Category Archives: Public Gardens

The Rochester Lilac Festival

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Earlier this month – on Friday, May 13th to be exact – my husband Doug & I began a 12-day road trip through the northeast U.S. to celebrate his university reunion in New Jersey and to tour as many public gardens as we could fit in along the way. On that first day, we drove from Toronto to Rochester, New York in order to enjoy the first of three May weekends at the Rochester Lilac Festival at Highland Park. It bills itself as the largest free festival in North America and given the already-filled parking lots and hordes of people milling in the park, I can believe it. Walking towards the lilac plantings, we passed booths with huge lilac bouquets….

….. and themed t-shirts….

….. and vendors of cut flowers that were NOT lilacs.

And, yes, there was cotton candy.  It’s a festival, after all.

Given the hot temperatures and sunny skies as we arrived at mid-day, photo conditions were terrible for photography – but oh-so-perfect for perfume, which wafted everywhere!

But I did manage to create some photos on the shady side of the shrubs, including one cultivar I later nominated as one of the top 3 lilacs of the (admittedly abbreviated) roster we viewed.  Meet Syringa vulgaris ‘Jessie Gardner’, a 1956 introduction by the Gardener Nursery in Wisconsin.

There are more than 500 varieties (species, cultivars, hybrids) of lilacs and more than 1,200 lilac shrubs arrayed on the gently sloped hillsides of Highland Park. Because they originate in extremely cold climates in Europe and Asia, lilacs have no problem surviving winter in upstate New York and southern Canada.  Other big collections are held at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum in Madison and the Katie Osborne Lilac Garden at Ontario’s Royal Botanical Garden. I have also photographed the lilac collection at the Montreal Botanical Garden and rare species lilacs such as Syringa sweginzowii from China in the David Lam Asian Garden at UBC Botanical Garden in Vancouver, below.

There are many lilac types that provide a long season of flowering, from April into June in certain climates. Flowers are officially assigned Roman numerals for colour: I-White, II-Violet, III-Bluish, IV-Lilac, V-Pinkish, VI-Magenta, VII–Purple. Interestingly, we often refer to certain flowers being “lilac coloured”, which according to its origin in the “IV-Lilac” hue of the common lilac Syringa vulgaris is neither the lavender-blue nor the mallow-mauve that people often mistake as “lilac”.  In doing my various explorations on colour, I’ve grouped true lilac-coloured flowers in this montage.

Part of the difficulty of assigning a colour to lilacs is that the flowers change colour as they age, which you can see below with S. vulgaris ‘Professor Sargent’, named in 1889 by German botanist and nurseryman Franz Späth for Charles Sprague Sargent (1841-1927), first director of Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum.

I am very partial to the Hyacinthiflora Hybrids, aka the Early Hybrids, partly because I live in a place where winter lasts well into “spring” and these fragrant lilacs tend to flower a few weeks ahead of the common lilac and its cultivars, and partly because the Canadian breeder Dr. Frank Leith Skinner (1882-1967) of Manitoba had a major role in their development. They are hybrids of S. vulgaris and the broadleaf Korean lilac, S. oblata or S. oblata var. dilatata. So the second of my Top 3 lilacs at Rochester was Syringa x hyacinthiflora ‘Excel’, a 1935 Skinner introduction which performs exactly as its name suggests, with excellence!

Another beautiful Frank Skinner Hyacinthiflora Hybrid is pure white ‘Sister Justina’, below, introduced in 1956.

Nearby was a common lilac cultivar, Syringa vulgaris ‘Frederick Law Olmsted’, hybridized by Father John Fiala (1924-90) and named in 1987 for Olmsted, the man sometimes called the father of American landscape architecture, who with his partner Calvert Vaux designed many well-known landscapes including New York’s Central Park and Rochester’s own Highland Park, the site of the lilac festival!  Father Fiala was legendary in lilac circles for authoring the book “Lilacs: A Gardener’s Encyclopedia”.  

Father Fiala also bred this beauty, S. vulgaris ‘Albert F. Holden’, also in my ‘Top 3″, with its deep-violet, very perfumed flowers with a silver reverse (similar to ‘Sensation’, but not as crisply white-edged). It was named for the man who endowed the Holden Arboretum in Kirtland, Ohio.

Rochester features many of the so-called “French hybrids” bred by the nurseryman Victor Lemoine and his son Emile between 1870 and 1950.  Among them are S. vulgaris ‘Linné’ from 1890, sometimes called ‘Linnaeus’ – the ultimate tribute name in botany.

Syringa vulgaris ‘Leon Gambetta’ with its double flowers, below, was introduced by Lemoine in 1907, its name honouring the French lawyer and republican politician who proclaimed the French Third Republic in 1870 and played a prominent role in its early government.

‘Jules Ferry’, also introduced by Lemoine in 1907, was named for a former Prime Minister of France during the Third Republic.

