San Diego Zoo Safari Park Bonsai Pavilion

Today, ProfessorRoush would like to apologize in advance for leading his captured audience on yet another set of vacation photos, but in the place of more brown Kansas landscapes, I wanted to share my recent admiration of a semi-ancient garden art form; Bonsai!

On my grandson's birthday last week, Mrs. ProfessorRoush and I found ourselves in sunny Southern California, trying to keep up as the family walked through the San Diego Zoo Safari Park.  At the limits of grandparent endurance, far from the park entrance and in the back reaches of the "Outback", I was delighted to come across the Bonsai Pavilion created and maintained by the San Diego Bonsai Club.  The Pavilion opened in 1987 and is touted as the first and largest Bonsai display in the Western United States.

The Bonsai Pavilion consists of a long gallery of individual Bonsai pieces, each labeled by the tree species and with the creator's name.  I didn't count them, but there were at least 50 and perhaps up to 100 individual specimens, each displayed at eye level on an individual stone table and contained in a solemn and quiet "room" with the occasional cough of a distant tiger to break up the sense of peace. 

I'm always astonished at the beauty of Bonsai, and always tempted to take up the art form, but as the basic requirements are some moderate degree of artistic sense and a PhD in patience, I'm simply destined to fail.  Still, appreciation and admiration for the messages in each piece could have kept me rooted at the site for hours.

I've added two "vistas" of the overall Bonsai display garden as the first two photos above, and followed it by photos here of several impressive specimens with different forms and techniques illustrated.

There was an equally impressive variety of species represented in the garden, with multiple representatives of both evergreen and deciduous forms, and each specimen making maximum use of the individual bark and leaf characteristics of the individual tree.

Here at left was one of my favorites of the day, this "grove" of trees mimicking and illustrating an entire forest in a small area.   

And, at right, I wanted to convey a small illustration of the technique of Bonsai, in this case the rock suspended on the tree, weighting down and slowly bending a branch into the artist's chosen position.

All in all, whenever you chance to visit the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, and you find yourself staring at the park map, wondering if the distance and climb to the botanical displays are worth it, my advice is to reach deep down inside to gather your energy and strength and to stumble, limp, or simply crawl, if you must, to reach it but I promise the reward is worth the pain!   My compliments to the San Diego Bonsai Club!

Hello March!

My, my.  Already beginning the third month of the year and ProfessorRoush has not, until today, touched a single finger to keyboard on behalf of this blog.  I've not been so absent from these pages since, well since before I began to blog, 14 years past, and yet, I feel only a minuscule degree of remorse or indolence.

It was a brutal winter here in Kansas, my friends; a monstrous, cruel, merciless season ruled by snow and ice and wind that drove, until this week, all thoughts of my garden and any plans for spring from my mind.  Central Kansas received several one-in-a-decade snows, with one early January beast dropping 15 inches here, the 4th deepest snowfall on record, shutting down transportation for days and burying the garden in drifts that took nearly a month to completely disappear.  Add on a week of continual below-zero Fahrenheit temperatures in mid-February and an absolute low of -15ºF one night, and I wonder if there will even be a garden this year.  

My garden today is nearly lifeless, and its focal points are now garden ornaments laid flat by blizzards (at top), still-red canes of roses that show no signs yet of revival (above), and the tight buds of dormant lilacs, however promising the latter may be (at right). I haven't begun my traditional garden-bed-clearing, at least two weeks later now than normal, but then, the garden itself is at least 3 weeks behind its normal patterns.  

Winter Jasmine

There are a couple bits of evident life out there, however.   I found a lonely, yet bright, spot of singular sunshine with two adjacent unabashedly bright yellow blooms at the base of a south-exposure-oriented clump of Winter Jasmine (Jasminum nudiflorum), as pictured at left.  Also, several daffodil clumps can be found timidly poking out of the still-frozen ground, brave, yet foolhardy, pioneers into the 2025 growing season (below).   That's it at present.  No Puschkinia, no White Forsythia, not even a single hint of Scilla (which bloomed last year, according to my notes, on February 24th!).

Daffodils!

weeds! (aarrggg!)

I'm currently choosing to overlook the weeds, as they do as weeds do, madly bursting forth everywhere in a fervid attempt to cover any bare ground and reproduce.  There is never rest for a gardener, and the endless wars of order versus chaos continue with renewed vigor each spring. 

