In the spring of 1846, Francis Parkman, a 23-year-old Harvard graduate, boarded a steamboat in St. Louis, bound westward for the Rocky Mountains. “The Missouri is constantly changing its course, wearing away its banks on one side, while it forms new ones on the other,” Parkman wrote of his first impressions on the river. “Its […]
I’ve been known to turn up my nose to spireas. My parents had old-fashioned Vanhoutte spireas (Spiraea × vanhouttei) lining their driveway, and several years back, when I helped with garden renovations, I recommended popping them out. Vanhouttes can grow more than eight feet high (unless aggressively pruned), and the plants were too large for […]
It’s said, in the Midwest, where I was raised, that you can stand in the middle of a cornfield on a summer day, close your eyes, and hear the stalks and leaves expanding. At the Arboretum, the growth is seemingly silent, but still, the plants are racing headlong into summer, with lanky shoots that, in […]
The small, fast Telico River is a jewel of east Tennessee’s Cherokee National Forest. Its clear waters tumble past moss-covered riverbanks while mountain laurels (Kalmia latifolia) abound on the steep, rocky hillsides. My father often fly-fishes there, casting for the brook trout that sway beneath the rapids. When the Arboretum’s mountain laurels explode with flowers […]
Please don’t ask me to identify a hawthorn—or rather to distinguish one from another. As a bookwormish horticulture student, memorizing leaf shapes and bud characteristics for plant identification exams, I learned only the basics. In a house yard in the Midwest, I would feel confident saying that a hawthorn with layered horizontal branches and tear-shaped […]
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 […]
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