Tag Archives: meadow

Miss Rumphius and the Lupines

Posted on by
16

I have a particular fondness for the award-winning book Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney (Viking, 1982).  First, it celebrates grandparents. Second, it’s a story about enchanting lupines. Third, it honours the essential gardening impulse to “make the world more beautiful”. If you’d like a little 4-minute bedtime story, have a listen to me reading it to my granddaughter Emma.

Who doesn’t love lupines? Or lupins, if you like. I’ve always added the “e” to mine, given that’s how the North American clan are usually spelled. The British tend to refer to them as lupins.  In fact, most of the colourful garden lupines are the offspring of those developed from 1911-1942 by the British horticulturist George Russell (1857-1951). . He planted many lupine species together in his two allotments, including the blue-purple North American species Lupinus polyphyllus – which had been brought back to Britain from the Pacific Northwest  by explorer David Douglas in the 1820s – along with yellow bush lupine (L. arboreus), sulphur lupine (L. sulphureus) and others. As for the crosses, he always claimed he let the bees do the breeding work for him, but he selected the best colour combinations, gave them names and saved the seed to sell. There’s a good story on George Russell and his lupine breeding here.  In Toronto, I get my June fix of multi-colored Russell Hybrids at the spectacular four-square potager garden behind the Spadina House Museum where they grow with lots of old-fashioned flowers.

In June in Toronto, Spadina’s garden is my favourite place to photograph.

The gardeners there keep the lupines coming back every year, with colours ranging from the deepest purple…..

….. to bubblegum-pink, with many bicolors that feature white, yellow and crimson markings.

They’re arrayed around Spadina’s gardens and bloom near the grape vines with sweet rocket (Hesperis matronalis)….

…. and the beautiful bearded irises….

…. and blowsy peonies…..

…. and old-fashioned ragged robin (Lychnis flos-cuculi)…..

…. and yellow loosestrife (Lysimachia punctata).

As the lupine season is winding down, the catmints (Nepeta sp.) make pretty partners.

Bumble bees have the long, strong proboscises necessary to probe through the lower keel to get at the pollen. I’ve done a lot of my bumble bee photography at Spadina House.

The Russell Hybrids have given rise to many of the modern lupines, like the Gallery Series in red….

….. and white.

I’ve been photographing lupines for a long time. The photo workshop I took with Freeman Patterson at his New Brunswick Nature Conservancy property Shamper’s Bluff back in the 90s featured….

…. lots of lupines in his beautiful meadows. Someone caught me intent on capturing dewdrops.

At Vancouver’s Van Dusen Botanical Garden, native bigleaf lupine (Lupinus polyphyllus subsp. polyphyllus) is planted under silk tassel bush (Garrya elliptica ‘James Roof’).

Lupinus polyphyllus subsp. polyphyllus is the locally indigenous sub-species of bigleaf lupine.

When I was travelling in Sisimiut, Greenland, I came upon this lovely stand of Nootka lupine, Lupinus nootkatensis.

One floriferous California spring (2004), I found this stunning hillside of dwarf lupine (Lupinus nanus) in the Los Padres National Forest.

Ten years later, I photographed arroyo lupine (Lupinus succulentus) in a magnificent meadow at the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden, along with yellow tidytips (Layia platyglossa) and goldfields (Lasthenia californica).

I came across an amazing meadow containing lupines and hawkweed in Vermont one June, and used it as the dreamy background to some abstract images…..

….. featuring close-ups of lupines. They hang in my kitchen at home.

But back to my own little patch of ground: my meadow at Lake Muskoka. I have to say it wasn’t easy to establish lupines, but after figuring out what they needed to germinate, and where they wanted to grow their first set of leaves, and how to care for them that first season, I enjoyed their beautiful spires each June.

They loved my acidic soil – they do much better in a low pH soil, despite what some cultivation guides say – and…….

…… the overwintering bumble bee queens always found the pollen to furnish their nests.

They emerged with an early cast of characters including blue false indigo (Baptisia australis) and ubiquitous oxeye daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare), below.

You can see some of wild lupine’s meadow companions in this bouquet I made featuring oxeye daisy, blue false indigo, large-flowered penstemon (P. grandiflorus), blue flag iris (Iris versicolor) and buttercups.

Many years, my lupines sported impressive coats of aphids. If I had the energy I’d try to spray the stems with soapy water, but there were lots of stems…..

And in time, I had my own supply of lupine seeds. But the white and red pines I planted in the meadows have now grown so tall that they shade out the wildflowers and grasses. That was the general idea: to have “in-between meadows” as our hillside healed itself after our construction there. I do miss them in their abundance, but enjoy the few that flower still.

There’s another reason I love Miss Rumphius. It was the subject of the very last weekly gardening column I wrote in 2006 for a certain national newspaper before they cancelled my column “to focus more on real estate”.  In truth, they were bleeding money and I was just one more freelance budget item to cut. (At least I hope that was the case!)

Miss Rumphius (Viking, 1982) – written and illustrated by Barbara Cooney.

In any event, the column I wrote detailed how I managed to germinate and grow seed of Lupinus perennis at my cottage, seen in the photos above, and I offer it here in case you want to make the world more beautiful.

ADVENTURES OF A LUPINE LADY (May 2006)

There’s a much-loved children’s book called Miss Rumphius (Puffin,1985).  Written and illustrated by the late Barbara Cooney and first published by Viking in 1982, it won the American Book Award for its renowned Maine author.

Miss Rumphius tells the story of a little girl named Alice who sits on her grandfather’s knee and tells him she wants to be just like him: to travel to far-away places and live in a house by the sea.  Her grandfather says that isn’t enough:  “You must do something to make the world more beautiful”.

Alice grows up to become Miss Rumphius, the librarian.  She travels far and wide, climbs mountains, rides camels and buys a little house by the sea.  But she’s worried because she hasn’t yet made the world a more beautiful place.  Then one spring she spots “a large patch of blue and purple and rose-colored lupines” in flower on a hillside near her home where they’ve spread from plants in her own garden.  Miss Rumphius becomes the Lupine Lady, spreading lupine seeds wherever she goes and, yes, making the world more beautiful.

Like Miss Rumphius, I adore lupines with their bewitching blue and purple flower spires in late spring.  At my cottage,  I’m working on creating my own wild lupine meadow too.  But at the rate my plants are growing, I’ll be an old woman with a cane by the time I’m ready to beautify the rest of the world.  For lupines have very particular needs, both in their germination and ongoing growth.

