It rained today at the National Arboretum....a lot

Runoff from the Ellipse filled a small corrugated culvert and flooded both the upper and lower sections of the Fern Valley wet meadow. Bullfrogs croaked their appreciation. On a larger scale it pooled in the infiltration basin and the storm water pond on the Ellipse proper. The cattails were happy. In the Asian Collections, the tropicals finally had enough water; this Musa 'Basjoo' has grown from 2 to 9 feet in three months. It fell in torrents on the Administration Building mid-renovation. Towards the end of the day the sun crept out tentatively but retreated quickly and the rains resumed.

My drive to work this morning was one of the oddest I can remember. I left just after 6:00 am half an hour before sunrise (~6:40 and later every day) so the hour combined with the clouds made it pitch dark. It wasn't rained when I left but within a mile I was enveloped in heavy rain. And then out of it by the gas station, about 5 miles. It began to fall again in earnest before I finished pumping but still before I'd gone the 2 miles to the highway it'd slacked off again. Three miles later as soon as I turned on the Parkway the rains resumed for about a mile at which point they stopped again and the sky lightened enough that, had it not been drizzling, I'd have turned off my headlights! Five miles later as I turned into the Arboretum the skies darkened and the deluge resumed. Things continued along those lines all day and as a bonus we had incredibly loud thunder. Movie thunder.Endless rumbles of reverberations and echos.

70% chance tomorrow. And three new tropical storms forming.

Lycoris radiata flowering under Acer pubipalmatum in the Asian Collections

It poured last night and off and on today. For three weeks we've had all the rain we could want without flooding. Actually, it's going to bring the rainfall to the year up to average. It was tough dealing with the drought through July, but all's well that ends well. In the collection we have a lot of Lycoris squamigera, the commonest of the "naked ladies" (so called because they send up flowering shoot without any leaves). The pink form is purportedly a triploid hybrid of two species and flowers a few weeks before this species.

Lycoris are sometimes called "resurrection" or "surprise" lilies because it takes less than a week for the flowering shoot to emerge from the soil, elongate, and then flower; sometimes a lot less time. All the rain we've had has helped drive these flowering shoots out of the ground. I first noticed them last Thursday and now they're flowering. The downside to all Lycoris is the death of their foliage in the middle of the spring garden. The plants will produce clumps of strappy leaves later this fall that will last through the winter. Unfortunately they go dormant in the spring producing sodden masses of rotting foliage. Siting is important!