Bookish Gardener

Amo amas amelanchier

Spring's imperative: to visit all the amelanchiers at the Arboretum when they're in bloom once a year. Their finery is on display for only a short time, and this week is that week. Amelanchier is a delicious-to-say botanical name; Wiki-know-it-all puts paid to the urban legend (well, a legend, probably not urban) that its common name of "serviceberry" comes from its bloomtime coinciding with the time when the frozen ground has thawed sufficiently to allow digging of burial plots. Serviceberry, shadbush, Juneberry: they're all lovely. The delicate white blossoms drape like Chantilly lace over deeply colored, athletically sinewed limbs and branches. Even those with abstractly improvised branching pose artfully (although I just saw one in a commercial landscape hedge-trimmed into a lozenge; don't do them like that). With some, the white raiment shines bright against the emerging lime green foliage; with others, the flowers and leaves merge into a sepia haze that somehow tints their surroundings too, and transports you, wibbly-wobbly, to a past time not your own. Glimpse them while you can; it won't be long until the amelanchiers change into their street clothes and recede into the crowd.

Promenade in green

"53º Cloudy." It's a falling mist that only aspires to rain. The garden is a quiet monochrome of green after the weekend's first fresh lawn mow and a lively thunder-and-lightning show last night. It's the stage of the season when everything is up but the blooms are accents only to the expanse of green foliage, the promenade in green.