native North American bees and butterflies on native North American plants.
Other bees are “specialists”, requiring the nectar or pollen from one, or just a few, types of plants. The North American squash bee (Peponapis pruinosa) is one of those, spending its short life acquiring food from the flowers of native squash plants, like the one below.
On vacation in Arizona, I was interested in the specialist native Diadasia australis bees who forage solely on opuntia cacti, like this Engelmann’s prickly-pear (Opuntia engelmanii).
At home, I have come to know my local native vernal or spring bees, like the polyester bee (Colletes inaequalis), shown below on early-flowering willow (Salix).
But I’ve been bemused in the past few weeks by native bees paying no attention whatsoever to my native plants and instead finding their sources of carbohydrates and protein in the nectar and pollen of non-native plants, such as the bicoloured sweat bee Agapostemon virescens working the wine-red flowers of European knautia (Knautia macedonica) in my garden, below….
… and a plethora of native pollinators, including the Eastern tiger swallowtail, avidly foraging on my neighbour’s Chinese beauty bush, Kolkwitzia amabilis, below.
But some plants don’t need pollinators. While I was videotaping the June plants above, the birds were squabbling noisily over the first ripening serviceberries (Amelanchier sp.) nearby. (I photographed the one below on the High Line one June.) I was curious that in all my years observing my serviceberries and their clouds of tiny blossoms, I haven’t seen any pollinators attending the plants. How could I have such an abundance of early summer fruit? Scientists have shown that several species of Amelanchier have evolved “apomixis”, bypassing sexual reproduction, meiosis and cell division entirely – thus no need for insect fertilization. In apomicts, the ovum in the flower divides parthenogenically.
I adore bumble bees (Bombus species), and I’ve spent years trying to identify the ones I see in my gardens and even the species I encounter during my travels. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that I have a large photo inventory of bumble bees online. Below is my favourite of all, the brown-belted bumble bee (Bombus griseocollis). Isn’t that the perfect name?
And I do have a soft spot for Toronto’s (un)official bee mascot, the bicoloured agapostemon (A. virescens), shown here foraging on purple coneflower in my garden.
Though many people dislike them for their wood-boring trait, particularly if it happens to their pergolas or sundecks, I love watching carpenter bees (Xylocopa virginica) using that strong tongue to bore into the corollas of certain flowers, like the Nicotiana mutabilis, below. Biologists call that “nectar robbery”, i.e. the bee is effectively bypassing the evolutionary pact between bee and pollinator to gain the reward without transferring pollen from one flower to another.
At the Toronto Botanical Garden, where I’ve contributed my photography as seasonal galleries, I spent a few seasons tracking pollinators on the plants, and made a musical video to celebrate them.
My city garden in Toronto was designed as a pollinator garden, too. It contains both native and non-native plants. I’ve shown this video a few times in my blog, but here it is again throughout four seasons.
And at my cottage on Lake Muskoka, I look upon almost every plant in my meadows, garden beds and planters as a chance to invite bumble bees, solitary bees and hummingbirds to sup on the mostly native plants I provide for them. (Please note that the vernonia should be V. noveboracensis).
So to celebrate National Pollinator Week, I would like to encourage all of you to think about your relationship as gardeners to the natural world. Should your garden really be all about you and what you like? Or do you agree with me that we should also consider that….
It was with great joy that I stepped into Chicago’s Lurie Garden last August. It didn’t matter that my companions numbered in the hundreds (garden communicators from all over North America at the annual Gardencomm symposium) – as long as they didn’t get in my shot! And it was the perfect time to visit, with the Lurie evoking in a romantic, chaotic way the wildflower-spangled prairie that once stretched across sixty one percent of Illinois (21.6 million acres), before the arrival in the 1830s of homesteaders and the John Deere tractor that broke up the tallgrass sod to plant beans and barley. No, the Lurie Garden is not a prairie recreation, and it’s certainly not ‘country’, given that it occupies five leafy acres of 24.5-acre Millennium Park in the heart of downtown, framed by some of the tallest skyscrapers in North America.
But when you see the artful tumble of some of the tallgrass prairie’s iconic natives, such as spiky rattlesnake master (Eryngium yuccifolium)….
…. and towering yellow compass plant (Silphium laciniatum), its common name alluding to the belief of pioneers that its leaves always pointed north and south,…..
…… mixed with other perennials and lush ornamental grasses in the Meadow section of the garden nearest Monroe Street, it certainly feels like walking into an August prairie in the middle of the city.