Growing Wild Lupines

Perennial wild lupine (Lupinus perennis) or sundial lupine is native to eastern Canada and the eastern U.S. where large lupine meadows are a familiar sight in late spring-early summer in the Maritimes and New England.  One of more than 300 lupine species worldwide, it’s the only known host food plant for the endangered Karner Blue butterfly.  Preferring full sun and well-drained, sandy soil with a low pH (acidic), wild lupine grows naturally in sand prairies, open oak woodlands and grassy areas with granite-based soils.  It will not tolerate clay soil, making it a challenge to grow in most gardens.

Nursery-grown lupines often fail because their long tap roots make potted plants notoriously difficult to transplant, so it’s preferable to grow your plants from seed.  If I do the math on my own seed-to-plant success, I estimate it’s about a 10:1 ratio, so a large supply of seeds is needed . Note: L. perennis is a widespread species and available from a large number of seed companies, including Wildflower Farm and Prairie Moon Nursery. (Postscript:  But do make sure it’s the right species – my seed turned out to be the west coast species L. polyphyllus or a hybrid of L. perennis and L. polyphyllus.  Lovely but not the same thing.)

This spring, I sowed a handful of lupine seeds at my lakeside cottage, observing a ritual I’ve perfected over the past five years.  First, I soak the large seeds overnight in water to soften them.  Then I get down on my hands and knees and carefully press each seed just under the soil surface in what I call my “lupine mud”.  It’s actually a patch of rich, damp, sandy soil behind the house that never dries out because it’s in part shade at the bottom of a hill, thus retaining the moisture that wild lupine seeds need to germinate.  I’ve tried at various times of the year to germinate lupine seeds in situ, but their critical need for moisture immediately after germination has led me to separate my seed bed from the actual growing locations.

A month or so later, when the little plants have several leaves and a small root system, I’ll carefully scoop them up with a large spoon and transplant them into my dry, sunny hillside meadows where I water them regularly the first summer as they put down their tap roots.  Those that survive the first winter seem indestructible and completely drought-tolerant thereafter.  They may not bloom for two, three or four years, but they’re on their way, ever so slowly, to becoming a meadow.

We can’t all be like Miss Rumphius, travelling to far-off places and living in a house by the sea.  But we can, in our own small way, make the world a more beautiful place.

********

It’s impossible to find a song about lupines, and not easy to find a song about gardens and children either, I discovered, but I did remember this one written by Dave Mallett in 1975. Personally, I would not use the word “prayer” and instead substitute the word “compost” – but I suppose a lot of people would not object to being prayerful about their garden. So here it is with John Denver and some singing flowers from Sesame Street.

THE GARDEN SONG (Dave Mallett composer, 1975)

Inch by inch, row by row
Gonna make this garden grow
All it takes is a rake and a hoe
And a piece of fertile ground
And inch by inch, row by row
Someone bless these seeds I sow
Someone warm them from below
Till the rain comes tumbling down

Pulling weeds and picking stones
Man is made of dreams and bones
Feel the need to grow my own
Cause the time is close at hand
Grain for grain, sun and rain
Find my way in nature’s chain
And tune my body and my brain
To the music from the land 

And inch by inch, row by row
Gonna make this garden grow
All it takes is a rake and a hoe
And a piece of fertile ground
And inch by inch, row by row
Someone bless these seeds I sow
Someone warm them from below
Till the rain comes tumbling down 

And plant your rows straight and long
Temper them with prayer and song
Mother Earth will make you strong
If you give her love and care
Old crow watching hungrily
From his perch in yonder tree
In my garden I’m as free
As that feathered thief up there 

And inch by inch, row by row
Gonna make this garden grow
All it takes is a rake and a hoe
And a piece of fertile ground
And inch by inch, row by row
Someone bless these seeds I sow
Someone warm them from below
Till the rain comes tumbling down

******

This is the eleventh blog in #mysongscapes series of winter 2020 that combine music I love with my photography. If you enjoyed reading, have a look at the others:

  1. Joni Mitchell’s ‘Night in the City’;
  2. Paul Simon’s ‘Kodachrome’ and my life in photography;
  3. Vietnam and Songs of Protest;
  4. Galway Bay and memories of my grandfather and Ireland;
  5. Simon and Garfunkel’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme;
  6. The John Denver lullaby I sang to my first grandchild, Today While the Blossoms Still Cling to the Vine.
  7. Gordon Lightfoot for a Snow Day
  8. Madame George by Van Morrison – my favourite song in the world
  9. Brown Eyed Girl(s) – Van Morrison’s classic and my black-eyed susans
  10. Raindrops – on flowers and in my gardens

Please feel free to leave a comment below. I love to read them.

Sage… Co-Starring Parsley, Rosemary and Thyme

Posted on by
12

Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Who doesn’t know the next line of the lyrics? Who doesn’t begin to hum that familiar, iconic melody, perhaps recalling where they were in October 1966 when they first heard it sung by two fresh-faced New Yorkers named Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel?  One of the joys of reaching my age is that the folk songs of the 1960s still seem fresh and somehow relevant. Especially the ones where traditional herbs play a starring role!  And no song elevated herbs like the title song of the third Simon and Garfunkel album, which also included Homeward Bound.

But ‘Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme‘ debuted with some controversy since the duo listed themselves as songwriters in adapting this traditional 17th – 19th century English folk song (with its many versions) – which would be fine if it was their own arrangement. But it turned out that Paul Simon had first heard English folksinger Martin Carthy (who had first heard it from Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger) sing his own version when he was in England and copyrighted a similar arrangement without crediting Carthy, causing a rift that lasted until 2000 when they sang it on stage together. “Worse”, according to one music critic, “it credited Paul and Artie as if the centuries-old tune had emerged entirely from their imaginations.” (Wiki)  On the Simon and Garfunkel website, it says, “the duo used vocal overdubs and instrumentation to weave together a traditional song and anti-war protest to stunning effect.” Although not as overtly political as some of the songs I cited in my recent blog Vietnam – Songs of Protest, the song in its long-verse form does sound like the lament of a far-away lover, perhaps a soldier, asking impossible tasks of his sweetheart at home.

SCARBOROUGH FAIR/CANTICLE* traditional, adapted by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, after Martin Carthy (1966)

Are you going to Scarborough Fair
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Remember me to one who lives there
She once was a true love of mine 

Tell her to make me a cambric shirt
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Without no seam nor needlework
Then she’ll be a true love of mine 

Tell her to find me an acre of land
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Between the salt water and the sea strand
Then she’ll be a true love of mine 

Tell her to reap it in a sickle of leather
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
And to gather it all in a bunch of heather
Then she’ll be a true love of mine 

Are you going to Scarborough Fair
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Remember me to one who lives there
She once was a true love of mine

*The lyrics above do not include the “Canticle” verses, which are part of the official lyrics listed in their database, but they were the lines sung by the duo 15 years later in front of a half-million adoring fans at the September 1981 benefit concert in Central Park (below) to raise funds for the redevelopment and maintenance of the park. By then, Simon and Garfunkel had broken up and reunited a number of times; even their rehearsals for the concert were fraught with tension. Though they were elementary school classmates who had sung together since high school, initially as the duo Tom and Jerry, lyricist and composer Paul Simon was continually frustrated by the wandering attentions of his partner Artie of the sweet choirboy voice, who had ambitions to be an actor and solo performer. The concert represented a short-lived reunion for Simon and Garfunkel and produced a double platinum live album.

