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 […]
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 […]
![Girl holding metal bowl of mushrooms for sale along Highway 214 between Yushu [Gyêgu] and Bayan Har Shan](https://www.arboretum.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/boufford-mushrooms-china-1995-60x60.jpg)
Hi Tom, thanks for your question. In Boston, marcescent (...)
This reminds us of the special wonders of winter - and the (...)
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