Enjoy Your Visit — WALK THE GARDEN

Celebrate Winter

PHOTO: winter walk In winter, a well-designed garden tells a story of texture, color, and shape, speaking through the interest of evergreens and berries, textural barks, and colorful stems.

PHOTO: winter walk An outstanding winter walk begins with a stroll down the Linden Allée’s formal avenue of symmetrical trees. Notice the blues, greens, and golds of more than 200 types of evergreens. Veer left just past the Rose Terrace into the English Walled Garden to notice its “bones,” the structural elements that give it character. These include a pergola, balustrades, weeping trees, and yew hedges, accented with such color as the red of crab apples and orange of possumhaw berries.

Sansho-En, the Garden of the Three Islands, is considered by many people to be most beautiful in winter. A walk in the Malott Japanese Garden may include snow viewing and shadow watching, where trees and shrubs create landscapes visible only when the world is white. Designed as a "stroll garden" with curving paths, it discloses its plant treasures gradually, never at once. Pines are pruned to open up distant landscapes, framing perfect views of lakes, grassy hills, woods, and gardens beyond. Nature imitates nature as shapes and forms repeat themselves — snowy mounds might be boulders, buried evergreens, or clouds. There is wisdom in such simplicity.

The fernleaf maple, Acer japonicum 'Aconitifolium', stripped of its lemon-lime leaves that blaze red in fall, in winter reveals a smooth, gray trunk with coral red side branches — a splendid shrub when set against the snow. The deep furrows of the large sugar maple, Acer saccharum, are echoed in the strong trunk of the neighboring weeping maple, Acer saccharinum, 'Beebe's Cutleaf Weeping'. But look more closely: Like colored stickers pasted on the bark, small bluish white and yellow patches of lichen attach themselves to this weeping tree. It is a sight we surely would have missed in summer. These maples and more await your winter visit to the Malott Japanese Garden.

PHOTO: winter walk Brisk walking in a tranquil setting, along with nutritious food, can improve health and fitness, experts say. In Japan, families plan formal visits to parks and public gardens to view the landscape freshly painted with snow. In our white wintry world, snow covers the land and the lakes, blurring the boundaries between water and earth. The islands themselves resemble domes of meringue; this shape repeats itself as heavily pruned shrubs laden with snow puffs mirror the likeness of Mother Earth. The Island of Everlasting Happiness, unattainable for mortals, appears to hover, cloudlike, over the white water.

Smooth lumps of yews and junipers, almost indiscernible beneath the snow, echo the natural form of boulders and clouds, their tightly pruned shapes covered with marshmallow fluff. Twiggy shrubs are swallowed by snow, only the tips of their branches visible through the white surface. These plants are safely insulated from winter's bite by two feet of white padding.

The fuzzy flower heads of ornamental grasses peek through the snowbanks, waving wildly in the wind. Their shadows tell a different story, one of mittened children calling impatiently to their friends, urging them on to play.

Walking in a white winterland muffles certain sounds while intensifying others. No phones; no engines; no music; no snow plows. Grasses rustle. Snow boots crunch. Chickadees call. Wind whispers at first...but soon changes its tune to a whistle. Early afternoon lengthens the shadow play, stretching the figures across the snow, moving them down to the valley where land and snowy water meet. Winter spirits are at work in the Malott Japanese Garden.


English Walled Garden	Bridge to Malott Japanese Garden