********

The Sages, a Photographic Collection

The Scarborough Fair was a popular medieval market fair held in the town in Yorkshire from mid-August throughout September. Though it went on until the 1700s, it was at its height of popularity in the late 1300s. The use of the herbs in the song lyrics recalls their traditional symbolic meanings: parsley for comfort, sage for strength, rosemary for love and thyme for courage.  Salvia comes from the Latin word salvus meaning “healthy”. It refers to the European herb Salvia officinalis, an evergreen (where hardy) sub-shrub native to Mediterranean parts of Europe and the Middle East. Its use as a medicinal and culinary herb is recorded in ancient works by Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen. It is a lovely plant for modern herb gardens, and is a favourite of bees too. (And, of course, one of its principal uses is in our stuffing recipes for turkey.)

Salvia officinalis has a number of fancy-leafed forms, including beautiful ‘Icterina’ (often labelled ‘Aurea Variegata’). I loved seeing it a few years ago (far right) in this exquisite design by Paul Zammit at the Toronto Botanical Garden, along with parsley and calabrichoa, heuchera, hakonechloa, pelaragonium and carex.

Another ancient sage (from the French word sauge for the herb) is Greek sage Salvia fruticosa. I photographed the handful of leaves in the Peloponnese in November, during my botanical tour of Greece with Liberto Dario (Eleftherios Dariotis).  There it is used, along with sideritis, for making traditional Greek tea.

Another sage is used for an entirely different ‘medicinal’ purpose.  When I was at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew some years ago, they had an exhibit devoted to hallucinogenic plants, including ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi).  One of the plants was Salvia divinorum, otherwise known by a number of descriptive common names…..

…. including sage of the diviners, ska maría pastora, seer’s sage, yerba de la pastora.

Silver sage (Salvia argentea) comes from southern Europe and northern Africa. A biennial, it is better known for its spectacular, silvery leaves that form as a rosette the first year…..

…. than for its white flowers the following year.

Over the past few decades, I’ve photographed salvia species, hybrids and cultivars around the world – admittedly just a drop in the bucket of some 900 species worldwide. And I’ve grown lots of them in my own gardens, both in the city where the meadow sage Salvia nemorosa ‘Mainacht’ (‘May Night’) with its deep-blue spikes graces my pollinator island, attracting lots of bees…….

…. and in the containers on my sundeck at our cottage overlooking Lake Muskoka. There salvias and agastaches are my principal container plants intended to lure ruby-throated hummingbirds each summer. I don’t have a nectar feeder for these graceful little birds, preferring to give them organic sweeteners. (That’s sacred basil on the far right, Ocimum tenuiflorum – a superb bee plant).

The very best lures are the big sages in my hand…..

….. especially the champion – Salvia guaranitica ‘Black and Blooms’ (also ‘Black and Blue’ in previous summers).

This lusty big Argentine sage is simply the best for bringing in hummingbirds.

Last year for the first time I tried Salvia ‘Amistad’ bred by Argentina’s Rolando Uría, and it was popular with the hummingbirds too.

Salvia ‘Wendy’s Wish’ was a distant third, but still attracted its share of hummers

Salvia microphylla ‘Hot Lips’ is so colourful and a hummingbird favourite.

I did an experimental planting of Salvia ‘Big Swing’ (Salvia macrophylla x S. sagittata) last season. Although the hummingbirds visited it now and again, its strange flowering habit (at least in a container) worked against it.

Annual ‘Mystic Spires’ salvia attracted hummingbirds, too, but not if ‘Black and Blooms’ was in flower.

In my naturalistic borders at the cottage, Salvia nemorosa ‘Mainacht’ consorts with a number of self-sown wildflowers (which we now call exotic invasives…..) including musk mallow (Malva moschata).

If you visit the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew outside London in autumn, be sure to find the stunning salvia border there. This was October 25, 2014.

It was at Kew that I first saw Salvia confertiflora from Brazil…..

….. and luscious, deep-red scarlet sage, Salvia splendens ‘Van Houtte’…..

….. and pretty hybrids like ‘Phyllis Fancy’ below, discovered at the University of California Santa Cruz Arboretum and named for Phyllis Norris.

Chanticleer Garden outside Philadelphia in Wayne, PA is my favourite public garden in the United States. I wrote a 2-part blog after my June 2014 visit. Its many gardens change each year in the most creative way, but I think my favourite scene was this confection featuring the deep-indigo spikes of Salvia nemorosa ‘Caradonna’ (from Zillmer Nursery in Germany), acting as dark vertical brushstrokes in a riot of cottage garden colour.

The Toronto Botanical Garden features its share of sages. Meadow sage, of course, is a prime player in the various June planting schemes. This is white Salvia nemorosa ‘Snow Hill’ (‘Schneehugel’, an Ernst Pagels introduction) with alliums, catmint, lady’s mantle and peonies.

Catmint, of course, is a beautiful partner for meadow sages, like Nepeta ‘Walker’s Low’, here with Salvia x sylvestris ‘Blauhugel’ (‘Blue Hill’), another Ernst Pagels introduction, and a splash of lady’s mantle (Alchemilla mollis).

In the Piet Oudolf-designed Entry Border at the TBG (I wrote a comprehensive 2-part blog on his design for this border), he incorporated his own introduction, Salvia nemorosa ‘Amethyst’, placing it near a wine-red sanguisorba.

His pretty purple-and-white hybrid sage Salvia ‘Madeline’ is also featured in the border.

And at the Royal Botanical Garden in Burlington, Ontario not far from Toronto, I loved this combination of Piet’s introduction Salvia verticillata ‘Purple Rain’ with creamy-yellow Achillea ‘Anthea’.

When I visited Chicago Botanic Garden in 2018, I was impressed with this mass planting of sky-blue bog sage (Salvia uliginosa)…..

….. enlivened by orange dashes of Mexican sunflower (Tithonia rotundifolia ‘Fiesta del Sol’). I wrote an extensive blog about my visit later.

Years earlier, I had been wowed by a themed garden at Chicago Botanic that featured bright-blue gentian sage, Salvia patens, with lots of gloriosa daisies (Rudbeckia hirta).