‘Paul Thirion’ was introduced by Lemoine in 1915 and is a popular and fairly common lilac.  Lemoine named it for a horticulturist at Nancy Parks, France. It is classed as VI-Magenta in colour.

Syringa vulgaris ‘Frank’s Fancy’, bred in the 1970s by Edward Mezitt of Weston Nurseries in Massachusetts and named for his friend Frank Goodwin, looks very magenta to my eye but is classed as VII-Purple. Blame it on the light.

For me, this is a classic and beautiful lilac truss:  mauve buds opening to pinkish-lilac florets on S. vulgaris ‘Frau Wilhelm Pfitzer’ introduced by Germany’s Pfitzer Nursery in 1910.

Syringa vulgaris ‘Silver King’ was bred by Wisconsin’s Dr. A. H. Lemke in 1941; its flowers are classed as III-Bluish but they are as close to silver as you’ll see.

Another type of lilac flowering at this time is the hybrid Chinese lilac, Syringa x chinensis, sometimes called the Rouen lilac because it was discovered in 1777 flowering in Rouen, France.  It is a cross between common lilac, S. vulgaris and Persian lilac, S. persica, from Iran.

Then there is S. x chinensis ‘Bicolor’ with its purple eye on pale pinkish flowers.

Seed of this unusual lilac, Syringa ‘Rhodopea’ was collected by botanist Václav Stříbrný in 1900 in the Rhodope Mountains in Bulgaria and cultivated in the botanical garden in Prague.  It has a different bearing and, according to the International Lilac Register is “not a uniform clone”, which accounts for it not always being included in the S. vulgaris clan.  Speaking of the Register, it is an invaluable resource to those searching for information on lilac cultivars and can be accessed here as a .pdf file.

Finally, I had to commemorate our Rochester visit with a husband-and-wife selfie, because who wouldn’t want to remember what it was like to stand amidst these perfumed shrubs on a warm afternoon in May? 

As we packed up the crumbs from our picnic lunch (devilled egg sandwiches made in my Toronto kitchen at dawn!) and made our way back to the car to drive on to Utica for the night, I asked a young mother if I could take a farewell photo for my blog, which she happily agreed to. What lucky children to run amongst the lilacs.

******

LILAC PEOPLE

Speaking of selfies, what fun it was during my few hours at the Rochester Lilac Festival to run into someone I knew only as a Facebook friend.  Brian Morley of Kansas City, Missouri is a man of many talents. Not only does he co-own a fabulous business called Bergamot & Ivy Design with lush, innovative floral designs, he is also an accomplished lilac hybridizer and is on the Board of Directors of the International Lilac Society. It is a small world, but perhaps not so small when people who love lilacs gather in a famous spot devoted to the genus Syringa.  And we gave each other’s lilac wardrobe choices an approving nod!

During my freelance career, I have been fortunate to correspond with renowned lilac experts, including the late Freek Vrugtman, International Lilac Registrar and Curator Emeritus of Ontario’s Royal Botanical Gardens, which features a large collection of lilacs in its Katie Osborne Lilac Dell, below.

Freek Vrugtman proof-read my May 2008 story on Hyacinthiflora lilacs for Canadian Gardening magazine, below….

…… and we chatted by email when I had a question on lilacs.  After his death on March 3, 2022, the RBG published a memorial tribute which included the following passage:  “Working with RBG’s other staff, including Charles Holetich and Leslie Laking, Freek directed considerable attention to the collection and became the International Registrar for Lilacs in the Genus Syringa in 1976, as RBG became the International Cultivar Registration Authority, or ICRA, for Lilacs. Whenever a new cultivar was bred anywhere in the world the breeder would submit a request to Freek for its entry into the International Registry. Freek would review all such applications and guide the breeder through the process. As Registrar Freek became widely known as the international expert on Lilac cultivars.“

When I had a lilac identification question Freek couldn’t answer, he passed it on to the RBG’s lilac specialist, Charles Holectich: “What do you think, Charlie?”  Way back in 1994, when I was writing my weekly newspaper garden column for the Toronto Sun, I interviewed Charles Holetich for some hints on caring for these lovely spring shrubs.  This is my column from May 22, 1994 – twenty-eight years ago!  Below that I’ve included the interview as a Q&A.

JD:  What’s the best location for lilacs?

CH:  Lilacs prefer open, sunny locations and neutral soil, though they will grow in slightly alkaline or slightly acid conditions and are found in both.

JD:  What about drainage? 

CH:  They dislike wet feet, so if planted in clay-type soil which has a tendency to retain moisture, you should make a hill about 2 feet high and 8-10 feet wide, so excess moisture seeps away.

JD:  If it’s located in full sun, does a lilac shrub need to be fertilized?  

