Thanksgiving! A few of the blessings in my life.

                                             Myself, Jan, Ryan Keating and Adam Black

From a recent much too brief hike at Roxborough State Park the day after our local Rocky Mountain Chapter's wonderful Symposium. Adam was the terrific Keynote speaker--I am so grateful to have him as a friend. Ryan has been a blessing: he built the crevice garden at my home--not to mention dozens of other gardens I admire--starting with Yampa River Botanic Park's incredible crevice garden he created over a decade ago that goes from strength to strength. He helped transform Chatfield Farm's crevice garden into one of the most extraordinary gardens I've ever seen--full of treasures as well as fine rock work. And great new things are in store for Ryan and Adam--that I'm sure of! And Jan has my back, quite literally here: a blessing for me in my life every day.

I can't believe this is the only picture I took with Scott and Michelle Beuerlein on our visit to Cincinnati. Scott organized the Symposium on Native Plants I spoke at last Saturday: it was his 40th symposium he'd organized in just over a dozen years or so--practically all of them sell-outs (this one sold out months ago--almost 300 attendees!). An ordinary human would be wiped out--but Scott and Michelle took Sunday off to tour Jan and me around Cincinnati--a city I've come to love. Scott is casting a long, long, long shadow on American Horticulture--his interviews in that magazine alone are riveting, as are his other essays. And you should follow his Rants! How fortunate I am to have treasured friends like these across our continent (and beyond). Much to be thankful for! (By the way, if you go to Cincy, reserve a day for Union Station: that stunning monument of Art Deco is chockablock full of museums, restaurants--and yes, trains! I caution against their gift shop, however, which robbed me of nearly $100!)

At our e Rocky Mountain Chapter meeting, Steve Aegerter received recognition from the North American Rock Garden Society--he's helped transform our chapter, which had been sputtering, into a dynamo once again. Our symposia had limped along for decades with 50 or so attendees--THIS year at his command we charged people to attend and had 97 attendees (we did have lunches and plant sales and more goodies Steve cooked up.). Steve is the very embodiment of "bon vivant"--as the screen behind him demonstrates. He and his wife Kathy have become two of our closest friends (along with another couple nearby) with whom every few weeks we enjoy Gin and Tonics and delicious repasts in one another's gardens in the golden light of afternoon.

I am lucky to work at an extraordinary place full of fantastically talented people. Chief among these is the fellow with the black hat--definitely the wrong color. Mike Kintgen has been a terrific friend, exemplary colleague and joy to me. These two gentlemen brighten my life day in week out!  

On Dia de los Muertos early this month most of my clan ZOOMED together to honor my eldest nephew, Andoni Taylor, whom we lost this past spring. I hastily assembled this Ofrenda (you can't believe the masterpieces my beloved nieces put together) with tokens symbolic of Andoni's passion for music, food, photography and so much more, as well as Indian pottery and bells betokening his father whom we lost three years ago on December 1, 2022. This is the first Thanksgiving (except for 1978) we are not spending with any of Jan or my closer families. We shall have a postponed Turkey day Saturday with dear friends from Oregon, and we're girding ourselves for a transcontinental trip to Chile in five days--don't feel too sorry for us!

                            A random shot of the Colorado foothills I took last August

I am grateful for too many things: this blog post would stretch on for several miles if I were to speak of the many people, places and tokens that grace my life day in, day out. But having been born and having lived MOST of my life in Colorado has to be one of the greatest. My two charismatic and adorable children I am sad not to be with today...

Earlier this week I noticed that Prairiebreak had over two million site visits. As I travel around the country I am always surprised when friends or strangers thank me for some post they've read or tell me that they follow my blog.  I too resent the various oligarchs who own these media I patronize all too frequently. I know idiots abuse Facebook, Instagram, and probably Blogspot and all the rest. I hate to admit it, but Social Media are for me a delight and solace. I don't anticipate taking vows in a monastery to giving them up any time soon. So I guess I should be thankful to them--and to you, whoever you are, who has made it to the end of this post. Have a blessed Thanksgiving...