It was spring 1914 when poet Carl Sandburg wrote his ode to Chicago. Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders
And it was the last line of that first verse and the nickname it lent Chicago – City of Big Shoulders – that landscape architects Gustafson Guthrie Nichol lit on in the late 1990s when they conceptualized the space that would become the Lurie Garden. Those “big shoulders” became the 15-foot high shoulder hedge, an L-shaped living wall separating the garden from the busy footpath to the Frank Gehry-designed Jay Pritzker Music Pavilion (see the steel roof angles) and Great Lawn in the space beyond.
Comprised of five cultivars of arborvitae (Thuja occidentalis) and hedge-friendly hornbeam (Carpinus betulus ‘Fastigiata’) and European beech (Fagus sylvatica), the shoulder hedge also echoes those other big shoulders of the towering skyscrapers behind Millennium Park. By the way, that’s a cultivar of white-flowered prairie native Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum) in the foreground with a purple cloud of sea lavender (Limonium latifolium) nearby.
For Dutch superstar designer Piet Oudolf, the Lurie plant design was his first commission in the U.S. and his first big public garden, though later he would design the plantings for the High Line in New York (which I blogged about in June 2014), our own entry border at the Toronto Botanical Garden (which I blogged about in March 2017 including the intricate design nuts-and-bolts) and the Delaware Botanic Gardens at Pepper Creek (opening this September), among others. When he became the perennial plant designer of the winning Lurie design team under Seattle-based landscape architects Gustafson Guthrie Nichol Ltd. (GGN) at the turn of the millennium and had his plant list prepared, he travelled to Chicago to meet with nurseryman Roy Diblik, owner of Northwind Perennial Farm in nearby Burlington, Wisconsin. Roy had already read Gardening with Grasses, the book Piet co-authored with Michael King in 1998, one of many design books he has written; it astonished him. As he said in a 2016 interview on The Native Plant Podcast, “It was the first book I’ve ever seen about grasses intermingled with other plants. This book showed communities, how to interplant, playfulness. It was wonderful.”
Roy Diblik, below left, recalls their first meeting in the biographical Oudolf Hummelo – A Journey Through a Plantsman’s Life (2015 ) by Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury: “I remember how he rolled out a copy of a plan for the Lurie Garden on a workbench. I could see immediately that there had never been anything like this before in the Midwest. We went through the plants, what would work, and not work. He got me involved in producing the plants – 28,000 plants, with no substitutes. We subcontracted the growing of the easier plants and I did the more difficult ones myself.” For his part, Piet had never seen a prairie before and Roy loved the prairie and its plants deeply, so he took his Dutch visitor to visit the Schulenberg Prairie at the Morton Arboretum, a very moving experience for Piet. So it was natural that they became more than design collaborators; they became close friends. The professional collaboration continues today, since every two years the Lurie invites them and the landscape architects to visit the garden, inspect the plants and assess how they’re performing……
Roy Diblik, left, and Piet Oudolf, right. Photo courtesy of Laura Ekasetya
…… in a consultation that includes Director/Head Horticulturist Laura Ekasetya, below, part of the formidable all-woman team at the Lurie.
To place the Lurie in context, you can see below in this amazing July image by Devon Loerop Media the Seam, the Light Plate and Dark Plate and beyond the garden, people sitting on the Great Lawn enjoying a performance at the Pritzker Pavilion under the airy overhead trellis containing the sound system.
Devon Loerop Media courtesy of Lurie Garden
Looking the other way in another image by Devon Loerop Media, you see Renzo Piano’s beautiful Modern Wing of the Chicago Art Institute, whose windows look directly onto the undulating garden, its sloping, prairie-like meadow and gardens and trees like some ever-changing work of modern art.
Devon Loerop Media courtesy of Lurie Garden
On a hot day last August, just beyond the bee-buzzy cloud of white calamint (Calamintha nepeta), there were young visitors cooling their feet in the water course, just out of view, that bisects the Lurie as part of the “Seam”, GGN’s evocative separation of the garden into the Light and Dark Plates. The Light Plate, left, is the sunny prairie-like side; the Dark Plate features a more garden-inspired design with many plants growing in dappled shade under black locust trees (Robinia pseudoacacia). In between on the Dark Plate side is an area called the Transition Zone, with tall plants.
The water course is part of stepped pools underlying the broad ipe wood walkway that carries visitors through the garden. But what exactly did the landscape architects intend to evoke with the Seam? Most of the waders would not understand that this is a sophisticated means of connecting the Lurie with the underlying landscape.