CH:  If it has too much foliage and not enough bloom, that means it’s high in nitrogen.  In order to induce flower buds, you should feed it with a high phosphate (middle number) fertilizer like 4-12-8 or 5-45-15.  This should be done immediately after flowering because next year’s buds are being formed in June, July and August.

JD:  What about all those seedheads?  Must they be removed and how can you reach the top ones on a big shrub?   


CH:  When summer has adequate rainfall, then it doesn’t matter because there’s sufficient energy to bring enough nutrients from the soil to satisfy the formation of both seedheads and flowering buds.  But in drought summers, you should remove seedheads and water deeply, about 5-6 inches once a month. 

JD:  Pruning confuses a lot of lilac owners too. 

CH: I think the ideal for a multi-stemmed lilac is to have 9-15 stems of different thickness positioned so they don’t rub each other.  Once this is achieved, then every two years or so, you should remove one or two of the oldest stems at ground level, keeping up to 3 new shoots.  Then the next year, you can decide which of the three is the best to keep and remove the others.

JD:  How tall should a lilac be kept pruned?

CH:  I’m a strong believer that a lilac should be deliberately kept pruned at between 6-9 feet.  

********

To all the passionate lilac lovers, growers and breeders, I tip my fragrant hat, fashioned with trusses of my own Syringa pubescens ‘Palibin’ and lily-of-the-valley (or, as it’s accustomed to being addressed in my garden, “guerilla-of-the-valley”….)

********

Want to read more about spring shrubs?  Read my blogs on:
The David Lam Asian Garden at Vancouver’s UBC
Spring at Van Dusen Botanical Garden, Vancouver (2 parts)
Spring at Ontario’s Royal Botanical Garden
The Rosy Buds of May and Beyond
A Shade Garden Master Class (Montreal Botanical Garden)

The Once and Future Toronto Botanical Garden

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I visited the Toronto Botanical Garden this week, my third visit this year. Given the constraints placed on the garden (and I’ll get into those later), it looked pretty good. The three gardeners and volunteers have tackled most of the weeds in the main borders. The beautiful Piet Oudolf-designed Entry Border was its usual boisterous self, the spiky, white rattlesnake master consorting with the blue Russian sage….

….. and the bees were buzzing in the blazing stars (Liatris spicata).

The Entry Border sported new rails to keep out unruly, selfie-snapping visitors….

…. with a few noticeable plant additions that might not have been strictly ‘Oudolfian’, like the brilliant orange daylilies behind the rampaging Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Firedance’, below  As I wrote in my 2-part, 2017 blog on the design of the border, Piet Oudolf-Meadow Maker–Part 1 and Part 2, the border was funded by the Garden Club of Toronto and constructed in 2006. Piet Oudolf recommended a full-time gardener as part of the ongoing maintenance of the entry garden. In his work with Chicago’s Lurie Garden (read my blog on the Lurie here), there was a multi-year ongoing relationship between him and the Lurie’s gardeners; that did not happen at the TBG due to financial constraints The complexity of this garden, its self-seeding plants and the ongoing assessment of performance stretches the capacity of a severely underfunded garden (I’ll get to that later, too). 

However, when I rounded the corner from the entry border to the entrance courtyard itself, I was dismayed. Red and blue salvias in Victorian ribbon planting with canna lilies. It felt a little like being in a 1950s municipal park.  

What happened to the creativity that should be the hallmark of a botanical garden, even in the current straitened circumstances?  The little square near the entrance is prime real estate, intended to be the greeting card for all who come to the TBG. In spring, it always hosts a colourful mix of bulbs; later swishing grasses and interesting annuals and biennals. But this?

These urns used to be filled with wonderful annuals and tropicals…

…now they’re filled with dwarf hemlocks. Just plain hemlocks.

Around the corner in the garden flanking the water channel in the Westview Terrace, there were impatiens plants sprinkled throughout the perennials. Given the prevalence of devastating IDM (Impatiens Downy Mildew) over the past decade, it was a shock to see them. But it was also disappointing from a creative point of view to have your grandmother’s impatiens in what should be an inspiring border filled with high performance perennials.    

And my spirits sagged further when I walked into the Edibles Garden – or what used to be the productive, instructive, nutritious Edibles Garden – to find it filled with bedding annuals in a new Trial Garden. The “Wild for Bees” installation would not be seeing a lot of activity with the annuals chosen here.

I know Ball Flora well; I’ve been to their display gardens outside Chicago as part of a bloggers’ tour. They do good work and I’m sure they’re happy to be featured here and make it an attractive partnership, financially speaking, for the TBG. But expanses of annuals are really not showing off what should be cutting edge planting design for a garden like ours.  

Not to mention that the Edibles Garden as it was conceived was a source of hundreds of pounds of annual donations to the North York Food Bank. Here are some of my photos from previous years. This was 2014.

And 2016’s edibles.