Last of the Mohigans, I mean blooms

MUCH bigger than any other Rabiea I've ever grown, this astonishing beauty with flowers almost 3" wide greeted me on my return from Cincinnati. I hope I can determine which species it is and that it proves cold hardy (this is its first winter out in the cold here!). Our first hard frost was several weeks ago, and it's been chilly ever since at night, often dipping below freezing--this doesn't seem to mind! November 24, mind you!

Diascia integerrima 'Coral Canyon'

Davis Salman told me once he thought this was my best introduction to horticulture. I am surprised not to see it in gardens more.

Gazania linearis 'Colorado Gold'

Another of my intros--it blooms pretty much non-stop.

Escobaria vivipara

Sometimes seedpods are as pretty as flowers! This demonstrates why this is sometimes called the "nipple cactus"

Salvia greggii

This looked much better last week--dozens of flowers on my big clumps of "Autumn Sage"--which can start blooming in May some years!

Iberis sempervirens

There are a few cultivar names for the autumn re-blooming candtufts. Not sure which one this is.

Blumenbachia insignis

This of us who grow this (not many) have a love-hate relationship with it. Such delicate flowers--but the stinging hairs are a nuisance. I grew Blumenbachia hieronymi for years at Denver Botanic Gardens where it was perennial--this is a self-sowing annual. A perfect plant for masochists..

Daphne cneorum

I'm surprised we don't have more rebloom on the dozens of daphnes in the garden (I once counted over 60 taxa). But then my soil is very sandy, I water sparingly and my plants are all a tad....let's just say tough!

Galanthus elwesii v. monostrictus

 A treasured memento from Montrose--a visit I shall never forget about this time of year. I recorded it in a blog post: check it out.  Every plant seems to harbor a memory (or more).
 

Viburnum farreri 'Nanum' 

Hope this will still bloom next March! I don't think this has bloomed precociously for me before...
 

Crocus laevigatus 'Fontaneyi'

And a special treat for me was finding this--weeks after my other fall crocus were finished. I grew this species for years as a young man in Boulder. There it always bloomed between Christmas and New Year. That was a different clone than this--glad nevertheless to have this widespread Greek crocus that is found on so many of the islands. Amazing that it adapts to our high altitude steppe climate: of course much of my career has focused on demonstratng that these Mediterranean waifs have steppish hearts! 

Antirhinum cv

Chrysanthemum cv.

Origanum dictamnus

Primula denticulata

Salvia 'Windwalker'

There were other plants with flower too--such as Malephora crocea--only I was photographing when it  was in the shade and closed. Oh well, you get the drift: it may be early winter but plants are as persistent as gardeners and just want to show off!

The ineluctable appeal of women botanists

 I have read biographies of Linnaeus, of Asa Gray, Thomas Nuttall, of Aven Nelson..and come to think of it quite a few other such gentlemen over the decades. They were all good reads. 

Why is it I find biographies of women botanists so much more interesting? Alice Eastwood's Wonderland: The Adventures of a Botanist, by Carol Green Wilson had me spellbound from start to finish. Her rescue of type specimens from the Academy of Science in San Francisco was of course practically Indiana Jones in its excitement--but there is something more to her story than what men had to put up with.

I picked up a copy of The Forgotten Botanist on my last visit to Tucson (where the mountain looking down on the city is named for her--and where she has not been forgotten). Again it is a page turner, and of course her husband kept getting credit for her work. 

This last weekend we'd just seen Lucy Braun's (and her sister Annette's) graves at Spring Grove cemetery. I'd actually seen them a half dozen year's earlier one August--but this time I managed to take a picture the graves as well as of the enormous white oak which towered here long before European settlement of this area.

Our Cincinnati host, Scott Beuerlein, is standing in front of the ancient oak...

