Common lilacs (Syringa vulgaris, 364-2012) flower in 200-year-old hedge on Bussey Hill. Photo by Jonathan Damery. Among the most incongruous facts of the coronavirus era is that spring pushes forward with or without us. Our ways of life have been scrambled into unimaginable forms. Yet daffodils (Narcissus) and early blooming shrubs did not notice. Forsythia popped up like yellow raincoats on a swampy day—over in this yard, along that path—brilliant but stark reminders of the sun hidden from view. Their unrelenting arrival felt like someone smiling when you are upset, making matters even wors ..read more

Flowers of the spike winterhazel (Corylopsis spicata, 10544*A). Photo by Jonathan Damery. 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 to prevent horticulturists from inadvertently introducing pests and diseases on imported plants. Arboretum plant collector Er ..read more

Four Colorado spruce (Picea pungens, 1476 and 22808) rise above their neighbors on a foggy day at the Arnold Arboretum. Photo by Jonathan Damery. 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 examine plants along the way. On the return trip, in August, the Grays made a special diversion in central Col ..read more

The Arnold Arboretum’s juniper collection is space of light and texture. Photo by Jonathan Damery. 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 relish, pulled out sprawling juniper shrubs that have engulfed the porch? How many times has a chainsaw licked the fragrant wood of an eastern redcedar (J. virginiana ..read more

A Hubei wingnut (Pterocarya hupehensis, 15390*B) is among the Arboretum trees turning 100 in 2020. Photo by Jonathan Damery. 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, while bean pots simmer at home. The background hum of the roads—Centre Street, the Arborway—would be absent, the roads quiet, while most people stay ..read more

Leaves of the American beech (Fagus grandifolia, 14585) turn copper in fall. Photo by Jonathan Damery. 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 and guidebooks. Chief among the copper-colored plants at the Arboretum is a sprawling grove of American beech (Fagus grandifolia, accession 14585), which spreads ac ..read more

Fruit on Photinia villosa (934-85*D). Photo by Jonathan Damery. 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 chattering, well-dressed mice who carefully stored crabapples and sundry seeds for the winter, warming their homes with thistledown carpets. At the Arnold Arboretum, these fall fantasies are vivid in the Bradley Rosaceou ..read more

The arching silhouette of Quercus variabilis (1581-77*F). Photo by Jonathan Damery. 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 also, of course, the season for plant collecting expeditions. (The reason for this convergence goes without saying.) When I think of plant collecting in the modern era—the time of airplanes and autom ..read more

Fruit ripens on Francis Parkman’s cucumbertree (Magnolia acuminata, 15154*D). Photo by Jonathan Damery. 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 channel is continually shifting. Islands are formed, and then washed away, and while the old forests on one side are undermined and swept off, a young growth springs ..read more

Steeplebush (Spiraea tomentosa) produces showy pink flowers at the Arnold Arboretum. Photo by Jonathan Damery. 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 the spot—fountains of fine twigs spilling well beyond the brim. We tucked a few transplants into the back of a larger perennial bed, but the o ..read more