A visitor from Victoria looked quizzical. When I asked what he thought, he said “They seem to be growing very common plants here.”  Indeed. Instead of lantanas and petunias, what about a garden of fragrance in front of this hedge, with lilies, nicotiana, dianthus, scented peonies, heliotrope, phlox, dwarf lilac, daphne, hyacinths, clethra, etc?  The TBG is light on small ‘theme gardens’ that help people design their own spaces

A bed in the Beryl Ivey Knot Garden had been planted bizarrely with Scotch thistle (Onopordum acanthium), which is as invasive a self-seeder as it is gawky. Why it would be plunked in this formal space is beyond me.

When I walked towards the perennial borders, I passed the window-box planters adjacent to the Spiral Garden. There must have been left-over red and blue salvia because these looked pedestrian, too.

In 2016, I wrote a blog on the TBG’s planter designs featuring the great creativity of the garden’s previous horticulturist Paul Zammit. The photo below shows three years of designs in these planters.

Sadly, through a lack of funding and administrative support, the TBG lost the creative minds of both the previous chief horticulturists, Paul Zammit and Paul Gellatly. My purpose here is not to retread the institutional woes, exacerbated greatly by Covid, that led to the May 22nd Globe & Mail story. It is to reflect on what made the garden brilliant as an underfunded 4-acre jewel and what looms ahead as a major 35-acre botanical garden (final concept plan below), once the merger with Edwards Gardens is complete.

On that note, I attended all three community engagement meetings with landscape architects and city planners, so I know a little of what went into the planning of the new garden, as spearheaded skilfully by former Executive Director Harry Jongerden with creative input by landscape architect W. Gary Smith, below, pointing out details on the screen. 

I care very much about the garden. As well as being a long-time member of the TBG and the Civic Garden Centre before that, I have written many blogs about it: the spring tulip extravaganza; the Blossom Party; the Woman-to-Woman luncheon; the annual Through the Garden Gate Tour, and more. Since May 2007, I tallied 152 visits to photograph the garden; these provided me with the images for the seasonal photo gallery that was on the TBG’s website for several years….

……as well as for my blogs and images the garden needed from time to time. Below is garden philanthropist Kathy Dembroski at the 2018 luncheon; she and her husband George Dembroski….

….were the lead donors for the award-winning Silver LEED building opened in their name, The George and Kathy Dembroski Centre for Horticulture.

In my 33-year career as a freelance garden writer and photographer, I’ve also visited and written about a vast number of public botanic gardens, from New York, below, to Chicago, Cape Town’s Kirstenbosch, Christchurch, Kew Gardens, Los Angeles, Malaysia, Saigon and Kyoto, as well as favourite Vancouver gardens like VanDusen and UBC Botanical, among many others. I’ve also spent a lot of time in privately-funded public gardens like Chanticleer near Philadelphia and Wave Hill in the Bronx and at the iconic High Line in New York City. So I am very familiar with a broad variety of public gardens, large and small.

My husband Doug and I have been regular TBG donors for many years. As well, I have contributed various articles and donated photos to the Trellis magazine (my cover story on cottage gardening, below).

Our daughter was married at the TBG in October 2012, and we have beautiful memories of that showery autumn day.

I especially loved seeing Meredith and her attendants standing in front of the donor panels featuring my own fern photos. Our rental of the facility nine years ago tallied $5,700 for her wedding, so I know how devastating 16 months of Covid closure has been for TBG rental revenues….

….. not to mention the loss of sales from two consecutive annual plant sales and the summer fundraiser garden tour.

*******

Why am I writing this blog? It’s not to trumpet my work in gardening, but to share a concern I have. Following the TBG’s Annual General Meeting in June – an online meeting that painted everything as rosy and was carefully scripted to exclude any critical commentary from members upset with board decisions – acting Board Chair Gordon Ashworth encouraged members to send in any issues they might have. This is my response.  In a word, it has to do with MONEY. At 35 acres, the expanded TBG will present both a great opportunity and an ongoing challenge to bring ground-breaking horticultural and environmental displays to Greater Toronto’s 6 million people, as well as providing inspired educational programs for children and adults. Ironically, the TBG’s current fiscal challenges have come at the same time as the federal and provincial governments announced a $2.2 million investment in Burlington’s Royal Botanical Gardens, below, as part of its 25-year master plan. Without taking anything away from the RBG and notwithstanding its 300 acres of gardens and 2400 acres of land stewardship, it is not positioned in the centre of the 4th largest metropolis in North America.

In 2012, I attended a city council meeting at City Hall to support the TBG’s then Executive Director, Aldona Satterthwaite as she begged for more financial support than the paltry $25,000 the city has traditionally given the garden in order to overcome a small deficit caused by the lack of potential revenue owing to the protracted parking lot renovation, a lot used mutually by Edwards Gardens and the TBG. I made the photo below in spring 2012; the work went on for months and months. Naturally, facilities rentals declined sharply. Through the efforts of Ward 15 City Councillor Jaye Robinson, bridge funding was secured to keep the garden solvent.