Speaking of gentian sage, this was one of the happiest combinations ever – a street planting at Vancouver’s Van Dusen Botanical Garden featuring Salvia patens ‘Cambridge Blue’ with Zinnia angustifolia ‘Profusion Orange’, purple Verbena rigida and fuzzy white bunny tail grass (Lagurus ovatus). Isn’t it lovely?

At Lady Bird Wildflower Center in Austin, Texas a few years ago, I was impressed by the meadow plantings of native mealycup sage (Salvia farinacea), a species that has become a popular bedding and container annual in colder regions.

There I was intrigued to see it looking so beautiful with native Texas yellowstar (Lindheimera texana), left, and was reminded of how effective it is with any yellow flowers, like the gloriosa daisies (Rudbeckia hirta) at right.

It’s such an easy sage to use: here it is with a rollicking sea of orange and yellow celosias at the Ottawa Experimental Farm one summer.

And this trio at the Montreal Botanical Garden was impressive: Salvia farinacea ‘Fairy Queen’ and ‘Evolution’ with a massed planting of chartreuse sweet potato vine (Ipomoea batatas ‘Illusion Emerald Lace’).

This formal knot garden at the New York Botanical Garden was enlivened by a mix of annual sage (Salvia viridis) in pink and purple popping up in the middle of the knots.

In spring, New York’s High Line features early-flowering Salvia ‘Pink Delight’ and ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ (both Piet Oudolf hybrid sages) mixed with amsonias. I blogged about that May 2012 visit too.

Last summer, I photographed and blogged about the Denver garden of Rob Proctor and David Macke. In June, their front yard is a sea of blue sage, including Salvia nemorosa and Salvia pratensis.

Even their long hellstrip (that’s Denverese for ‘boulevard’) is an azure avenue of sages, perennial geraniums and onosmas.

On my recent botanical tour of Greece with the North American Rock Garden Society and Liberto Dario (Eleftherios Dariotis), we visited our guide’s “salvia garden” in Paiania outside Athens. Let’s just say there are a few sages growing there, including many whose seeds he offers to customers worldwide.

What else? So many….. When I was in Tucson, Arizona seven years ago, I drove over the mountain pass to the fabulous Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. In its wonderful garden, honey bees were busy gathering nectar from native Salvia apiana. Guess what its Latin name means? Yes, “bee sage”.

At Idaho Botanic Garden a few Septembers ago, native rose sage Salvia pachyphylla was in flower.  And of course, I blogged about that lovely visit as well.

At Santa Barbara Botanical Garden, the appropriately named California hummingbird sage (Salvia spathacea) was, naturally, attracting California hummingbirds! This is the sweet little Anna’s hummingbird.

While at Santa Barbara Botanical Garden, I also saw Santa Rosa Island sage (Salvia brandeegii)…..

….. lovely, silvery Salvia leucophylla ‘Amethyst Bluff’, a selection of purple sage by Carol Bornstein.

During my visit to Chile and Argentina last winter on a wine tour, many of the gardens featured Mexican bush sage (Salvia leucantha).  What a great shrub that is for warmer regions!

I can’t remember where I photographed Salvia dorrii.

Salvia mexicana ‘Limelight’ has brilliant chartreuse bracts that are as much a colour feature as the blue flowers.

Biennial clary sage (Salvia sclarea var. turkestanica) is a cottage garden mainstay.

Even my local park’s Victorian ribbon planting took on a festive air when scarlet sage (Salvia splendens) was paired with chartreuse Canna ‘Pretoria’.

All the sages are wonderful pollinator plants and since insects on flowers are a specialty of mine, I always enjoy finding bees on salvias, like this big carpenter bee nectar-robbing from the corolla of Salvia ‘Silke’s Dream’ at Wave Hill in the Bronx (yes, a blog there, too)….

….. or this bumble bee foraging on annual Salvia coccinea ‘Coral Nymph’ on my own cottage deck.

Hmm.  I think that’s enough sage wisdom for one blog, don’t you? Except…. what about poor rosemary? It’s having a little identity crisis at the moment because it was known as Rosmarinus officinalis ever since Linnaeus assigned names back in 1753, but then came 2017 and one of those gene-sequencing revelations that turned taxonomy on its head.

Alas, it seems that rosemary is just a needle-leafed sage, now called Salvia rosmarinus. But sssshhh… don’t tell Simon and Garfunkel.

********

If you liked this musical blog, the 5th in #mysongscapes for 2020, be sure to read my blogs on Joni Mitchell’s ‘Night in the City’, Paul Simon’s ‘Kodachrome’ and my life in photography, Vietnam Songs of Protest and my sentimental take on ‘Galway Bay’.

Bringing in the Honey at Lavender Hills Farm

Posted on by
5

For Tom Morrisey and Tina-May Luker, home is Lavender Hills Farm, a 25-acre property near Orillia in central Ontario, Canada.

Here, beautiful gardens….

….. and a custom-designed, bee-friendly, 2-acre tallgrass prairie meadow (seed-drilled ten years ago by their neighbors and friends Paul Jenkins and Miriam Goldberger of Wildflower Farm) supplement the natural softwood and hardwood forests and swamp that surround their farm.

Tom – who’s been a beekeeper for 40 years – tends 20 colonies at the farm, in addition to 110 colonies he manages in outyards in the region, for a total of 130 colonies.  He calls himself a “sideline beekeeper”, but, of course, at one time he was a novice. He started out four decades ago working as part of the interpretive staff at a provincial park where the focus was agriculture and apple orchards. There was also a beehive under glass at the park – an observation hive – but no one on staff knew anything about bees. So Tom took a 5-day course at the University of Guelph (Ontario’s agricultural college) in order to explain to visitors the fine points about apple pollination.  Later, he moved to the Orillia area and started working in adult education at a local college.

As he recalls now, he looked around at all the farms in the area and thought, “I don’t know anything about farming, but I know about beekeeping!” So he bought a couple of colonies and began keeping bees as a hobby. After working for a while in Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources, he went travelling internationally. When he returned to Canada, he met Tina-May Luker and told her he wanted a job where he could ride his bicycle to work. He knocked on the door of commercial beekeeper John Van Alten of Dutchman’s Gold Honey (and later president of the Ontario Beekeepers Association) and offered his services. Two days later, he was hired to help manage between 800-1200 hives.

When he and Tina-May moved back to the Orillia area seventeen years ago, they bought their farm and Tom began beekeeping in earnest, with 50 colonies the first year and another 50 a year later. His farm beeyard is adjacent to the tall-grass meadow and surrounded by electric fencing to deter black bears.

