March 2013

Last Friday a friend told me that her sister in Florida had called and was complaining about the cold. It had dropped to 53 degrees!

On the other hand here in the Northwest we were yodeling and twittering like spring-addled birds, because it reached 53 degrees. It is rare that these diametrically opposed climates, the temperate Northwest and tropical Southeast, sync up climatically.

I couldn’t help but crow, “We’re as warm as Florida.” It rose up in me like a hallelujah, like the feathered arrogance of robins spilling across the lawn in their pre-nesting-battle games. Everything was hurdling forward, getting kicked far ahead of this aging player by the preternatural warming.

I ran around taking picture of all the tropical looking plants in the garden for yet another tropical post.

(Fatsia japonica variegata)

 (Rhododendron protistum))

But then it hit.

Drama queen winter would not be ignored— maybe I declared it spring one too many times in the last few weeks—so she’s hit us with frost, and snow at lower elevations. Everything has pulled back from the exaltations toward the deep quiet within called winter: withinter.

Still the winter had been so mild this year that I haven’t really missed having a tropical vacation. I‘ve been focusing on how marvelously mild it has been here. And keep convincing myself that the lushness of the Northwest is every bit as good as the tropics. Yet I have not put on my shorts, or flip-flops or sunscreen, though my face pinkens on the sunnier days this unusually warm March. I can even feel a homeopathic dose of vitamin D coursing through my veins.

There will be plenty of time for tulipic triumph, magnolian explosions and the endless chatter of nesting and egging. For now I look away from my fantasy that the tropics might be moving ever so slowly northward, and embrace these last few days of winter admiring the snowy whiteness of hybrid hellebores…

…and the chilly blue of Chionodoxa forbesii ‘Blue Giant’ as it pushes through a mat of Cardamine triphylla sparkling with a flurry of flowers. Now that spring is so darned close I’m even feeling a bit of sympathy for the winter I tried to rush out the door by ignoring it.

“It’s seems you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.”

EACH YEAR, Michael and I take a tropical vacation in February. We’ll at least the last few years. We’ve been to Mexico, India, Nicaragua and back to Mexico. This year for reasons beyond our control we did not. But still I couldn’t get the idea of tropical breezes, tropical fruits and warm sunny beaches out of my mind, even as I was flying to the cold snowy Midwest last week.

Going to see family is its own sort of warm vacation filled with lots of food and laughter. And being in Milwaukee, which was already buried deep in snow when I arrived, made it easy to escape to the tropics, at least for the afternoon.

I went with my mother and sister to the Mitchell Park Domes, the closest I ever got to the tropics in the first half of my life. The three domes are the world’s only conoidal glass houses, the shape allowing a better angle for solar heating and more height for tall trees.

It’s amazing what a little glass, actually each dome is made of 2,200 panes, between you and the frigid snow-scape can do.  Of course there is the heating system of low pressure boilers heated by natural gas keeping the 3 domes at the desired temperature for the plants and animals, there are 8 species of tropical birds, toads, frogs, fish, turtles and lizards in the tropical dome, as well as many beneficial insects, they house. I‘ve been going to the domes for a winter escapes since First Lady, Ladybird Johnson dedicated the facility in 1966. And I still get a thrill when I go, discover a new plant and get off on the warm humid air.

Yet when I got home and looked at my pictures I was surprised to see how many pictures I took of plants with white variegation and flowers. Was I subliminally longing to be out in the snow? All winter in the greener-than-green Pacific Northwest I was longing for snow. We had some beautiful hoar frosts, but not a speck of snow.  There is something about a world gone white, of being trapped inside, of the cold certainty of snow that I’ve learned to love growing up in Wisconsin, Something that the long gray and green winter of Seattle will never satisfy.

The day I flew out of Milwaukee there was a big snowstorm in process and the morning was a milky blue confection. Strangely I wanted to stay, to make snowmen with my nephew, drink hot chocolate and stare out the window instead of braving the icy streets and runways. Yet brave the streets and runways I did.

When I landed in this lush temperate rainforest I now call home, I realized we were only a few degrees away from being topical,  [come, global warming, come!!] yet a few thousand miles from the equator.

post script: for those of you still waiting for the winner of the 2013 winner of the Golden Palette Award at the Northwest Flower and Garden Show ( sorry there was interrupted internet service in the valley before I left) It was RHR Horticulture & Landwave Gardens very tropical garden called “ The Lost Gardener: A Journey From the Wild to the Cultivated”.

p.s.s.(I’d say there is nothing wilder than snow, like being pounced on by a panther)