At that City Hall meeting, former Councillor Janet Davis (my doppelgänger) asked me during a scrum if I knew how much other gardens charged for admission. I answered that most had an admission fee except ours. In the case of privately-run, 55-acre Butchart Gardens in Victoria, which receives more than a million visitors annually, it is very steep, reflecting the cost of running a world-class garden (not a botanical garden, but useful for comparison). In 2013 when I photographed the entrance, below, it was $28; it’s now $36.  Well-run, creative gardens cost money. It’s that simple.  

I make this point because one of the major conditions in the expansion plan between the City of Toronto and the TBG is that admission to the expanded 35-acre botanical garden be free. At first glance, this is in keeping with ‘park’ policies; you don’t pay to visit High Park or any of the city’s many excellent parks, and Edwards Gardens is a large ravine park currently accessed via the renovated parking lot whose significant parking fees now thankfully accrue to the TBG. But once the TBG and the park are amalgamated, is free entry really the right financial vision for a botanical garden in the 4th largest city in North America?  Or is it a lack of vision rooted in unreality?  Or just thinking small? Here is a table I made with the admission costs and membership fees of botanical gardens I’ve visited. 

BOTANICAL GARDENAdult EntryAnnual Membership
   
Toronto Botanical GardenFree$45
Royal Botanical Garden$19.50$85
Montreal Botanical Garden$16.50/21.50*$45
VanDusen Botanical Garden$11.70/8.40*$45
UBC Botanical Garden$10$55
Butchart Gardens$36$69 (annual pass)
New York Botanical Garden$28-23$98
Chicago Botanic Garden$24-26*$99-$72*
Missouri Botanical Garden$14-6*$50
Denver Botanic Garden$15$55
San Francisco Botanical Garden$12/9*$70
   
*Variable pricing due to weekend/weekday, seasonal, or geographic parameters.  

The now defeated Rail Deck Park project proposal is a cautionary tale of planning without financing. In a May 13th editorial, the Toronto Star put the blame for the failure of the Rail Deck Park at the feet of the city and Mayor John Tory. “In 2017, the city designated the rail corridor as parkland but still didn’t move to acquire the air rights, through a negotiated purchase or expropriation if necessary. And it didn’t earmark the estimated $1.7 billion the project would cost or even explain how it intended to fund Toronto’s “next great gathering space.”  It would be disastrous if our expanded TBG suffered from the same lack of realistic financial planning. Its needs will be much greater than a municipal park.

In her opening remarks during the June AGM, Councillor Jaye Robinson said that “getting the Master Plan through city council was not for the faint of heart. Very little support, quite frankly, but I got it through by compromising and we’re very excited to see this institution grow to 35 acres.” She also said that she and Ward 25 Councillor Jennifer McKelvie moved a motion to make 2022 The Year of the Garden in Toronto. That will be great — but why so little support?

We can only hope that life will return to some semblance of normal before long, and that activities will resume that require rental facilities like the TBG, thus returning it to a level of financial security. Development personnel will start knocking on doors looking for donors for the exciting expansion. And the lead landscape design firm PMA Landscape Architects will begin rolling out detailed designs for the new garden areas. The relationship between current city park personnel and TBG staff and volunteers, like those below, will hopefully be engineered to co-exist smoothly. But my fervent wish is that the amalgamation comes with a better financial framework from the city, province and federal governments that recognizes the real importance of the botanical garden to Canada’s largest city and its diverse and growing population.

On that note, I leave you with a little musical glimpse at the other population that the Toronto Botanical Garden serves.

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Casa Loma’s Woodland Wildflowers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

… and here, with Virginia bluebells.

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

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

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

Whoever said it was terrible to garden in shade?

*****

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

One Steppe at a Time

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Last June, during my visit to Denver with the Garden Bloggers’ Fling, I spent a little extra time in the fascinating Steppe Garden at Denver Botanic Gardens. I had been there once before during a late April visit when wild Tulipa greigii, Fritillaria pallidiflora and Iris bucharica from the Central Asian steppe were in flower. I blogged about my 2018 spring visit at the time.

But a year later, it had filled in nicely and I was fascinated with all the unusual plants. As DBG says on its website, “The Steppe Garden is an ambitiously diverse collection of tough and unique plants from steppe biomes, some of the most rugged habitats on Earth. This quarter-acre garden brings together the North American, South American, Central Asian and Southern African steppes to explore the diversity and similarities of their cold, dry grasslands and shrublands”. Designed by Didier Design Studio and installed in 2016, the garden is still filling in. The photo below (courtesy of Denver Botanic Gardens) shows an aerial view of the Steppe Garden as it was in 2017. I have numbered the individual gardens: 1) Patagonia; 2 and 3) Central Asia; 4) cultivated steppe (hybrids and plants influenced by human hands; 5) Southern Africa; and 6) Intermontane steppe of North America.