The remainder are situated in a half-dozen outyards within an hour’s drive, with between 10-30 hives at each location. The outyards include a commercial cranberry bog, below,……

…..and a wildflower farm.  His honey house at the farm is a converted double garage several hundred feet from the beeyard and close to the driveway so the honey supers can easily be unloaded from his pickup truck after a trip to the outyards.

That brings us to one of Tom’s favorite beekeeping gadgets, and one he devised himself.  “In my pickup I put a piece of plywood with a little bit of a rim around it, sort of like a picture frame, and put some loops of wire into that, and that allowed me to use straps to tie down all my frame. It’s terrific, and only cost fifty bucks for lumber.”

Tom has another favorite piece of equipment, his “Mr. Long Arm”. That’s an extendable painter’s pole at the end of which he has fashioned something like a butterfly net made of fence brace wire threaded through the seamed end of a heavy-duty plastic shopping bag. “When it’s extended its full length of twelve feet,” he says, “I can often retrieve swarms that have settled well above me in the branches near my beeyards. The bees can’t grip the smooth plastic so I just shake them out into a brood box on the ground. No more ladders for me!”

As for those swarms, he says: “You can use that whole impulse to swarm to make more colonies of bees, if you want them. If you don’t want them, then you’ve got to be very diligent to manage your colonies so they don’t get crowded.”

Tom started raising queens a few years ago and finds it an engrossing learning experience.  “It’s not something a beginner usually tackles, but at some point you get enough confidence to try it, and it’s very interesting.  The whole idea is to try to select bees that have the characteristics that I like working with and to give me a supply of queens early in the season when they’re very handy to have.”

In spring, his bees find willows and red maple in the plentiful swamps around one of the outyards, where thawing occurs earlier than other places. At the farm, local basswood trees (Tilia americana), below, provide a good flow and produce excellent honey about three out of five years.

Abundant staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina) feeds the bees and the red fruit clusters provide the fuel for Tom’s smoker.

There’s clover and alfalfa in neighboring farm fields and birdsfoot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus) and viper’s bugloss (Echium vulgare), below, growing wild along the country roads.

Tina-May’s borders and vegetable garden provide lots of nectar and pollen from plants like Oriental poppy  (Papaver orientale), butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa), lavender (Lavandula angustifolia)……

….. motherwort (Leonurus cardiaca), Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia), below…..

……thyme (Thymus sp.)….

….. and asparagus that’s gone to flower with its bright orange pollen.

In the designed meadow, masses of coreopsis give way to purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea), Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum), blazing-star (Liatris pycnostachya and L. ligulistylis). The final act, lasting from August well into October, stars the goldenrods, and Tom and Tina-May grow four species including stiff goldenrod (Solidago rigida, syn. Oligoneuron rigidum), below,

The grapefruit should be totally avoided while a person is making love. viagra professional canada Such framework gives the effect of the Kamagra, the user should be sexually stimulated to develop an erection. levitra professional samples viagra 25mg online Unless and until you do not have a “can do” attitude bring other employees down. Obesity like issues enhances the risks of vascular disease and the signal that a heart attack is coming in the not so distant future. cheap viagra deeprootsmag.org

…. rough-leaved goldenrod (Solidago rugosa)….

…..and the very late-flowering showy goldenrod (Solidago speciosa), below.

Says Tom: “Goldenrod is a good honey, very dark and somewhat strong tasting.  The bees produce a bright yellow wax when they’re collecting goldenrod.”  But this late flowering of the goldenrods and native asters also helps the health of the hive, as Tom explains.  “There’s an expression that it’s really good to have ‘fat bees’ going into winter, meaning bees that are really well-fed. And being stimulated by a good flow of nectar and pollen allows them to make the physiological changes they need for winter. Bees in the summer, they’re flying around, they last six weeks, then they die. But in the winter, they have to sit in a hive, they don’t go out for six months, so their whole body, essentially, has to work in a different fashion.”

Most years, Tom’s colonies winter very well, with his survival rates matching or bettering the provincial average.  “I make sure the bees are well fed, because that stimulates them to keep brooding up later in the season. So I feed them in the fall. And I make sure the mites are under control.”  Here’s a little video* I made of Tom explaining how he checks for varroa mites. (*If you’re reading this on an android phone and cannot see the video, try switching from “mobile” to “desktop”. Not sure why that glitch occurs.)

Honey extraction begins in late July and extends well into October.

From time to time, Tom enlists the help of family members like brother-in-law Paul Campbell, seen assisting him below.

Here’s a video I made of Tom and Paul at this time in late summer moving the honey frames for extraction.

Over the years, Tom has automated his honey harvest to lighten the load, but it’s still hot, sticky, noisy work, with rock music blaring from speakers above the clatter of the hot knives of the decapping machine….

…..and the whirring of the horizontal extractor.

Here’s a video I made of the honey extraction process at Lavender Hills Farm. Because it’s hard to hear Tom over the machinery and the music, I put in a few subtitles.

Tom and Tina-May, below, are regulars at four farmers’ markets in the area….

….selling honey, mustard, honey butter, herbal soap, candles, and treats like honey straws that children love. “Farmers’ markets are a great place to get to know your customers and build a steady market for your product,” says Tom.  “People want to know that you’re the beekeeper, and they want to hear stories about keeping bees, just like I’m telling stories now.”

It’s a demanding occupation with lots of tiring physical work and he gets stung “dozens of times a day, sometimes”. And the challenges are many now. “When I started,” he recalls, “There were no parasitic mites, viruses weren’t an issue, and agri-chemicals didn’t seem to be as big a factor. You could put a box of bees in the back of the farm, they’d winter all right, and you’d get a box of honey. It’s certainly changed in the past twenty years.”

One of the newest factors is small hive beetle, and though it’s been seen in the Niagara region, it hasn’t yet made it this far north.  However he’s heard talk of beekeepers arranging refrigerated storage for their honey frames

But Tom is still enthralled with the whole thing. “Keeping bees is a very elemental occupation. The bees are subject to all the natural forces around them, from the plants to the weather and all the variations in between. It’s one expression of nature that you can roll up your sleeves and get right into. And that’s very enjoyable, because every year is different.”

If there’s one piece of advice he’d give to a new beekeeper, it’s this: “Get two hives, not just one, because of the chance of you either making a mistake or nature dealing you a blow that might take one of your hives, but you’ll always have another one.”

And that could be the beginning of a very long love affair.

***********

This story is a much-expanded version of an article that appeared earlier this year in a beekeeping magazine.  It’s a joy to know both Tom Morrisey and Tina-May Luker, below, with me at the Gravenhurst Farmer’s Market on Lake Muskoka this summer.

