Winter Interest Plants         

Winter has come for real this year. I bundled up and walked through the arboretum Wednesday, looking for a plant to feature. I passed the Dawn Redwood with its armpits, the Paperbark Maple with its peeling bark, the Winterberry Hollies covered with red berries, and the Oakleaf Hydrangea holding up its dried flower heads on exfoliating stems. All of these are former plants of the month.  The movement of a small bird under the Norway Spruce caught my eye. I want to learn more about birds, their names, habits, and what they eat. If you provide food, water, shelter, and places to raise young, your yard can be listed as a Certified Wildlife Habitat. Plants can provide three of these four basic habitat needs. It’s a great way to fill your yard with birds. The arboretum is a Certified Wildlife Habitat.
I ended up in the conifer garden. This garden was installed three years ago with small plants. The day we planted them, it looked like a dwarf conifer garden indeed. Now they are spreading out and growing up until some are touching. It’s so pleasurable to see how the garden is taking shape—like watching your kids grow up. Living things are each unique. Each family has strong resemblances, but each individual is different in some way from all the rest. That keeps plants and people interesting.
I walked down to the wildflower garden. We have two new big iron gates. By spring we will have a fence erected. And then the wildflowers will be protected from the foraging deer. We’ll be able to plant cardinal flowers, trillium, and Solomon Seal—deer delicacies. If we can keep the deer out, we can have a native wildflower garden for all to enjoy. Please keep the gates closed.
The fragrance garden was redesigned in 2009. New fragrant plants were put in. I can’t wait to see how it looks and smells in three years. If it’s like the conifer garden, not much will appear different. And then one day you’ll be walking by it and you’ll be struck by how much it’s grown.
So I didn’t pick one plant to feature this month. A quiet walk in the cold was like visiting with old friends, some old, some young, some green, some bare, all familiar, yet with some aspect unnoticed until now.
Join us for our winter walk this Wednesday, the 13th, at 11:00 with our old (that is former) arboretum director, Toby Bost.