About this time each year I start itching to see the first blooms of spring. Thankfully, the Orangery at Denver Botanic Gardens is currently loaded with colorful orchid blossoms. Come visit our Orchid Showcase to help quench your thirst for that burst of spring color.
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After several months of bare tree branches, I am ready for the arrival of spring and with it returning to Colorado’s flower filled natural areas. The gardeners I know spend these short days and long cold nights perusing seed and plant catalogs to gear up for the next season.
In lieu of shiny catalogs, botanists, like myself, and mycologists work with specimens (mycologists study organisms in the kingdom Fungi). Specimens are individual plants or fungi that have been dried and archived into a collection. These plants and fungal specimens are collected as part of a scientific study to document species diversity and distribution.
The specimens themselves serve as a voucher or as a representative of the population for future botanical and mycological research. For botanists, anxious to get out into the field, specimens allow us to continue our work even when the plants or fungi are dormant for the season. Likely for this reason, in the 1500’s, the Italian botanist and physician Luca Ghini developed the practice of preserving plants by pressing and drying them when freshly collected, and then
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A Tangelo blooms in the Denver Botanic Gardens Orangery in winter.
Winter is busy, and not just for Colorado skiers. Gardeners are planning, dreaming and preparing; growers are tending indoor blooms; and propagators are starting plants to be ready for warm weather: busy! Evergreens are balancing photosynthesis and drought, orchids are delivering on the promise of color and beauty, and seeds are trying to intuit the fine line between germinating too soon and too late: busy! For some gardeners, winter means that their busy, short days can’t hold time to appreciate each bloom and everything that is happening.
You can’t always look ahead either. It was pure chance that I saw this white Tangelo blossom on a snowy day. (The Orangery at the Gardens looks lovely with the orchid showcase throughout.)
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Helleborus niger, blooming January 26, 2012 at my house
There are a number of plants that are clever enough to bloom during the winter months: none
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It’s right around this time of year every year that I start to really crave spring, and all that comes with it. While we all still must wait patiently, beauty and color can still be found in the depths of winter. There are many succulents that love to bloom when the days are shorter and the temperatures are cooler, specifically, succulents hailing from the southern hemisphere.
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As the Greek government, its creditors, and the bankers at the International Monetary Fund continue to discuss Eurobonds and interest rates, my thoughts have wandered from the European Central Bank to another sort of bank altogether—the seed bank.
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Usually I get to see the look on people’s faces when I give them a bag of delicious produce in winter from my passive solar greenhouse. You should have seen MY face the other day when Cord came home with a large bag of vine-ripened, delicious, juicy winter-grown tomatoes! From somebody else’s greenhouse!
Cord finished building a 44’ state-of-the-art totally sustainable passive solar greenhouse late last August and the owners lost no time in getting tomato plants in the ground soon after. They planted large potted tomatoes in deep beds at the base of the wall of stored water – the thermal mass.
Now, in January, they are 10 feet tall and bursting with tomatoes. Not only were they grown in winter – but with passive solar. And, oh yeah, at 8,000 feet in the mountains!
No tomato ever tasted so good. The juice ran down our chins. I started laughing while I was eating
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This time of year, our greenhouse staff, with help from volunteers and other members of the horticulture department, embarks on the task of cleaning the seed that was collected throughout the warmer seasons from the grounds and surrounding areas. In 2011, we collected approximately 600 different species,
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