By the beginning of October 1918, the influenza pandemic was racing through Boston. Businesses had been shuttered. Schools had been closed. A local conference for the National Association of Gardeners was postponed. Meanwhile, at the Arnold Arboretum, director Charles Sprague Sargent was finding it increasingly difficult to navigate a quarantine of a different nature—one designed […]
In the summer of 1872, mere months after the Arnold Arboretum had been established, Harvard botanist Asa Gray embarked on a cross-country trip with his wife Jane Loring Gray. The trip was enabled by the recently completed Pacific Railroad, which connected the eastern and western rail networks, and Gray would disembark, at station stops, to […]
To walk in the Arnold Arboretum’s juniper collection is, in some sense, to walk among garden specimens that could have been. For many gardeners, junipers—that is, the horticultural members of the genus Juniperus—are the classic case of the right plant in the wrong spot. How many times have new owners of old homes, with justified […]
Like clockwork this December: every Tuesday has brought snow, at least for the first three weeks. If the pattern keeps up, a fresh dusting will arrive on New Year’s Eve, transforming the Arboretum landscape, on the first of the year, into a hushed and brilliant scene. I can imagine neighbors walking though, for fresh air, […]
Copper is the final shade of fall. Leaves that were once golden have tarnished, and reds and oranges have long ago quilted the ground. It is still fall, undeniably so, with temperatures hovering in jacket weather, but it’s now a latter-day version of the season, with muted tones that don’t feature as charismatically on postcards […]
The moist and moldering days of fall are upon us: wet leaves trodden into the soil, fleshy fruits turning to muck in the garden. These are weeks of surrender and senescence, although in another sense, these are weeks ripe with potential. It makes me think fondly of children’s books that I grew up with, featuring […]
I have no numbers or statistics to prove this, but this fall, at least locally, appears to be quite good for acorns. The roads around Jamaica Plain are covered with an increasingly dense flour of smashed red oak (Quercus rubra) acorns, and the bounty has been plummeting much more profusely than last year. Fall is […]
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 […]
Oh, great memories George! Can you imagine the number of (...)
Oh, I remember my old red friend so well! For several years (...)
Why thank you! Plants inspire us to be creative in many (...)