Honey bees are favourite photography subjects of mine. To see a large album of my honey bees on flowers, have a look at my stock photo portfolio.

A Texas Garden with English Roots

Posted on by
8

When I was consumed with garden fever back in the early 1980s (and finally had my “we’re staying here” house), there was a book whose pages became dog-eared from the hundreds of times I flipped back and forth gazing at glossy photos of English cottage gardens.  I dreamed that someday I’d have a garden crammed with flowers in artful combinations, yet seemingly tossed together with wild abandon. That vision informed the meadows I’d eventually have, both in Toronto and at our cottage north of the city. It was only appropriate therefore, that one of my very favourite gardens during my recent Garden Bloggers’ Fling in Austin, Texas was owned by a pair of British ex-pats and featured garden rooms full of Texas natives and self-seeding flowers that managed to give a nod simultaneously to the local vernacular and romantic English cottage garden style.

Jenny and David Stocker have gardened here at the edge of hill country in southwest Austin for 17 years since they moved into their new home, which was custom-designed by the late architect Dick Clark who’s considered to be the father of Austin contemporary style.   He also designed the garden walls, which have been painted soft mocha tones that match the house. I wish I’d paid more attention to the house itself, since his intent was to align the various windows and views with the outdoor rooms.  Let’s start under the trees outside at the street, with its lovely emphasis on drought-tolerant succulents.  In this area, landscape architect Curt Arnette of Sitio Design arranged for the placement of the large ledgestones, but everything else here and throughout the gardens – including the dry streambed, below, that becomes a very wet stream during heavy Texas rains – was done by the Stockers.

But before I go any further, I want you to see what a blank slate looks like, and imagine the work that went into creating the garden I’m about to show you – given what the starting point looked like in the Stockers’ photos below.

Alright, let’s head into the garden. I loved these generous platform steps that will take us into the first garden room, the front courtyard. They also nicely accomplish a level change, and feature just a few of Jenny’s many containers.

In the front courtyard, we see the source of the dry streambed (what Jenny calls “the wet weather creek”) that empties outside.  Many kinds of agaves are used, including the beautiful whale’s tongue agave (A. ovatifolia) below.

The millstone-like water feature at left, below, was a chance find – the abandoned base of a basketball stand – in a back alley near the Stockers’ son’s house in Dallas. It took two people to load it onto their truck, it looks stunning here.

The courtyard features a rich profusion of plants that seem to thrive in the thin soil including many succulents and self-seeding flowers.  Notice the gravel mulch and liberal use of stones (many were here before the garden was made).

The Stockers love eating and relaxing outdoors, so the garden features several places where they can do that, like the niche below.

Artichoke agave (A. parryi var. truncata) is one of my favourite succulents.

The garden walls are perfect for ornaments.

Containers – always pebble-mulched – are a mixture of succulents and English favourites like foxglove.

Can you imagine how lovely it would be to spend time under that perfumed brugmansia, perfectly placed for inhaling?

All the garden rooms feature their own collections of artful accessories. “You can’t just have plantings,” Jenny said to one interviewer.

I loved the face peering out of the hedge.

Though the rain that had fallen in torrents a few hours earlier at the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center had now subsided, plants were still wet. This is lovely Agave desmettiana ‘Variegata’.

If there’s a theme in the garden, besides amazing plants, it’s rock. As Jenny has said: “I love to work with rocks, of which we have plenty, and they form the backbone of the garden. My husband, David, is my rock man and has hunted out some amazing rocks and done some great rockwork. I was on site every day during construction, saving rocks suitable for making the drystone walls.”

So let’s go see the stone wall Jenny made in the next garden room, the English Garden.  There it is in the background, Jenny’s dry-stacked wall made from flat rock gathered as the house was being constructed.  This garden’s motif is circular, from the concentric edgings of brick encircling the birdbath garden…

…. to the circular flagstone-and-brick dining patio…..

…. to the circular paving stones and the spheres that sit in the gravel.

As in any good English cottage garden, there are lots of self-seeding flowers here, like biennial foxglove…..

….. and Texas natives such as blackfoot daisy (Melampodium leucanthum).

I’m sure that Jenny’s garden attracts a lot of birds. That’s Virginia creeper on the wall behind the sweet birdhouse.

The ornamented wall near the next room sets up a galactic theme……

…. which is expanded on in the saying above the arch.  Live by the sun, love by the moon. Indeed!  Notice the change in paver materials between garden rooms – all very subtle, but designed to enhance.

Let’s go down the stairs to yet another level, past another pretty collection of potted plants and an inviting teak bench…..

Always seek out opinion nonetheless from reliable resources and not those which levitra online from india browse around that storefront are talking about all negative things. And then, these nutrients get mixed up in the morning and yet you struggle to maintain an equilibrium and a feeling of normality in which there ‘s no balance and no normality. cheap cialis 20mg The intracranial stress regularly increases because of generico levitra on line davidfraymusic.com brain cancer or a number of additional disorders. The record keeping is central buy viagra without prescriptions but trade is link ed to such physical place because modern markets are computerized.

….. into the appropriately named sunken garden, aka the pool garden. This, for me, is the full embodiment of those glossy photos I loved in those books long ago. A true cottage garden filled with a mélange of romantic blossoms that will shift and alter their companions throughout the season. The iconic Texas bluebonnets are long-gone in this photo, but that’s how things start out here in April, which you can see in this photo by Jenny’s friend and our Austin Garden Bloggers Fling co-host Pam Penick’s post from April 2015.

Sometimes, in appreciating a grand design, I forget to notice the small details. Here’s the lovely native Texan golden columbine (Aquilegia chrysantha).

It was one of the cast of May characters in Jenny’s garden, along with annual love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena), blue mealycup sage (Salvia farinacea), magenta-pink sage (Salvia sp.) As Jenny notes, “I rely heavily on self-seeding plants and am more than willing to let them grow where they plant themselves, as well as passalongs from garden friends. It’s not a low-maintenance garden.”

Most of the breadseed poppies (Papaver somniferum) had already formed their seedpods….

…. but corn poppies (Papaver rhoeas) were still announcing their brilliant presence. I loved the flowing urn feature here, which creates a bit of music with its splash.

What an inviting scene. Many gardens we saw in Texas were accompanied by a swimming pool, because as lovely as spring weather can be, summers are punishingly hot.  And since there are no trees inside the garden walls and the rocks do reflect the sunshine, Jenny says the garden becomes very hot in midsummer. The walls here, by the way, are not just decorative, but meant to keep out varmints, including deer.

Here’s another look at the flowery poolside meadow. This area was originally laid with old granite flagstones, so the Stockers laid Arizona sandstone on top leaving 1-inch spaces for self-seeding plants.

