Cherry blossom time

Tidal Basin view, 2011

Growing up near the nation's capital, cherry blossoms were the joyful harbinger of spring. Even though the trees encircling the Tidal Basin are the best known blooms, there are masses planted throughout the area.

By the Basin, 2011

With these other trees, you could celebrate your own private cherry blossom festival: flowering branches arched over the sidewalk on the way to school, trees lined the streets of a nearby community, and a specimen brightened the backyard. If you climbed to the top of a tree in bloom, you would find yourself floating on a frothy pink sea. The fallen petals could be tossed like confetti.

Somerset Elementary School, Chevy Chase, 1998

It felt like old times to catch a glimpse of these pink flowers on a recent trip to Washington.  But then, on returning home to Massachusetts, I realized that I keep a reminder of a mid-century Maryland childhood on the walls and in the curtains of my bedroom and master bath. These cherry trees are always in bloom . . . and, marvel of nature, fruiting at the same time!

Schumacher and Co. cherries

Dumbarton Oaks, autumn

Folks rave about the beauty of the Washington spring--cherry blossoms lining the Tidal Basin, swathes of daffodils running along Rock Creek Parkway--but autumn is pretty darned lovely, too.



Last weekend, I spent an Indian Summer afternoon at my very most favorite garden, Dumbarton Oaks. I've raved about the sublime Beatrix Farrand landscape in a previous post, so here's a single highlight: the herbaceous border.

From outside the towering walls of yews bounding this garden, all you can see are billowing clouds of pale purple asters.



Inside, two 100-foot long beds of mixed perennials and annuals line a sloping central walk. At either ends are columnar yews. No fantastically exotic flowers here: just masses of zinnias, chrysanthemums, asters, ageratum, and verbena.



And this sublime beauty.

Glenn Dale azaleas

This past week, I was fortunate to enjoy azalea season down in our nation's capital. Living in New England, I don't see many azaleas that compare well with their southern cousins. Northern azaleas seem to tend towards the leggy, distorted, and small. And way too many are sheared into unnatural geometric shapes and shoved into a line of foundation plantings.

So it was a delight to have some attitude adjustment at the National Arboretum. The woodland banks of Mount Hamilton were swept with mid-season bloomers.



Even the gaudiest varieties were in shameless company among a sea of other gaudy azaleas. The eye adjusted to all that fuschia, scarlet, and Pepto-Bismol pink within a few minutes. Below, "Chanticleer" crowed out loud and clear.



Between 1946 and 1948, the Mount Hamilton hillside was planted with 10,000 Glenn Dale azaleas hybridized by the Arboretum director, Benjamin Morrison.



This lovely specimen, "Ben Morrison," is his namesake.



In addition to all these gloriously rambunctious Glenn Dale azaleas, the National Arboretum also holds a collection for which pruning is a positive thing: the azalea bonsai, like this exquisitely shaped kurume example, made you forget just how unnatural they actually are. Super-natural, perhaps!

Tudor Place, Washington, DC

At some point soon, I'll return to my own back quarter acre, but again this past weekend found me far from home. In the meantime, a sneak preview of the season was afforded by a trip to a warmer hardiness zone, namely, to the zone 7-8 Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC.

As my husband has said of the green thumbs in our nation's capital, "People down here really love their gardens." They do. And it shows.

During a few free hours, I paid a visit to Tudor Place, an early 19th-century neoclassical house set on 5 1/2 acres deep in Georgetown. The bracingly austere rear facade overlooks a series of tightly constructed outdoor rooms.



These acres combine all those evocative components of Southern gardens: the gravel paths that crunch underfoot, the heady scent of boxwood, the irrational exuberance of azaleas (sadly, now past their prime) . . .



. . . and then there are lawns, real lawns, lovely sweeps and strokes of pure green that set off the plantings along their borders.



Lawns are currently consuming an unusually large portion of my psychic space, as I'll explore further in a later post. The Tudor House lawns are inspirational.



Flanking the central path is a rose garden edged with low boxwood plantings. Perhaps echoing the Meissen collection inside the house, the roses are in sugary porcelain shades of pink and ivory--except for this very congenial Bourbon cultivar, "Variegata di Bologna."



Okay, it was all inspirational.

Digital dilly-dallying

Of course, working in a museum, I love old photographs. Lantern slides, glass plate negatives, gelatin silver prints: they're all good; and when the subject is gardens, even better.

The Archives of American Gardens at the Smithsonian Institution contains 80,000 images documenting contemporary and historic gardens. The core collection is 3,000 glass lantern slides from the 1920's and 1930's. Bliss! On a winter's evening, how pleasant to wander through the searchable database and stop to smell the virtual flowers. Best of all, you can direct your path by searching for gardens in particular places and times.



On my first trip to this database some years ago, I found several images of the Chevy Chase, Maryland, garden of renown rosarian, Whitman Cross. From the marginalia for this photograph, the rambler so happily sprawling over the stone wall on a sunny afternoon in late May, 1930, appears to be "Dr. W. van Fleet." When I showed these photographs to my mother, she told me that Mr. Cross, who lived just around the corner from her, had 2,000 roses growing in his half-acre suburban yard. Among them was the dark red rambler, "Chevy Chase," and I've wondered since if the deep crimson rose that my mother trellised by our back door was an homage to her childhood neighbor.

Viva, Mount Vernon, 1916

When recently sorting through some old photographs, I came upon this print of my grandmother in 1916. Anyone who has visited the gardens at Mount Vernon will immediately recognize the undulating picket fence and the sweeping grass path of the Upper Garden. "Straight is the line of duty, curved is the line of beauty," as the subject of this photograph would herself say.

Among the dense plantings, hollyhocks, iris, and peonies can be discerned. Another photograph shows oriental lilies in bloom.

This photograph so evokes the delights of this particular garden on a hot sunny summer day. And my grandmother, whose personal credo was "We'd have an easy life if it wasn't for our pleasures," seems to be taking her enjoyment seriously!

Dumbarton Oaks, the sublime

A weekend trip down to Washington afforded the happy opportunity to visit my very most favorite garden, Dumbarton Oaks.

These ten acres, designed by Beatrix Farrand, are magically inventive. Around every corner and over every wall, views are alternately concealed and revealed.



Deep inside a bamboo grove, a faun plays his pipes.



Inset zodiac signs pin down the corners of the almost hidden Star Garden.



And boxwood-lined paths lead up and down the terraced hillside.



I have many fond non-gardening memories of Saturday afternoons spent exploring the grounds with my brothers and of school day afternoons playing hooky down in Lovers' Lane. Quite revelatory however to see this garden through older, less distracted, eyes. None of the plants are marked, so the visitor retains the impression of a private garden rather than an arboretum.

The rose garden is frothing with leggy canes, many topped with fresh foliage and full blooms.













The center of this "garden room" is stuffed with hybrid teas, almost 1,000 according to the official record. Along the edge, a sunny border of Rosa multiflora ramblers turns the corner into a line of shade-loving anemones so well matched in color and size that at first glance they look like a single variety. What a clever sleight of hand!



None of that tidy style of gardening with each isolated plant adrift in a sea of mulch here. At DO, the garden beds are solid masses of form and color. The herbaceous border is a crashing wave of tall asters and mums.



This radiant yellow border reminds me of J.M.W. Turner's later luminous paintings, seen the previous day at the National Gallery of Art. Even the ripe pears hanging from the enclosing trees visually connect.




Towards the bottom of the hill are the very stylish tool sheds and lines of potted plants in the holding bed. Inspiration to this beleaguered field hand.



Sublime.