Not the immense parking garage immediately below – since Millennium Park is a massive green roof, the largest in the world. Not the ghost of the old Illinois Central Railway tracks below. Rather, it evokes the swampy marshland in the delta of the Chicago River that once led into Lake Michigan just a few blocks away, atop which young Chicago grew in the early 19th century. By 1900, the river would be reversed to flow ultimately into the Mississippi River, but it was a muddy beginning for the young city that necessitated a gigantic engineering project and wooden walkways to ensure that the big-shouldered city and its citizens did not sink into the mire. That’s the history conjured up by The Seam.
The Raising of Chicago was undertaken after outbreaks of cholera in 1854 and ’59 killed more than two thousand people. It involved the use of jackscrews to lift entire streets of buildings six feet above ground. Below is an artist’s 1856 rendering of the plan to raise Lake Street. Connecting historic events like this with a contemporary landscape like the Lurie is perhaps the finest interpretation of capturing a ‘sense of place’. Read more about Gustafson Guthrie Nichol’s design rationale for the Light and Dark Plates and the Seam here.
Image – Chicago Historic Society – Edward Mendel
The plants for the wildish front section of the Lurie may evoke the prairie, but Piet prefers to call this the Meadow. As Noel Kingsburgy wrote in Oudolf Hummelo: “At the time Piet created the Lurie Garden, it represented a new level of complexity and sophistication in his design. It drew on a number of elements that had proved successful elsewhere, but it also contained several innovations. The bulk of the planting is formed of like plants clumped together, although there is a small area of innovative intermingled planting at the southern end, known as The Meadow, where species are mixed in a truly naturalistic fashion. Its matrix of ornamental grasses including the native Sporobolus heterolepis, is broken at intervals by a number of perennial species that rise up above the grasses….” The matrix system would inspire Piet a few years later in his design for the High Line. Many of the plants in the Meadow are native prairie plants, but not all. The lovely white coneflower below is Echinacea ‘Virgin’, one of Piet Oudolf’s own introductions.
Grasses are chosen for their hardiness, beauty and architectural durability, regardless of whether they’re native species, non-natives or selected cultivars. Here is the Meadow’s matrix grass, the lovely tallgrass native prairie dropseed (Sporobolus heterolepis).
Award-winning ‘Blonde Ambition’ blue grama (Bouteloua gracilis), below, has striking pennant-like flowers and grassy, blue-gray foliage.
Autumn moor grass (Sesleria autumnalis), on the other hand, is a European grass that Piet knew well from previous designs. In June, it’s the soft, chartreuse framework for the Lurie’s spectacular purple-blue “salvia river”, and in summer, it enhances purple coneflowers and cloudlike, white-flowered prairie spurge (Euphorbia corollata).
Here is autumn moor grass nestling the tallgrass prairie forb wild petunia (Ruellia humilis).
Grasses also frame another typical prairie denizen, nodding onion (Allium cernuum).
‘Karl Foerster’ feather reed grass (Calamagrostis x acutiflora) may be the most commonly-seen ornamental grass in North America now, but it creates the perfect vertical accent below. It is named for the renowned Germany nurseryman and plant breeder Karl Foerster (1874-1970) who in turn was the teacher of Piet’s own friend, the late nurseryman and plant breeder Ernst Pagels (1913-2007). Pagels introduced many plants we see in Oudolf gardens, including Salvia nemorosa ‘Amethyst’ ‘Blauhügel’ and other sages; Phlomis tuberosa ‘Amazone’; Veronicastrum virginicum ‘Diane; Astilbe chinensis var. taquetii ‘Purpurlanze’; and, in honour of Piet, award-winning Stachys officinalis ‘Hummelo’.
One of the paradoxes of the surge in popularity of American native plants and their selections is that much of the work was done in Germany and Holland. ‘Shenandoah’ switch grass (Panicum virgatum), below, with its rich red foliage, was selected by another of Piet’s friends, German plantsman Hans Simon. Here it is with the ferny foliage of Arkansas bluestar (Amsonia hubrichtii) and Agastache ‘Blue Fortune’, a superb hybrid of North American anise hyssop (Agastache foeniculum) and Korean Agastache rugosa, bred and selected by Gert Fortgens at Rotterdam’s Arboretum Trompenberg.
The ‘Blue Fortune’ anise hyssop was attracting hordes of monarch butterflies the day I was there, and the photographers in the crowd were vying for the perfect shot.