Drone aerial of the Steppe Garden – 2017

Let’s take a walk through, below. That’s South Africa on the left and the Central North American steppe of the Great Plains on the right. Denver, of course, is part of that steppe biome and DBG has focused on the unique ecology of steppe plants in this space. 

As the sign says, the plants found in this garden are native to eastern Colorado and grow in the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains.

In June, that means penstemons! Here we see a mix of lavender-purple Rocky Mountain penstemon (P. strictus), pink showy penstemon (P. grandiflorus) and wispy foxtail barley (Hordeum jubatum).

I grow showy penstemon myself at our cottage north of Toronto and I know what a tough hombre it is for dry, stony soil. But it looks so refined in the Steppe Garden, below.

Just outside the Steppe Garden itself is the Laura Smith Porter Plains Garden, featuring plants endemic to what was once native shortgrass prairie, with seeds sourced within 30 miles of Denver. Under the frieze here is soapweed yucca (Yucca glauca) and blue Nuttall’s larkspur.

Walk out the path and you get a feel for the shortgrass steppe or shortgrass prairie of the Great Plains. It’s these wonderful approximations of ‘what used to be’ that make Denver Botanic Gardens so special.

Here is Nuttall’s larkspur (Delphinium nuttallianum), named for Thomas Nuttall, the Yorkshire-born botanist who collected extensively in the United States from the Great Lakes to Kansas, Wyoming and Utah, then to California and Hawaii, followed by time in the Pacific Northwest.

Plains prickly pear cactus (Opuntia polyacantha), another shortgrass native, is in bloom in June.

Let’s go back into the Steppe Garden and enjoy this view over the water to the Central Asian Steppe Garden.  

As the sign states, this is the largest steppe on the planet

Visitors walk through a microcosm of the species that grow in the Central Asian Steppe. I love that the gardens here look more like meadows than botanical garden collections, but each geographic section has been carefully sourced and the plantings designed by the Steppe Collections curator and plant explorer Michael H. Bone (more on Mike later).

The Altai mountains are in the Central Asian Steppe and located where China, Russia, Mongolia and Kazakhstan come together. And this is the Altai onion, Allium altaicum.

This is Angelica brevicaulis from the mountains of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.

I love the Eurasian horned poppies (Glaucium corniculatum) and photographed them growing with roses in the garden of Panayoti Kelaidis, senior curator and director of outreach at Denver Botanic Gardens. (Read my blog on Panayoti’s Denver garden here.)

Most gardeners are very familiar with opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), which has long been naturalized in Central Asia, as well as many other regions of the world..

Phlomoides oreophila is a new plant for me, native from Central Asia to Northwest China.

Leaving the Central Asia Steppe, we come to a part of the garden that is still being developed, the South American Steppe, featuring the plants of Patagonia.

Looking over the water again, we see the main path through the Steppe Garden featuring two beautifully crafted stone sculptures. Behind is the South African Steppe.

Let’s take a closer look at the farthest sculpture, which is actually a beautiful water feature that serves as a special crevice garden for chasmophytes, i.e. plants that make their homes in narrow openings in rocky outcrops in the steppe regions. The open part is a trickling water fountain.

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Look at these little jewels! I photographed the plants below, including the lilac-flowered Iberis simplex (I. taurica), in April 2018. It grows in the Taurus Mountains in Southern Turkey.

Here is the top of the water feature in June 2019….

….. and another view. What exquisite stonework!

The South African Steppe is the star here, in my opnion, given DBG’s long history with plants from the region.. Let’s have a look at some of the plants, such as….

…. the strange-looking caterpillar grass (Harpochloa falx).

Apart from plants growing in the large, rocky structures, there are some beautiful container vignettes that will inspire visitors with restricted space – like this assemblage of species from southern Africa.

I love this border with blue cape forget-me-not (Anchusa capensis)and magenta ice plant (Delosperma cooperi).

And as a confirmed bee photographer, it was fun to capture a honey bee nectaring on the anchusa.

Here’s a long view of this section in the South African Steppe.

South Africa, of course, represents the largest floristic province in the world, and the Steppe Garden divides plants into the Western South African Steppe….

…. and the much more lush Eastern South African Steppe.

There is a lot of fireweed (Senecio macrocephalus) in bloom in the eastern steppe in June.

And kniphofias, of course, are signature South African plants.

Look at this brilliant stone work.

Another grouping of containers highlights plants of the Eastern South African Steppe.

But Denver Botanic Gardens is famous for its ice plants, and they are featured prominently here in the part of the Steppe Garden devoted to garden introductions.

