Cyclamen coum 'Something Magic' This one cames from Terra Nova, allegedly the first tissue cultured Coum

They certainly picked a beautiful form to produce. It is one of the "Christmas Tree" types (the green interior of the leaf vaguely resembles a Christmas tree). Karen and the boys snagged it while they were picking up plants for an installation job. That's an occupational hazard, spending so much time at Garden Centers. I'm glad they picked it up, its a beautiful little plant.

For us, C. coum flowers in the spring, or at least late in the winter. The other hardy Cyclamen commonly grown in the Washington area is Cyclamen hederifolium. Both leaf out this time of year, but hederifolium begins flowering as it leafs out; we have dozens of flowers on various plants now.

Chimaphila maculata colonies and strange game's end box

Nate, Neal, Alice, and I did some more peripheral reclamation (I'm going to stay with this euphemism, it's explanatory and implies neither culpability nor previous neglect) and while we mostly encountered Asian Viburnums, Mulberries, and three truckloads of Greenbrier (Smiliax), we also found a few small interesting things.

Apparently there was some sort of contest, rally, game? a few weeks back with clues, riddles, etc, the obect of which was to end up on the top of Hickey Hill. I remember seeing one group of people being photographed and heard some nebulous rumors. Well today Alice found a waterproof box that contained a pad and pencil to be used by the successful to record their presence. It seems only only four groups made it. Apparently it is traditional to leave a small gift/prize for whomever arrives after you. We found a Teddy Bear stamp??!! After examining the contents of the box we replaced it though I don't expect there will be any more finishers.

We found a number of colonies, including hundreds of individual plants, of Chimzphila maculata, Pipsissewa, a lovely little evergreen native in the Pyrolaceae (subsumed in current taxonomy, into the Ericacee). They are charming little plants, and I agree with Michael that they would be excellent subects for Young to include in her Kusamono.

Stachyurus praecox var. Matsuzakii....I love this plant, I just can't take a picture of it that shows what I want to show!

I saw my first Stachyurus when I first worked in the Asian Collections 17 years ago. I was floored. The plants are spectacular in late winter when the buds on the pendulous racemes swell and an entire large shrub is covered with vertical strings of green pearls. I took the lesson with me and, I put some number of these relatively unknown plants into....well a lot of my commercial landscapes. It is a striking plant in winter as the buds swell and through spring when the flowers open.

This particular plant (which lives across from the Asian Parking Lot) has good fall color s a bonus.

Salix chaenomeloides....what can I say? i've always liked this plant

I used to have hope that it would someday enter the florist industry as a cut stem for winter. The red buds are over a half inch long. When the catkins expand they are quite impressive, frequently two or more inches long. Easily grown, it doesn't seem to be invasive, and you can coppice it for profit. Still, no one seems to have run with it.

This plant is growing beside the Anacostia River.I posted it last winter but had to fight my way through vines to get to the plant. We had a cleanup project this summer and three people sweated and bled for several hours to free this plant; Amanda, and I think Jeanette, but I don't remember the third person. I'm sorry I forgot, but grateful they did the dirty work. We (read mostly Nathan) have been staying on top of the area with a bit of weeding, a bit of spraying, and a bit of mowing. At least for the short term things look good.

Dawn Redwood...fall color in the morning sun at the south entrance to the Bonsai Penjing Museum

One of the bonuses of spending a whole day in one place is that, as the sun arcs through the sky you get to see the varying effects of different angles of sunlight. These trees were beautiful all day, but stunning in the morning when the sun first crept over the wall and ignited the Metasequoias and and while the background was still deep shade.

I worked in the Bonsai/Penjing Museum again this weekend and for the first time felt as though I had some grasp of which plants needed water and which didn't. Heretofore I haven't really felt that any of them were dry (actually, they weren't) but this time some definitely were. I like to water plants that are ready for water; conversely I am made very uncomfortable when I'm assigned to water a large number of plants and none of them need water. Curiously many of the dry plants were pines; the last few times I watered I don't think I watered any of the pines. Sometimes I find it helpful to think of water as a chemical, toxic to plants, that they nonetheless require in certain quantities. But I'm a bit odd.

I was the weekend waterer in the Greenhouse complex (and the Herb Garden), but didn't have a lot to do there.  Tony watered yesterday and he is meticulous, scrupulous, and thorough.

Solanum mammosum, Nipple Fruit....was it worth it?

I bought a seedling at the Philadelphia Flower Show and this is what its grown  into. Of course you can't tell from the picture that the plant is ~5 feet high and three feet across, nor can you tell that these fruit aren't edible. They aren't. And they don't dry! They're just decorative?...for a little while.

I'm not going to go all Wilt Chamberlain and claim that I've seen? 20,000  (40,000?) nipples, but between National Geographic, the peep shows (just kidding), and my own limited experiences I've seen a few and these fruit don't bear any particular resemblance to any that I can, at present, call to mind. Still....I'm old and I've forgotten many things.

It's surely an interesting plant and I'm glad to have grown it. I'm going to save seed, and Brad tells me that he will too but I suspect neither of us will be growing it again any time soon!

Bit your tongue! That's a leaf blower.

This is a view that many of us at the Arboretum see a lot at this time of year. There are pros and cons to the use of leaf blowers. Cons: they're unconscionably loud; the pollutants they expel smell awful and can't be good for any of us; the torque applied to our torsos can cause back problems; they''re addictive, it's hard to stop using them because they're so effective; they facilitate any bit of the "obsessive compulsive" we might have in our psyche by making it possible to remove EVERY leaf from an area.

Now for the positives: they are at least 10 times as fast as a rake; they can blow leaves out from places that would be destroyed by raking; because of their speed, it becomes reasonable to walk through a garden once or twice a week and quickly make it presentable (when you're raking an area because it takes so much longer there is either a temptation or a necessity to limit yourself to one or two visits a year to any particular area. Over those 2,3,4 weeks, the laws of thermodynamics work against you. The leaves gradually settle into positions of lowest potential energy. They flatten themselves against the ground, become wedged into small spaces, stuck on spines or prickles, glued together by water or fungal hyphae....and every time it rains they get heavier. Despite all the negatives it's easy to see why we choose to use blowers.

But wait!  there's hope for the future. Every year brings new models that are lighter, quieter, and less polluting. Sometimes technology does good things.