As I wrote these few paragraphs, taking longer-than-normal because evidently I'm out-of-practice (and apparently subconsciously going for a hyphenation record here today), I can testify that, glancing to my left out the window, I was thrilled to see a bright blue male bluebird flitting about the front garden, likely fresh from his migration flight and ready to choose a nest and mate. 

Blest be ye, Bluebird, and blest be thy brood as the days begin to warm.    

Sweet Dreams Are Made of This

And, pray tell ProfessorRoush, what have we here?  Which of these many seeds is the next KnockOut, the rose that will take the world by storm?  Which will become a favorite fragrant friend, pink and demure and beautiful like no other rose?   Which will become simply a thorny thicket, barely worthy of being called Rose?   White, yellow, red, or pink; will the color be drab or vibrant, pure or muted?   Will there be fragrance and later hips, or will each underwhelming blossom fade away to brown paper?   Disease-free and hardy, or mildewed, black-spotted, and dying?  Rugose, matte, or glossy?  Such promise in a pile of seeds, such anticipation for that first pair of leaves. 

ProfessorRoush is trying again, this time with Science instead of blind faith.   Every year for a number of years I've collected rose hips, like these, waited until spring, and planted them, hoping to grow a rose of my very own, with the result of failure, mostly, over and over.   I've kept the hips in the garage, in the barn, and refrigerated but always left the seeds in the hips over winter, growing one or two roses of my own through the years, with those that survived the damp and fungus being less than inspiring when they actually made it to bloom.   I've nursed a non-remonant pink rose that finally succumbed to Rose Rosette, and I have another in the garden right now, a two-year old, whose blooms appear sporadically and resemble 'Heritage', but whose bush struggles.

But, this year, I put about 50 hips, from 'Fru Dagmar Hastrup', 'Morden Sunrise', 'Snow Pavement', 'Heritage', 'Therese Bugnet', and many other shrubs into the refrigerator, Rugosa-Hybrids and Canadian roses, and Old Garden roses all into one bag.  This weekend, caught up from other work over the past six weeks, I found time to consult Dr. Internet and looked up what I should really be doing with them.   I learned about stratification in the "proper" manner, and vermiculite, and proper moisture, and, finally, what to watch for to know when to plant them.  I learned about how to transplant the seedlings, how to fight mildew and rot, and how to introduce light in the proper way.

In about 3 months, when the first seed germinates, I'll begin again; first downstairs in a lighted window with extra grow lights, and then, as spring arrives, transplanted outside.   I have hope, you see, hope that the honey bees and bumble bees have selected genes far better than I ever could, and hope that "internet experts" actually know what they talking about.  Hope that somewhere in this pile of seeds is a rugosa that will rule the world.  "Hope springs eternal in the human breast; Man never is, but always to be blest" said Alexander Pope in An Essay on Man.  Who am I to disagree?  

(Bonus points for those who can put the title together with the last sentence and name the group and song starting with those lyrics!)

(And, oh  yes, the words "do not discard" are for Mrs. ProfessorRoush's attention.  One season's hips mysteriously disappeared from the refrigerator a few years back.)

Instantaneous Shifts

 It seems to happen in an instant, these changeling days as I grow ever older.   Seasonal changes that used to take...well, a whole season...now seemingly occur in days, sometimes hours.  Just yesterday, (or on the 11th of November, to be honest and accurate) I was out and taking a picture of what I suspected was the last rose of the season, the English rose 'Heritage', seen here along with the very cold honeybee, the latter frantically gathering pollen to store away against a long winter.

And then, suddenly, instantaneously, this morning my southern view from the kitchen window turned from this colorful scene, which has been unchanged for several weeks:

To this, a Dicksonian still life created by a completely unpredicted and clandestine snow:

My front (northward) view this morning was no different in tone or despair, a world untouched yet by human or dog and bland and frigid, converted in an instantaneous, almost magical shift from autumn to winter, regardless of the date on my human-created calendar.

And now I'm relegated to joining my garden's Rip Van Winkle by awakening to a world changed, transformed both in appearance and liveliness, as cold and dead and hard and outright unwelcoming today as it was warm and sunny and vibrant yesterday.   I begin a winter inside, quiet weekends and periods of staring out the windows, sleeping under an opened book just as my cement friend outside.  It will be some time before I venture outside again to work and play, to smell and run my fingers through warm dirt, to plant life and nurture its growth.  I sleep and wait inside, hopefully not for the 20 years of Irving's tale, but at least fretfully waiting until the world changes back, awaiting a new year of life reborn.