Pennisetum alopecuroides ‘Cassian’ is an excellent, hardy fountain grass named for Piet’s friend, Cassian Schmidt, director of the renowned German garden Hermannshof.
A signature plant in Piet’s gardens is airy sea lavender (Limonium latifolium), seen here with a tiny sprig of prairie spurge (Euphorbia corollata).
Nearby was a drift of early-blooming pale purple coneflower (Echinacea pallida), their pink flowers now bronzed with age. Seedheads and senescing plants, of course, are a vital part of the four-season design that Piet has promoted in his gardens, adding structure to plantings and an evocative, almost metaphorically human sense of “a life well lived” . As he told a New York Times writer more than a decade ago: “You accept death. You don’t take the plants out, because they still look good. And brown is also a color.”
The seedheads of Allium lusitanicum ‘Summer Beauty’, a Roy Diblik plant introduction, still looked wonderful, especially framing Echinacea ‘Pixie Meadowbrite’.
Wild quinine (Parthenium integrifolium) is a tallgrass prairie perennial whose flowerheads were slowly turning tawny.
Under the trees in the Dark Plate, the brown seedheads of Phlomis tuberosa ‘Amazone’ added a strong note of verticality.
Touring visitors through the Lurie, as Laura Ekasetya was doing here, often means explaining Piet’s philosophy, since people don’t always appreciate the beauty of plants once the flowers fade. Birds do, of course, and seeds of many perennials offer nourishment to songbirds long after summer ends.
And even without their purple flowers, the tall spikes of prairie blazing star (Liatris pycnostachya) are simply spectacular, and will be prominent well into winter.
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But the liatris season is long, and the knobby flowers of rough blazing star (Liatris aspera) were just opening……
….. bringing native insects to nectar. This is the two-spotted longhorn bee.
The Lurie attracts a diverse roster of insects to forage on the flowers. Native skullcap (Scutellaria incana) was being visited by a lumbering carpenter bee (Xylocopa virginica), while…..
….. tall ‘Gateway’ Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium maculatum) was entertaining monarchs, as was….
….. the ‘Diane’ Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum).
In fact, monarch butterflies were even mating on the common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) that had been left in a few spots in the garden to ensure enough food for the monarch’s larval caterpillars.
Although I’m a prairie girl at heart, I finally dragged myself away from the sunny Light Plate into the shade-dappled Dark Plate. Here, the planting is less meadow-like and more refined, much as you would find in garden borders.
And I loved the chickadees that were flitting through the trees. Here’s a little taste….
The perennials in this section appreciate richer soil and a little more moisture, too. Below is Heuchera villosa ‘Autumn Bride’ with Aruncus ‘Horatio’ having formed seedheads behind. Pink Japanese anemones are at the rear.
I could smell the perfume of the summer phlox (Phlox paniculata) even before I arrived at the spot where it was flowering. In every possible shade of pink, it was paired perfectly with Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium spp.).
Great blue lobelia (Lobelia siphilitica) made a good companion to the phlox. Summer phlox is one of those native North American perennials that enjoyed early cosmopolitan success in the 18th century when plants were collected in the “new world” and shipped to Europe. It was John Bartram who found it growing near Pennsylvania’s Brandywine River in 1732, and sent it to England, where it soon found its way into estate borders and cottage gardens throughout Europe. Though it is occasionally susceptible to disease (and voracious groundhogs in my own Toronto garden, where I haven’t seen a bloom in years), it is such a lovely mid-late summer perennial and romantically ebullient and perfumed.
In fact, it was in this part of the garden where Piet Oudolf and Roy Diblik noticed a phlox, below, that had seeded from the original planting of a named variety. It was clear pink and exhibited excellent characteristics. After watching it for a few years, they had it dug up in 2016 and taken to Brent Horvath of Instrinsic Perennial Gardens (IPG) in nearby Hebron, one of the midwest’s finest wholesale perennial growers. In honour of the Lurie’s Director and Head Horticulturist, Piet named it ‘Sweet Laura.’ And as Laura Ekasetya says, “He is including this plant in the new edition of (his book) Dream Plants for the Natural Garden.” IPG propagated cuttings in 2017 and 2018 and it is now sold locally and at the Lurie Garden’s May plant sale.
Courtesy Intrinsic Perennial Garden
As I was reluctantly leaving the garden to return to the symposium at the over-air-conditioned convention centre, I saw a honey bee landing on Geranium soboliferum, Japanese cranebill, below. It cheered me up as I was planning to return on my own later that day to meet someone special at the Lurie.