You can see in the background against the wall one of the large, porous limestone boulders native to the property.

There are native cacti in the gardens, including the spineless prickly-pear (Opuntia cacanapa ‘Ellisiana’).

I found Jenny in the sunken garden, chatting with fellow bloggers (her own interesting blog is called Rock Rose) and looking mightily relieved that the morning’s rain had stopped in time for our visit.

I waited for my blogging pals to take their leave of this beautiful dining area near the swimming pool – one of six seating areas Jenny and David use, depending on the time of year and day – so I could make my photo. There’s a good reason for being the last one on the bus!

At the edge of the dining area was another grouping of containers, this one featuring the agave relative Manfreda undulata ‘Chocolate Chips’.

Manfreda flowers are so interesting, especially post-Texas-rain.

The herb garden is tucked into an alcove created by the house walls, and looks beautifully wild..

Nearby, behind the wall of the swimming pool garden, sits the potager: a series of raised beds containing…..

… leafy vegetables like curly kale……

….and squash vines starting out under protective wiring….

….and tomato cages.

A long raised bed nearby contains flowers for pollinators. In early May, it abounds with larkspur (Consolida ajacis) and Verbena bonariensis.

Perfumed star jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides) blankets one wall of a garden shed in this area. How nice it must be to harvest veggies with that scent wafting by!

A galvanized water tank is a great idea for a water garden: small, manageable maintenance, yet a nice spot for a bird to bathe or have a sip of water.

Nearby were little vignettes, like this…..

….. and this. For me in Toronto, Mexican feather grass (Nassella tenuissima) is a textural annual, but here it’s perennial and adds a grace note to the garden.

As always on a garden tour, the bus was waiting to take us to our next stop, so off we went in our rain-soaked shoes down the pathway beside the spineless prickly-pears. But for me, the garden of Jenny and David Stocker had been a chance to satisfy a long-held desire to enjoy time in a cottage garden filled with masses of flowers arrayed with artful abandon.

Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center

Posted on by
18

One of my gardening life goals has been to travel to Austin, Texas in April to see the bluebonnets in flower, those much photographed sheets of azure-blue carpeting the ground in parts of west Texas. A few weeks ago, I managed one of those goals – to travel to Austin – and I had a tiny whiff of the other – those bluebonnets – when I joined almost a hundred other garden bloggers at our annual Fling, during which we tour around public and private gardens and nurseries to get a flavour of the best horticulture and design from each host city.  The list of gardens included the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in southwest Austin.  The Center, of course, was the dream of Claudia Taylor Johnson, aka “Lady Bird” (1912-2007), one she fulfilled after returning home to Austin from Washington DC when her role as First Lady with President Lyndon Baines Johnson ended in 1969.

But even before LBJ assumed the presidency in 1963, following John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Lady Bird had proved herself a capable businesswoman, using her own family inheritance to buy a few small radio and television stations that later parlayed her $41,000 investment to $150 million. But during her time in the nation’s capital, “beautification” was her passion, and by that she didn’t just mean gussying up outdoor spaces with pretty flowers, but thinking hard about improving the aesthetics of the roads and highways so many Americans spent hours driving on and through each day. She also advocated for the preservation of national parks. In Washington itself, Lady Bird, with the help of philanthropist Laurence Rockefeller, launched a project called Society for a More Beautiful National Capital; it resulted in a significant planting program for the capital: dogwoods, oaks, crape myrtles, and more cherry blossoms for the Washington Monument area, below.

More importantly, in October 1965, the federal Highways Beautification Act (proposed by LBJ but known unofficially as Lady Bird’s Bill) was passed, effectively controlling the proliferation of large billboards, lighting, junkyards and other eyesores and advocating wildflower planting along the nation’s highways.  In an appreciation column after her 2007 death, the Washington Post said of Lady Bird’s influence on her husband’s presidency: “It was but one of 150 environmental laws, including the landmark Clean Air Act, enacted with her vigorous support during the Johnson administration from 1963 to 1969. She was a patron saint to the National Park Service.”  But for Texans, her landmark contribution was the co-founding, with actress Helen Hayes, of the National Wildflower Research Center in 1982. Its first 60-acre site was in East Austin, but its popularity with the public dictated a 1995 move to the current site in southwest Austin, now expanded to 279 acres. In 1998 it was renamed the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and was incorporated into the University of Texas at Austin in 2006. It now fulfils its mandate of promoting and conserving Texas native wildflowers, grasses, trees and shrubs and acting as the largest online database of North American native plants (it actually managed to snag the online URL www.wildflower.org) while providing a lovely venue for conferences, weddings and other social events.

And here I was, ready to explore its 9 acres of cultivated gardens. (In actual fact, I had signed up for an early morning photo seminar, but the weather forecast was dire so I made the decision to photograph outdoors before the rain started.)

I began in the courtyard near the Central Complex buildings, where a little “hillcountry spring” irrigates the plants.

I walked around the buildings in the central complex, noting the big muhly grass (Muhlenbergia lindheimeri) and a pretty pink-and-white cultivar of autumn sage (Salvia greggii ‘Teresa’) that the center itself propagates and sells, on behalf of its discoverer, David Steinbrunner, to raise funds.

I passed the Color Garden, created in memory of Leslie Turpin, by his son Ian Turpin and daughter-in-law Lucy Baines Johnson Turpin.

Purple coneflowers (Echinacea purpurea) and blackeyed susans (Rudbeckia hirta) reminded me of my own Ontario meadow garden. I would give anything to be there when those standing cypress (Ipomopsis rubra) in the background sent up their bright-red flowers!

This was the Edible Garden. Did you know that mealycup sage (S. farinacea) and evening primroses (Oenothera speciosa) are edible?

Walking past drifts of blue and white mealycup sage made me appreciate anew that little annual workhorse cultivar ‘Victoria Blue’. It became so popular, we grew a little bored with it, but I don’t recall it ever having quite so commanding a presence as these tall sages.

Strolling through the gardens outside the auditorium, I caught a glimpse of the audio-visual screen and felt momentarily guilty at being outside – but I could already hear thunder rumbling in the distance.

The central complex buildings all have adjoining gardens of native wildflowers, so you don’t have to wander far afield to see beauty.

There was lots of colour here in the Nectar Garden, where Prairie verbena (Glandularia bipinnatifida) was looking lovely.

I took the Savanna Meadow Trail leading to the 5-acre $5.3 million Luci & Ian Family Garden donated by Ian Turpin and Lady Bird’s daughter, Luci Baines Johnson Turpin.

This was a useful reminder to visitors to stay on the pathways.

Native wildflowers have been used in designed areas adjacent to the Play Lawn in the Family Garden.

