Today we went to Longwood Gardens, which is a an estate with a large, stone greenhouses. It’s a former du Pont estate with a world-class conservatory. It’s an amazing place, with room after room of gardens, fountains, and plants in different conditions. There’s a children’s play area with amusing fountains, a short stream, a lawn, a curtain of orchids, citrus fruits, a banana room, a collection of magnificent bonsai, and more.
This was new to me, anyway. I recognized it as a ground cherry but the waitress said it was a gooseberry. I looked it up and found it is a ground cherry that’s sometimes called the Cape gooseberry. The taste reminded me of tangerine.
The information and picture came from the Tradewinds Specialty and Heirloom Vegetables and Fruits page.
Las Pilitas nursery specializes in native Californian plants. I looked at manzanitas: there are about 40 species of them. They have a secition of hard-to-classify oaks, with this motto at the bottom of the page:
The only way to succeed is to fail, repeadedly, repeatabley, repeateditly, repetetely, ah, #@!
There’s a sentiment that I can appreciate.
Here’s something interesting:
Emerald Carpet manzanita is an evergreen groundcover… This is a hybrid between Arctostaphylos uva-ursi and Arctostaphylos nummularia.
That’s odd; I thought uva-ursi was the bear-berry, which grows in Canada. Could they be related?
Cullen Gardens used to have acres of gardens surrounding its nursery site in Whitby. The site was laid out by Len Cullen, owner of Cullen Gardens (a gardening store chain). It included a wildflower meadow. But the town of Whitby bought the land in 2005 and Mr. Cullen died last year. The upper gardens may be maintained, but in the valley the wildflower meadow is neglected. And wild-flower lovers fear that their garden will be sold to developers.
[Erika] Thimm remembers how beautiful her site with 250 species of native Ontario plants once was – and could be again. She’s formed a group called Friends of Cullen Central Park, as the site is now known, to preserve the wildflowers and speak out to protect the green space from being sold to a developer.As the town mulls what to do with the $10 million site, Thimm’s nature lovers aren’t letting grass grow under their feet. On Aug. 15, the first anniversary of Cullen’s death, they were at the park yanking weeds and clearing overgrowth.
Follow the link to see a picture and read the Star’s tear-jerking story.
The peak of the cherry blossoms were a week or two ago, but the apples are still blooming, the oaks are covered with tiny pink leaves, and we even found a late forsythia bush. The white flowers in the grass are white violets.
The Mediterranean Fan Palm, Chamaerops humilis, is resistant to wind and drought, and, for a palm tree, to cold. The leaves are arranged in a symmetrical crown up to 3 metres wide and the tree grows only 4 - 5 metres tall. The leaves range from blue-green to grey-green to grey-yellow or yellow-green. Older trees can have several smaller trunks around the main trunk.
Here’s a conversation about growing them as far north as Seattle or Vancouver.
I took this picture at the Fullerton Arboretum in California.
Previous palm: the Everglades Palm
The Everglades Palm, or Acoelorraphe wrightii, is a member of the Arecaceae family. It is a clump-forming palm that is found in southern Florida, the West Indies, and Central America.
(Photograph taken by me at Fullerton Arboretum)
Previous palm: Palm au naturel
Next palm: Mediterranean Fan Palm
During my trip to California in January-February, I visited the Fullerton Arboretum in Orange, CA. I was fascinated by the variety of palm trees in their collection and tried to take pictures of both trees and their identifying labels. I’ve been wondering when and how to publish them and if people would be interested. Today is Palm Sunday so it seems like a good time to start with a Sunday palm.
This is what at least some ordinary palm trees look like without teams of gardners to trim off the dead leaves every so often:
Next palm: Everglades palm
In the depths of cold February, I found potted amaryllis growing indoors….