This one is called Delosperma Jewel of Desert Grenade. Isn’t it lovely?

More examples of the delosperma cultivated rainbow of colours, as seen in the South Africa Steppe.

I know I’ve probably missed a lot of detail and might even have mixed up the odd steppe region in my rush through the garden, but I do consider myself fortunate to have met the garden’s curator, Mike Bone, aka #steppesuns, below, this March in Toronto when he spoke to members of the Ontario Rock Garden Society. Mike is an enthusiastic plant propagator, seed collector and explorer who has spent decades working at DBG, acquiring plants from the four great steppe regions of the world and getting them displayed not just at his own garden, but other botanical gardens throughout the world.  I know his mentor, Panayoti Kelaidis is very fond of Mike – or “Ghengis Bone” as he calls him in this blog he wrote about travelling with him in Mongolia.

They even collaborated on a 2015 book called Steppes: The Plants and Ecology of the World’s Semi-Arid Regions,co-authored by Dan Johnson (whose garden I blogged about recently), Mike Kintgen and Larry Vickerman, all of Denver Botanic Gardens.  As the book’s description states, “steppes occupy enormous areas on four continents. Yet these ecosystems are among the least studied on our planet. Given that the birth and evolution of human beings have been so intimately interwoven with steppe regions, it is amazing that so few attempts have been made to compare and quantify the features of these regions.”

I’m so happy to have had the chance to visit DBG’s fascinating Steppe Garden, and look forward to exploring it in other seasons in the future.

The High Plains Environmental Center

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Long ago, in the mid-1990s, I attended a presentation here in Toronto on “new urbanism”. It was focused on a development and planning approach that sees communities built according to principles of diversity of use and population; pedestrian and transit opportunities rather than being centred on automobiles; accessible public spaces and institutions; and a “celebration of local history, climate, ecology, and building practice.” (Source: Congress for The New Urbanism). One of the speakers was a local developer who was keen to build a community featuring many of the tenets of new urbanism. I was fascinated by his dream but secretly felt he would have a tough time competing economically with the treeless subdivisions of cookie-cutter, chock-a-block houses springing up north, east, and west of Toronto’s urban core. My city’s developers had been paving farm fields for years to build residential shrines to sprawl and the automobile. Yes, they were ‘affordable’ suburban homes for the middle-class in a growing metropolis of more than 6-million people, but any vestiges of natural or cultural heritage were erased in a bid to streamline lot servicing and maximize profits.

I was reminded of this a few days ago while reading in the paper about one of Toronto’s most successful subdivision builders. He demolished a $48-million house he’d purchased in seaside Florida a few years back in order to spend perhaps an equal sum to build an “ecomansion” for his family, utilizing net-zero energy but with enough garages for his many cars. And, of course, he flies there via private jet.  I do not begrudge anyone their profits; he took a lot of financial gambles and lost money here and there along the way, especially during the 2009 recession.  He is also a generous philanthropist. But it seems strange and counterintuitive to me that environmental principles are not part of an intelligent development business plan for every economic level of new home ownership.

So I was delighted last June during my annual Garden Bloggers’ Fling to visit the High Plains Environmental Center (HPEC) in Loveland, Colorado in the northeast part of the state. Here, an hour’s drive north of Denver in a 3000-acre mixed use development called Centerra, environmental principles are a major selling feature. Begun in 2001 by McWhinney Enterprises on land homesteaded and farmed by their family from 1866, Centerra includes retail businesses, office buildings, restaurants and residential neighbourhoods. The homes were built by McStain Neighborhoods, co-founded by green building pioneers and architects Tom and Caroline Hoyt. Both the McWhinneys and the Hoyts understood that there is a great cachet to building not just houses, but sustainable environments, in which people can feel connected to the land around them. Part of that initiative was the creation of the High Plains Environmental Center, occupying 100 acres of land surrounding two lakes comprising 175 acres of open water which are reserved for waterfowl. HPEC also manages 135 acres of common space belonging to the landowners in Centerra. Its educational visitor center was opened in 2017, a small building fronted by a lush meadow of native plants…..

…. including delicate blue flax (Linum perenne var. lewisii)……

…. and my favourite of all the penstemons, beautiful pink Palmer’s beardtongue (Penstemon palmeri).

Though we’d been told to make our way through the building, I had to stop for a few moments and enjoy the plantings in the parking lot, especially this border of labelled native perennials and shrubs…..

…. including gorgeous blue Rocky Mountain beardtongue (Penstemon strictus) and golden columbine (Aquilegia chrysantha var. rydbergii).

And as a photographer of bees, including bumble bees, I was delighted to spend a few moments tracking a new species for me, the Nevada bumble bee (Bombus nevadensis), which was busy foraging on the penstemon.