That picture doesn't give the right scale. Here's one that conveys the magnificent oak's size better. We'd just seen Lucy Braun (and her sister Annette's) graves at the fringe of the oak's crown.

Scott's wonderful wife, Michelle, gives a much better sense of the size of this specimen. There were dozens of graves in the shadow of the oak--it took us a while to find the Braun sisters. 

Later Sunday afternoon I had the distinct pleasure of watching a movie about Lucy Braun at Cincinnati's fantastic Union Station--a gigantic Art Deco masterpiece filled with museums, restaurant, wonderful ice cream parlor and much more--including a theatre where documentaries are shown. 

Like the books I've read about women botanists, this documentary was more stirring than similar pieces I've seen done about men. I suspect knowing the enormous challenges professional women faced in the past (and no doubt still do) adds a layer of concern and engagement to the account of their lives. Or are women just more interesting?

Click on the image above to have a chance to learn about a great American botanist. And her sister to boot--an important entomologist.

And if you've managed to read this far, I have another blog post about another extraordinary woman who also led an amazing life in Academia and beyond: Mary Rippon. 

A tale of two (or three) from A to Z(abelia)

Abelia x grandiflora cv. at Dallas Botanic Garden in October

I am not sure what rock I've been hiding under, but I was entirely ignorant of the autumn flowering abelias until this fall (or late summer) when I was in the mountains of Central China in late August when we encountered the parent of the hybrid shown above growing on steep ravines. I was transfixed!

 So transfixed I apparently didn't photograph them! What we saw in China was Abelia chinensis, which looks very much like this hybrid, which represents a cross between chinensis and A. uniflora (the latter apparently lost to cultivation). As Jan is demonstrating above, it has a bewitching fragrance....

Everybody who walked by the spectacular hedge alongside the building where I spoke seemed to want to poke their nose in these. Some botanists have tried to lump these taxa under Linnaea, Twinflower--the circumboreal groundcover of subalpine coniferous forests, but the lumping doesn't seem to have stuck. 

We hit this at the perfect time: there are never enough showy late summer blooming shrubs, are there?

When I came back to Denver Botanic Gardens anxious to teach my colleagues about this gem, and of course we were growing it already....when I went out to check the specimens I was underwhelmed--they were no match to Dallas' hedges. And of course the extensive literature about these plants (I blush that I knew nothing about it hitherto) pretty much says it will be marginally hardy in Denver. Next spring I intend to attempt as many different clones (and there are a lot of them) in various parts of my home garden in order to see if that's true!

Zabelia tyaihyoni

There is another plant, once known as Abelia mosanensis, of which we do boast good specimens at the gardens. There is a great deal one can write about this fantastic plant, but the International Dendrological Society does it much more succinctly and better than I could. Do click on that link and you'll find a wonderfully tangled taxonomic mess (almost every website miss-spells the name, by the way!) Except for mine and the I.D.S.!

To recap just a tad--this shrub is extremely rare in northeast South Korea where it's considered at risk of extirpation. Who knows what's happening in North Korea with it.

The Zabelia at Waring House, DBG (Not as floriferous--it had been pruned hard the year before)

It's surprisingly new to cultivation, and still rare in gardens, which is strange since it's a tough customer, and quite graceful and not too big for most gardens. Most significantly, it is EXTREMELY cold hardy (possibly Zone 3), very attractive in form and blossom. And the flowers are also extremely fragrant and produced for a long time. No one seems to mention that the seedpods are rather pretty, and it has wonderful fall color....speaking of which, here is my specimen at home:

It took on some reddish tints a week or so later. I planted this five or so years ago--it took some doing to find a mail order source. Last spring I was admiring it from this spot, taking in the rich fragrance when I noticed something similar in our neighbors' garden: you can see a yellow shrub at the top of this picture: turns out, they'd planted one several years before me and I'd never noticed it until this year--it's twice as big as mine and was part of the source of the rich scent I was noticing. I was torn: should I be pleased at their good taste (where the hell did they find it? No one sells it around here), or pissed I'd been "trumped"...in the old sense of that word, of course!

