In a living collection comprising thousands of distinctive plants from around the world, bigleaf magnolia (Magnolia macrophylla) makes quite a big impression. Living up to its common and scientific names (“macrophylla” literally means “big leaf” in Latin), bigleaf magnolia bears the largest simple leaf (up to 30 inches long) and flowers (up to a foot […]
When it comes to flowering ornamentals, form matters. A hybrid crabapple developed at the Arboretum more than sixty years ago is a case in point.
April is the perfect month to catch the bright flowering of Forsythia. Spring is manifest in these golden-flowered, deciduous shrubs, and the Arnold Arboretum Horticultural Library curates a number of brilliant Ektachrome color images of Forsythia like the one featured here, captured by an unknown photographer on Beech Path looking toward the ponds, available through […]
In the depths of winter, time feels endless. There will always be another weekend to haul cross-country skis from the closet. There will always be more evenings to hunker down with the ever-growing stack of bedside books. But then, suddenly, spring happens, and those best-laid plans vanish with the snowmelt. Temperatures bounce and runners emerge […]
Compared to the convivial leaf-peeping of fall and the blossom daze of spring, winter walks feel more personal, more private. Snow muffles the sound of tires on the streets. Voices are muted beneath scarves. Yet snow, when it happens, focuses the eyes. The fox that might have slipped by unnoticed in fall, ducking into the […]
In many gardening circles, the mere mention of bamboo is enough to cause nightmarish shivers. Visions of voracious overgrowth devouring shrubs, birdbaths, and toolsheds inevitably haunt the mind. Here at the Arnold Arboretum, our largest stand of bamboo (Phyllostachys dulcis, accession 1019-89) covers a slope on Peters Hill, where it was planted thirty years ago. […]
After you’ve sung “Auld Lang Syne” and shot confetti scraps into the air, eaten the silvery herring or popped the twelve grapes (whatever your auspicious New Year’s traditions may be), it’s time to start humming “Pomp and Circumstance.” One hundred years ago, the Arnold Arboretum received the final seed shipments from Ernest Henry Wilson’s sixth […]
Trees normally like to stay put. Some grow as colonial masses, pushing up new stems feet away from the original trunk, even covering a whole mountainside (as with the quaking aspen, Populus tremuloides)—all one plant, slowly spreading—yet it scarcely takes an experienced field botanist to know that tree locomotion is primarily the realm of whimsical […]
As a rule, trees are always redder on the other side of the fence—the next town over or several hours north. Maples (Acer) are beginning to turn extravagant shades at the Arboretum, yet the leaf-lorn, like myself, always wonder whether the show will completely materialize, or whether a storm, like the one that whipped through […]
On the morning of the fall equinox, I awoke at a Maine campsite, where the ground was sheathed with frost. The calendar page had officially flipped from summer, and when I returned to Boston, rain and cool evenings followed suit. Although most trees are still green, homeowners must be stocking up with leaf bags at […]
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