On returning from Colorado last June, the first blog I wrote was called Penstemon Envy. There are simply so many beautiful penstemon (aka beardtongue) species to see in early summer. This is pine-leaf penstemon (P. pinifolius).

Large-flowered beardtongue (Penstemon grandiflorus) with its semi-succulent leaves is one I grow at my cottage north of Toronto. For me, it behaves as a biennial, making its rosette the first year and flowering the second.  Imagine how inspiring these native plants are for the homeowners in the neighbourhood!

Growing amidst rugged Colorado sandstone boulders was beautiful sulphurflower buckwheat  (Eriogonum umbellatum), along with orange California poppies (Eschscholzia californica).

Prince’s plume (Stanleya pinnata) is a spectacular native plant that we would see in other Denver gardens on our fling. As well as being a larval host to two species of butterfly, it was also a traditional medicinal plant for many Native American peoples.

I passed the sign that marks Centerra’s certification as a Wildlife Habitat. And I wonder how many North American suburban planned communities could be brave and generous enough to view homebuilding as an ecological mission. 

We were here to see the center but also to hear from its Executive Director, Jim Tolstrup. Originally from the Boston area, he’s been with HPEC for more than a decade, and we gathered around him in the Medicine Wheel Garden. This part of the center aligns very closely to Jim’s professional background, since he was “a founder and former president of Cankatola Tiospaye, a non-profit that provides material assistance to Native American Elders”. Though his role there, he developed life-long friendships with Native Americans and a perspective that informs much of the emphasis here at the center.

Jim told us about Centerra’s beginnings and its mission and said that the center and the community’s environmental ethos have actually become prime selling features for the development, where there are strict building and landscaping design guidelines. It’s promoted as “Certified Wild”, he said. This video is an excellent introduction to the High Plains Environmental Center.

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This is the HPEC Master Plan from 2016 which gives a good overview of the site.

Courtesy of High Plains Environmental Center

The Medicine Wheel Garden in which we stood was erected on consecutive Earth Days in 2018 and 2019.

It will be used for the local Thompson School District’s annual 3rd grade powwow and to host participants in the 400-mile Lakota ride along Colorado’s front range each summer.

It was freshly planted with species used by various Plains tribes as food, medicine or in ceremonies. The plants are labelled with their traditional Lakota names.  Beyond the new Medicine Wheel Garden is The Wild Zone. Still being developed, it will serve as an outdoor classroom to foster a love of nature through play and self-directed learning. This section is called “The Nest Tree”.

Here is one of the plant labels in the Medicine Wheel Garden….

…. and the plant with its unripe fruit. Chokecherry fruit was traditionally mixed with pounded bison meat and tallow in the making of pemmican patties or wasna.

Here is the label for yellow monkeyflower (whose Latin genus name Mimulus has been changed to Erythranthe). Check out that clay….

And here are the beautiful blossoms. The leaves of this species were cooked by the Lakota for food.

Fishing is allowed from the shore of Houts Reservoir and adjacent Equalizer Lake, with a licence from Colorado Fish & Wildlife. The lakes also support native waterfowl.

We toured the Community Garden…..

….. where members grow tomatoes, herbs and all manner of vegetables in neatly spaced raised planter boxes. In a normal year here, there are workshops on composting, pest management, propagation and other garden practices, as well as produce-swapping potlucks.   

I wish we’d had more time to explore the Heirloom Fruit Orchard.  I was surprised to learn that this part of Colorado has a buoyant fruit industry, and that the first cherry trees were planted here in 1864. Though the trees are young, this will be a wonderful spot. Among the old varieties of apples are Haas, Goodhue, Flower of Kent, Johnny Appleseed, Utter’s Red, Patricia, Gravenstein, Maiden Blush, Pitmaston Pineapple and Duchess of Oldenburg.

The greenhouses are used to raise native plants for plant sales and landscaping. Because of Covid, this year’s sales were held online with curbside pickup. Available plants included native hyssops, sages, columbines, milkweeds, buckwheat, gaillardia, sunflowers, beebalm, tansy aster, evening primrose, penstemons, ratibidas, goldenrods, vervains and Stanley’s plume.

We walked down The Promenade, a beautiful pathway through mixed plantings of Colorado natives. Imagine how inspiring this is for Centerra residents looking for plant design ideas for their landscapes.

Honey bees were all over the apache plume (Fallugia paradoxa).  Not only is this drought-tolerant native shrub beautiful in flower, its fluffy, red seedheads are very decorative as well.

There were plants I’d never encountered before, like desert 4 o’clocks (Mirabilis multiflora).

I loved this beautiful western ninebark (Physocarpus monogyna), with Rocky Mountain penstemon at its base.  It was the perfect pairing, and the perfect way to end an all-too-short visit to the High Plains Environmental Center.

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If you’re interested in First Nations culture, you might wish to read my blog on two days at Wanuskewin Heritage Park in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, the city where I was born.