Magnificent mountains of central China

Ever since I returned in mid September from the extraordinary trip through the mountains of Central China I've been haunted by them. I have been privileged to visit China five times over the past three decades--and have traveled extensively in Yunnan, and even across much of Southern Tibet. I visited great cities along the east coast from Hong Kong, Shanghai, the Shandong Peninsula and of course Beijing. There were lots of mountains in many of these areas, but not until this past trip did I finally go to the great central heartland--between Xi-An (the ancient capital Chang An) and the Sichuan plateau and then down to the Yizhang gorge region--three epicenters of Chinese civilization which are nestled, so to speak, between a vast complex of sugarloaf mountains the scope and complexity of which dumbfounded me.

Most jarring of all was the realization that those Chinese paintings of mountains I've admired all my life, thinking they were flights of fantasy were actually quite realistic.

The focus of this trip was woody plants, especially trees since it was organized by the International Dendrological Society (I.D.S.)--an august very international group which in this instance had participants from more than a half dozen countries. I knew China was unusually rich in woody plants--and assumed most of that biodiversity was further south, in the Western extremities of the Himalaya. I was vaguely aware that Metasequoia, Gingko, Acer griseum (for instance) were found further north a bit. I had no concept that we would find hundreds of taxa in the complex, mostly karst mountains clustered in China's very heart. 

I will intersperse the far too few pictures I took of these mountains with a few palate cleansers--like this shot of Chinese quite literally circle dancing below us at one of our outdoor dinner venues. My dullish shots of green mounds might get a tad tedious otherwise. I confess that of the several thousand photos I took, far too many are of green leaves of the vast assortment of trees we encountered--not to mention an awful lot of the mind-boggling fern flora and rich herbaceous layer we weren't suppose to notice.

And it was misty and even rainy many days (this was still part of the monsoon season), and I came to realize that much of China is really warm temperate rain forest! 

Our drivers (we had a fleet of sturdy vehicles at our command) were all characters. This car belonged to someone who was manifestly Buddhist, and that the photo was taken at 12:08 pm on September 2 of 2025. On a Tuesday to be exact.

We traversed just a sliver of two enormous mountain ranges--the QinLing between Shanxi province and Chongqing (effectively and formerly the eastern portion of Sichuan province). and then the Daba mountains 

Unless you've actually been there, it's hard to believe the diversity of plant life: we must have seen a couple hundred kinds of ferns, and more woody genera than I dreamed possible. There had to have been a couple dozen kinds of maples, for instance. I was so focused on the near ground I simply forgot to look up much of the time, and took far too few pictures of the scenery.

Oh yes, fungi galore!

A vista taken in a big bend of the road.

The roads were incredibly well maintained, although the near rain-forest vegetation did try and take over at times!

We finally arrived at the Yangtze.

More mushrooms--love how these come out of the overlapping scales of the pine cone!

How fun it would be to repel down those cliffs (not for myself however)...what treasures must lurk there...

The graceful characters transliterate as "Shen Nong Jia"--the name of the national park where we stayed the longest.

And here is Shen Nong Jia hinself: the deity spirit of the region. We were fortunate to visit during a slow period in September: the park is swamped with visitors from March to August (when it's cooler here than in the surrounding heavily populated lowlands) and again in November due to fall color.

Every view seemed different.

Lots of rugged rocks as well in spots.

We did have wonderful meals and stays at elegant inns and hotels.,,,

And lots of misty days--we were in the monsoon season still. Fortunately not a lot of hard rain.

Proof positive I was there!

How fun it would be to go back in spring, or brave the crowds to see the fantastic fall color. Perhaps another lifetime...although if you live long enough, dreams you didn't even know you had come true!