EVENTS Calendar

SPRING IS IN THE AIR…

Chicago gardeners may have forgotten that spring does not always arrive with the calendar, nor does it always usher itself in accompanied by bird song, fragrant blossoms, and gentle zephyrs…especially not this year.

tulips Officially, the first day of spring 2008 is March 20, the vernal equinox, when the sun moves across the equator in such a way as to cleave equal hours of daylight and nighttime throughout the world. We’ve anticipated this season of renewal for weeks, even months, wondering when our winter-without-end would, in fact, end. The early time change of March 9 heightened our hopes, waking us to the gradual lifting of light, and the subtle change in the sun’s angle (best seen as it reflected off the persistent snow and ice still clinging to the northern exposures of our gardens). Spring is arriving, slowly to be sure, but as it takes its time, it offers us an extended period to witness, and savor, its gifts.

At the Chicago Botanic Garden, signs of spring are everywhere, multiplying quickly as sunlight and warming temperatures eliminate the receding snow and expose new life pushing through moist soil. Last year, the Bulb Garden boasted snowdrops in January, earlier than they have ever appeared there, but this year they will be “back to normal,” nodding their bell-shaped white heads in time with yellow winter aconite, early crocus, and sapphire squill. Walkers through this garden are guaranteed new flowers with each new day.

The reliable blossoms of vernal witch hazel are usually the earliest to bloom of all shrubs at the Garden. These late-winter, fragrant flowers feature spiky yellow petals with red inner calyxes, sometimes coexisting with dried witch hazel foliage that clings up and down the branches over winter. Look for them along the walkway to the Landscape Garden.

The sunlit brick walls of the English Walled Garden provide protection from March winds and late frosts, and the radiating warmth creates micro-climates and encourages early blooms from tender plants like Lenten rose or bear claw hellebore. Check for flowers in unusual tones of apple green or dusty rose. Little bulbs, planted by the thousands here, will emerge this season in sequence, blooming first in the garden’s open sunny spaces. Joining them throughout the garden’s borders will be stately tulips, allium, fritillaries and foxtail lilies.

No bulbs trumpet the arrival of warmer months in a more welcome manner than the Garden’s signature collection of narcissus. Hundreds of thousands of them are massed outside the Garden wall, on the open hillsides of Evening Island and Bird Island, in parking lots and throughout the interior gardens, where they peek through rich leaf compost before blooming in magnificent clumps of yellow, white, apricot, and orange.

tulips Even before the first spring ephemeral blooms, or the first native tree leafs out in McDonald Woods, visitors will notice the effects of the Garden’s conservation and restoration efforts on this 100-acre native oak woodland, as well as along the northern border of the Garden on Lake Cook Road, where so many invasive plants have been removed. As sunlight is now able to filter to the floor of the woods, native plants can thrive, and the health of the community of plants existing there will greatly improve. Resident raptors will soon be joined by flocks of migrating song birds, water and shoreline fowl, as well as birds of prey, making the entire Garden, with its ideal combination of open water and diversity of plant material, one of the top birding spots in Chicagoland.

Should spring dally, teasing us in fits and starts, we can find comfort in the warm, moist air of the Garden’s Greenhouses, where hundreds of tropical, semi-tropical, and desert plants pay no attention to the inclement weather outside. Here, they bloom brightly in shocking tones of Indian pink, tangerine, cerise, and chartreuse, confirming once again the simple power of plants to lift our spirits and bring warmth to more than our cold hands.

No season is more longed for, or dreamed about, than spring, perhaps because it rubs shoulders with the harshest months of the year. This spring, discover daily miracles and celebrate the plant world at the Garden in all its optimism, color, and beauty.