IT WAS 2011 WHEN I proposed a story on urban beekeeping to Organic Gardening magazine, which has sadly since folded. The story featured three expert beekeepers and their shared wisdom about the ancient art and science of beekeeping. One was Michael Thompson, beekeeper for the hives on the rooftop of Chicago City Hall and also the Lurie Garden. But beekeeping (read this Edible Chicago article on Michael and his history with honey bees) and being co-founder and director of the Chicago Honey Co-op is just one of Michael’s journeys in life; he also works with urban agriculture (including an urban orchard project), especially in parts of the city where organically-grown vegetables and neighbourhood involvement are a departure from the norm. When I was making my plans to travel to Chicago, I contacted Michael to ask if there was a chance we could meet in person. We agreed on a time and I made my way back to the Lurie that afternoon. After arriving on his bike in sweltering temperatures, Michael donned his veil and began inspecting the hives.
Brood and honey looked good for August, a product of the Lurie’s abundance of nectar- and pollen-rich plants (not to mention urban street trees throughout Grant Park and downtown).
Among the plants I’d noticed earlier with honey bees were Japanese anemones (pollen only, which bumble bees also collect)….
…. Knautia macedonica, which yields magenta-pink pollen…..
…. Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum ‘Diane’), which is a superb plant for native pollinators too….
…. calamint (Nepeta calamintha), which honey bees adore…..
…. and mountain mint (Pycnanthemum muticum), which attracts honey bees and other pollinators in droves.
But apart from seeing the beehive inspection, I wanted to meet Michael in the flesh here at the Lurie, to cement one more personal connection in this wonderful world of flora that we all cherish.
And after receiving my gift of Chicago Co-op honey….
…I went back into the Lurie, now comparatively empty of people. And I thought of the friends I was with on this symposium, people I’ve come to know in the thirty years I’ve been immersed in gardens, like Helen Battersby, who co-produces with her sister an award-winning blog called Toronto Gardens…..
….. and Theresa Forte, who writes a column for the St. Catharine’s Standard (and is a proud grandmother like me). Behind her is Portlander Kate Bryant, who generously drove me around her fair city visiting gardens last year, not long after our Lurie visit.
I’d shared a Lurie stone wall at lunch with horticulturist Anne Marie Van Nest, a longtime friend who gardens at Niagara Parks and Quebec’s Larry Hodgson, who writes, photographs and leads tours en Français to gardens throughout the world.
I thought of the people who grow all the plants and tend all the gardens, like Intrinsic’s Brent Horvath and his partner, Chicago Botanic Garden’s Lisa Hilgenberg, who manages the edible gardens there. I would meet them at the symposium dinner later that week.
And I thought of people directly related to this very garden’s design ethos, and a fun dinner in 2016 hosted by the New Perennialist himself, Tony Spencer, standing left, with me, plantsman David Leeman, special guest Roy Diblik and nurseryman Jeff Mason of Mason House Gardens. Tony also began the Facebook group Dutch Dreams, and has become a good friend of Piet Oudolf over the years.
Those are just a few of the many hundreds of people I’ve met and become friends with in three decades. As I walked through the Meadow again, looking up at the compass plants giving the nearby skyscrapers a run for their money,……
….. I thought about spring 1999, when I’d visited Hummelo and photographed Piet Oudolf on the eve of the new millennium. He would begin the Lurie design process just a year or so later. And of this garden, about which he said in a Tom Rossiter video recently, “The Lurie Garden created a moment in my life where I stepped over a threshold and came into another idea of design. For sure it has affected my work. And it has done a lot of good in my personal experience and it’s done a lot of good in my designs, in particular to touch people’s emotions.”
If there are big shoulders in cities, there are big shouldered people in the world of gardening and design as well. We stand on their shoulders and learn from them, and they sometimes learn from us. It is a rarified world rendered infinitely interesting by the changing of the seasons and by the way it touches our emotions. And we are all so very fortunate to live (and work) here.
Happy 15th anniversary, Lurie Gardens and Millennium Park.
*********
Please leave a comment. I’d love to know what you think of the Lurie, too!
If you’ve read my first and second blogs on our safari at Kicheche Laikipia, in Kenya, you’ll know that it is now late March 2016, on the cusp of the rainy season. We’re the last guests in this intimate 6-tent camp near Nanyuki, which will close for the season in just two days. This morning we’ve slept well and are ready for the 5:30 am knock at the tent door and the tray of coffee, hot chocolate and biscuits. Within 40 minutes of waking, we’re with our guide Albert Chesoli out on the savannah, awaiting the sunrise. As yesterday, Mount Kenya is clearly visible on the horizon; later in the day, it is almost always shrouded by cloud.