This pretty combination of Texas yellowstar (Lindheimera texana) and mealycup sage (Salvia farinacea) caught my eye. Love those yellows and blues together!

This is Engelmann’s daisy (Engelmannia peristenia).

And this is Engelmann’s prickly-pear (Opuntia engelmannii), below. Both of these plants were named for the German-born botanist and doctor Georg Engelmann, who emigrated to Baltimore in 1832, eventually setting up a medical practice in St. Louis with his young German wife and doing his botanizing on vacations from his practice.  He was despondent after her death in 1879, when he was approached by Charles Sargent of Boston’s Arnold Arboretum to accompany him on a trip to the Pacific coast, where, at the age of 70, he collected the plants that now bear his name.

This gorgeous flower is Texas rock rose or swamp mallow (Pavonia lasiopetala).

I did find a few bedraggled bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis), but the big show had happened in March and early April.

There were scattered Texas Indian paintbrushes (Castilleja indivisa) around, too. Though I had a nicer photo of this plant, I included the one below because it illustrates a peculiarity of this species and all members of the genus. Their specialized roots, called “haustoria”, wander below ground until they touch the roots of neighbouring plants, often grasses, whose roots they then penetrate to secure nutrients and water. Members of the hemiparasitic family Orobanchaceae, paintbrushes do photosynthesize themselves, but they use this method to augment their own metabolisms.

The prime host plant for Texas Indian paintbrush, not surprisingly, is nitrogen-fixing Texas bluebonnet, a partnership beautifully illustrated in the photo of Lady Bird Johnson below.

I think blanket flower (Gaillardia pulchella) was the most abundant wildflower I saw in my 4 days in Austin, with highway edges spangled red and yellow like this.

The sign below highlights the center’s focus on education and ecology. A savanna, of course, is a grassy plain studded here and there with the occasional tree, but here, the savanna is managed with prescribed burns to control the incursion of too many woody species.

Stud 100 Spray is an effective topical solution for delaying early cialis 40 mg ejaculation. The Acupuncture in Long Island, are always ready to give you the driving knowledge under the parents’ canadian pharmacy sildenafil participation. There is a strong relationship amid weight problems order generic viagra http://deeprootsmag.org/2013/02/19/bipartisan-consensus/ in addition to the the most important starting point involving kind the second adult onset diabetes utilizing the nation’s related insulin resistance. As humans give them out through perspiration, try that shop now purchase generic viagra they are subconsciously detected by nose, brain and nervous system. I was excited to find sprawling antelope horn (Asclepias asperula), just one of Texas’s thirty-six native milkweeds – a fine feast for monarchs winging their way north from their wintering grounds in Mexico.

Some wildflowers I knew, like Mexican hat (Ratibida columnifera), below…..

….. but most I didn’t, such as silverleaf nightshade (Solanum elaeagnifolium)…..

….. and Texas prairie parsley (Polytaenia texana).

It was fun to see white sage (Artemisa ludoviciana) growing with big muhly and prickly-pear, since so many gardeners are familiar with the cultivar ‘Silver King’.

I was unaware, when I walked into the Family Garden, that it had been designed by my friend W. Gary Smith with TBG Partners. An artist and landscape architect who has remained firmly in touch with his inner child and the world of make-believe, Gary created a magical space here in Austin. First off, I noticed the massive windmill……

…. which I suppose is intended to demonstrate wind power, provided the kids work hard enough on the equipment to generate the energy needed to turn the blades!

I was happy to see red yucca (Hesperaloe parviflora) flowering here, because it had been the star of the Red Hills Desert Garden in St. George, Utah, which I’d visited and photographed a few days earlier. Shockingly (for a plant photographer), I had never even seen a hesperaloe before Utah and Texas, only to find it was one of the most common plants in the Austin gardens we visited!

Look how lovely those flowers are – and a lure for hummingbirds and butterflies, too.

The Robb Family Pavilion offers a bit of shade so kids can engage in crafts or picnic out of the hot Texas sun.

There’s a Dinosaur Creek here with “footprints” of actual dinosaurs whose fossil remains have been found in the region.

Nature’s Spiral features colourful walls (with tiles recycled from a dump) enclosing a spiral path that teaches children about the spiral shapes found in nature, including Fibonacci sequences!

The Stumpery is made from fallen cedar trees and is perfect for climbing.

The Giant Birds’ Nests were fashioned from grapevines and grasses.

And, as if preordained, it was right after exploring the birds’ nests that I heard my first Carolina wren singing in the forest, soon to be followed by the familiar song of a cardinal.  Have a listen…..

The Karst Bridge reminds visitors that the center’s savanna sits on a karst landscape featuring porous limestone through which water percolates and is transported miles away.

Now I came to smaller scale gardens designed to inspire visitors to grow native plants on their own properties. This was the Tallgrass Meadow in the Ann and O.J. Weber Pollinator Habitat Garden, featuring lots of Texas parsley.

A nearby trellis featured the tropical-looking flowers of vigorous crossvine (Bignonia capreolata), which can be found climbing trees in damp pine woods in east Texas.

Thunder was closing in and a few raindrops had begun as I walked quickly into the Theme Gardens, 23 beds all surrounded by a low limestone wall, each demonstrating varieties and uses of plants for “weekend gardeners”. There is a fiber & dye garden, a night-bloomers-for-moonlight garden, a deer-resistant garden, a hummingbird garden (which would surely include red yucca, below, a hummer favourite!)….

…..and dry gardens featuring plants like this handsome agave ……

…. and cane cholla (Cylindropuntia imbricata var. imbricata).

I loved these big tank planters filled with autumn sage (Salvia greggii).

I could have stayed in the theme gardens for hours, but the rain was approaching and I made a dash back to the gift shop and Visitor’s Center. Moments later, the skies opened and we were treated to a Texas rainstorm – and not the 5-minute cloudburst typical of an eastern thunderstorm. No, no. This one went on long enough that our shoes and pant legs below our rain ponchos got sopping-wet and stayed soaked for the entire day!  So, as a final memory of Lady Bird Johnson’s wonderful Wildflower Center, here’s a little taste of a true Texas gully-washer, with a serenade by the late Dee Clark.

A few days after visiting the center, I walked down Congress Avenue and stood on the bridge overlooking what used to be called Town Lake (a man-made reservoir in the Colorado River), but was renamed Lady Bird Lake following Lady Bird Johnson’s death in 2007.  She had worked hard to beautify the lake and create a recreational trail system around its shoreline.

I will let Lady Bird Johnson sign off on today’s blog: “My heart found its home long ago in the beauty, mystery, order and disorder of the flowering earth. I wanted future generations to be able to savor what I had all my life”.