Slowly, the sky turns pink….
…. and finally, the sun rises. Though we don’t have the lovely giraffe silhouettes we saw yesterday, there’s always something interesting on the horizon at Ol Pejeta Conservancy, like these zebras grazing amongst acacia trees in the distance.
It isn’t long after sunrise when we’re rewarded with what is our best sighting in all of our safari excursions. We spot two cheetah brothers (Acinonyx jubatus), the remaining pair of three brothers born six years earlier. They are amazingly synchronized in their behaviour, heads turning at the same time….
….lying down at the same time, then meandering off through the grasses together to sit, one marking a tree to establish territory.
Albert positions our van as close to them as possible, then turns the engine off. For the next half-hour or so, we are utterly absorbed watching them in this quiet corner of Ol Pejeta. Like the cats they are, one sharpens his claws on a dead tree trunk….
…while his brother watches for prey, preferably an antelope or gazelle straying from the pack.
What beautiful markings on their faces!
Soon they begin to relax – a snooze, perhaps, in their future.
The cheetah brothers are so transfixing, I’ve been switching between still photos and video. Because of weight restrictions on the small planes, I only brought my ‘small’ camera, the Canon PowerShot SX50HS with its powerful 50x zoom lens (now replaced by the Canon SX60HS with 65x optical zoom), but it’s perfect for recording these two stunning animals interacting playfully and lovingly with each other like the bonded 6-year olds they are.
When it appears that lolling around wrestling and grooming each other, rather than hunting, is on their agenda, we turn on the engine and head back out on the savannah…..
…. but the other animal sightings this morning are somewhat anti-climatic after our cheetah experience. We decide to stop for our picnic breakfast, and Albert finds us a clearing near a spring-fed stream and prepares to sets the table.
This morning’s menu features Scotch eggs, a delicious combination of spicy sausage and boiled eggs, with crepes and mango chutney.
As I sip my coffee, I notice a little glimmer of bright-red in the grasses. It’s the tiny flower of an indigenous hibiscus, H. aponeurus. In my later reading, I discover this little flower was used by the Maasai in witchcraft!
Besides the acacias, the other predominant shrub on the savannah is Euclea divinorum, which is widespread on the African continent.
The morning has warmed up considerably and many of the animals seem to be hiding from the heat. So we drive back to camp – pronounced Kee-cheh-chay – to put our feet up for a while before lunch.
After lunch, I read on our tent porch and watch a cape buffalo at the water hole. But when I approach with my camera, he galumphs off through the mud…..
….. so I photograph the cattle egrets on a dead tree instead.
In mid-afternoon, I’ve arranged to meet William Wanyika, who not only works in the Kicheche camp administration but is the resident beekeeper, something he’s been doing for most of his life. (Photographing honey bees is one of my great passions.)
William shows me the flowers of the abundant euclea, which are providing most of the nectar flow for the bees at the moment….
…and I ask him to talk a bit about his beekeeping while I videotape him. What a treat to have this opportunity to learn about something I’ve chronicled at home. Here’s my video – sorry about the buffeting wind.
So super active viagra to maintain the correct functional mode of your gadgets, you may require the help of experts. A few sites do not obtain medicines in a legal manner from purchase cheap cialis providers who carry the necessary accreditation. Treatments: Treatment depends on the cause of infertility for any levitra in india given couple. This herb works to improve the ability of men to have additional problems in getting their prescriptions reimbursed by their insurance companies for drugs like viagra uk without prescription. Soon it’s time to set out on our 4 pm game drive, our final safari outing. Albert decides to head over to the far side of Ol Pejeta Conservancy, quite a long drive. En route, we spot two black-chested snake eagles (Circaetus pectoralis) in a tree.
As we get closer to the Sweetwaters Chimp Sanctuary where the majority of lodges and hotels are, we find lots of crowded safari vehicles on the road; one driver pulls close to tell Albert about a lion sighting nearby On our way to find it, we come upon a bull elephant (Loxodonta africana) drinking at a pond. It’s clear by his partially-unsheathed penis that he has also recently been (or is about to be) urinating. From his vantage point, Albert doesn’t think he’s in musth, but with my telephoto lens I can capture him at a safe distance and later see that there are secretions from the temporal glands at the side of his head which seem to indicate that he is. If so, his urine contains much higher levels of testosterone than usual, and dribbling it around signals his musth status to other males.
Unlike the female elephants that congregate in matriarchal communities with grandmothers, daughters, aunts, female cousins and the youngest male and female calves living together, young male elephants are kicked out when they reach their adolescent years (about 14) and will live in “bachelor clubs” with other males and a dominant bull male, from whom they learn behaviour. When females are in oestrus, musth males can detect it from far away.
Once the elephant saunters off, we go in search of the lions, finding them resting in the trees near the road, likely waiting for darkness before going hunting. So we drive on.
Next we find a pair of grey-crowned cranes (Balearica regulorum) doing their courtship dance….
….and a southern white rhinoceros drinking at one of Ol Pejeta’s water troughs….
….and some newborn zebras, below. The common (Burchell’s) zebras (Equus burchellii) usually give birth during the rainy season in East Africa. The mare will separate from the herd before delivering in order to protect the vulnerable foal.
Albert points out that zebras have evolved long enough legs for a newborn that when standing behind their mothers (and combined with the visually confusing stripes), lions cannot easily detect them.
As we drive on, we see a group of safari vans parked along the road, all the cameras trained on a lioness She yawns…..
….then saunters off, and we decide we’re a little tired, too. Time to head back for a drink – the traditional safari ‘sundowner’ – before dinner.
Tomorrow, we fly home and this is our final sighting at Kicheche Laikipia and Ol Pejeta Conservancy. But I’ve collected video of a lot of the animals we’ve seen over the past few days, and put it together so I can enjoy the feel of the savannah here any time I want. I hope you enjoy watching it, too..
On our last morning, we sleep in a little (no safari drive today) and have breakfast in the main tent before packing for home.
We say our goodbyes to Andy & Sonja Webb, and Albert drives us into the little airport at Nanyuki and watches until we’re safely up in the air. These flights are often milk runs, and the sleepy passengers settle in as we head to Wilson Airport outside Nairobi via a stop at Lewa Downs, where we began our Kenyan adventure one week before.
As we fly over Laikipia, I gaze down at the landscape below us. The patchwork farm crops…..
….the wheat fields…..
…and the great forests and acacia-dotted plains of the conservancies and parks where Kenya’s magnificent animals roam free.
It is a land like no other, and one we’re so fortunate to have experienced.
Postscript: Given the vagaries of airline schedules, a total of 41 hours will elapse between awakening at Kicheche Laikipia and going to bed In Toronto. To pass some of the hours before our Nairobi-London leg, we’ve booked a day room at Macushla House on Nairobi’s outskirts, where we stayed for 2 nights more than a week ago on our arrival in Kenya from London.
We can sit and read in an easy chair….
…while enjoying the unique furnishings, like this cool owl support post….
Or sip a gin-and-tonic at an outdoor table with lunch…
…after a swim in the pool.
Eventually, it’s time to brave Nairobi’s traffic to Jomo Kenyatta airport to begin the flights home to Canada. As always, East Africa has bewitched us, its people have enchanted us, and its majestic animals have served as powerful reminders that there are still beautiful places in the world where ‘wild’ is more than just a word, it’s a covenant with nature.
The first week of September seems to be its very own kind of mellow. Everything about it: lazy cicadas droning; bees buzzing, seeking the last nectar of the season; kids heading back to school, all polished and excited; that tang of autumn in the air, even as Indian summer thunderstorms threaten the quiet morning. And that’s just today. In my slightly messy front garden not far from downtown Toronto, the September-blooming perennials are at their peak.
The mini-hedge of ‘Autumn Joy’ sedum (Hylotelephium telephium ‘Herbstfreude’) is opening its thousands of tiny pink flowers, attracting many types of nectar-seeking bees, flies and butterflies before turning that lovely russet-red that carries it into autumn.
There is a nicely-behaved goldenrod, Solidago sphacelata ‘Golden Fleece’ that weaves its way gracefully through other flowers. (And some uninvited cousins that will have to be ejected.)
I love the magenta flower spikes of obedient plant (Physostegia virginiana), In richer, moister soil, it might spread aggressively and the flower stems might grow tall and flop. But in this garden, lack of extra irrigation keeps it at a reasonable height and its spread is welcome.
The bees love it, too, especially carpenter bees whose strong tongues can pierce the corolla to access or “rob” the sweet nectar. Later, honey bees and bumble bees will use these pre-drilled holes to acquire their own nectar. That is why Kamagra is called generic drug as the both are the online cialis same genre and group. Tubal/peritoneal elements like Endometriosis, Pelvic adhesion or inflammatory disease like http://davidfraymusic.com/events/belgrade-serbia/ cialis generika PID (brought on by Chlamydia), Tubal occlusion/dysfunction play the function of blockages leave couple eying for a surrogate mom is needed. Apart from that, the couple’s doubts about the use of viagra online cheapest cleared. 6.Price Is Just Right – price is the factor that brings people to the online pharmacies and cialis and you would enjoy buying medication the same way you enjoy shopping any other commodity. Hence before the consumption, please consult to your doctor and any elderly one who intake this pills and you have prior known discount cialis prices the cautions and side effects of this medication.
And it looks beautiful with the ‘Golden Fleece’ goldenrod as well.
The biggest perennial — and most problematic to me, for its eager spreading ways — is Helianthus ‘Lemon Queen’, shown here against the house behind a big drift of Rudbeckia fulgida ‘Goldsturm’, which has been generously blooming for several weeks. This robust, naturally-occurring hybrid of Helianthus pauciflorus var. subrhomboideus and Jerusalem artichoke, Helianthus tuberosus,is a wonderful plant for naturalistic gardens, provided you plan ahead for placement. At 6-feet (2m) plus, it needs to be back of border, not mid-prairie muscling out everything around it.
But the bees are awfully fond of it, too. So I may move it next spring — or I may not…..
I spent 3+ very hot, sunny hours on the High Line this week, along with several thousand other New Yorkers and visitors. In fact there were so many people walking the city’s unique linear park between 14th and 30th Streets, that when I stopped to photograph a fetching plant or a beautiful scene, I felt like a boulder in a rushing river. But despite the terrible light conditions, I did stop every now and again to photograph Piet Oudolf’s beautiful plants. Because who could resist these lovely and unusual partners: copper iris (Iris fulva) and twisted-leafed garlic (A. obliquum). Oh, and that pointy building in the background isn’t too shabby either!
The honey bees just loved the copper iris. Normally an ornithophilous (bird-pollinated) plant in its native habitat in the central-south U.S., moisture-loving Iris fulva was nevertheless a great hit with the honey bees, which climbed right into the style arm to nectar.
And all kinds of bees were visiting the twisted-leafed garlic (Allium obliquum), which made a pretty neighbour to a light-pink form of Knautia macedonica, bottom right.
White wild indigo (Baptisia alba) and creamy-white oxtail lily (Eremurus himalaicus )made charming partners, too.
I love watching bees nectar on foxtail lilies – such a lot of tiny flowers to explore in this beautiful foraging ground!
One of the more statuesque alliums is the white Allium nigrum, here with Bradbury’s eastern beebalm (Monarda bradburiana), a low-growing native of the central-south U.S.
Like all alliums, A. nigrum is a great bee lure.
Amsonia ‘Blue Ice’ nestled its compact, beautiful self into the crevices abutting the High Line’s popular walkways. He was granted a license to practice acupuncture in Russia in 1978, and from that time he combined conventional Western medical treatment with free viagra no prescription herbs, acupuncture, and other manual therapies may be helpful in reducing pain and providing temporary relief of symptoms. According to FDA laws, dietary supplements are available in the market which claims to help you manage your viagra for women australia sexual life in a better way. Taking the medicine with proper care may avail you the benefits of getting into the love-game even every day. loved that on line levitra Therefore cheapest viagra pills changing the diet pattern may be extremely helpful when it comes to remaining erect.
While Lonicera sempervirens ‘Major Wheeler’ flung itself luxuriantly across its high, mesh trellis a stone’s throw from Frank Gehry’s bold building.
Staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina) was in full, glorious flower, the female inflorescences held separate from the male ones.
And the honey bees were making sure those flowers would turn into fuzzy red fruits later.
Clusters of ripe Allegheny serviceberries (Amelanchier laevis) dangled like rubies over the street below.
And they were being eaten by hungry birds that knew just which berries would be the sweetest.
Ensuring there would be red berries, a honey bee patiently nectared from the tiny flowers of the ‘Red Sprite’ winterberry (Ilex verticillata), below. In fact, the entire High Line was buzzing with bees and alive with bird song – the sign of a well-designed, holistic garden with intrinsic value not just for humans, but for the small creatures that visit it for food and shelter. Ready to join me for Part 2 of the High Line in June?
