| What’s
Blooming in Hyde Park-Kenwood? |
Third Week of
April |
Trees, shrubs, bulbs, perennials--everything is coming on so fast that in a week’s time there are many more blooms to talk about. The weather has been fine, in spite of a very hot day and lots of drying winds, which usually would dry up daffodil and tulip flowers quickly. But it doesn’t seem to have happened. Not only are lots of daffs still around, but the tulips are in full bloom. The Single Earlies are probably what we are seeing most of now, and aren’t they fine planted in quantity? Check out the yellow and orange blocks blending into a kind of peach in front of 1700 E. 56th (thanks, Lesley Bloch), or blocks of yellow and pink at 5016 Greenwood, or the long bed of yellow daffs with white tulips (a favorite combination of mine) on the campus side of the Administration Building, 58th & Ellis. Another example, in the front yard of 4945 or so Woodlawn, yellow and white daffs with white flowering quince (rarely seen), all set off by the emerald green of emerging vinca minor in lovely blue bloom. I’d guess it’s Bowles’ variety. This gardener has a fine sense of scale.
The botanical or species tulips are the smaller, shorter, often bunch-flowered ones. In spite of their name they are being hybridized to make new varieties, all charming. One that is sturdy as a wildflower is tulipa tarda. It has no common name. It’s only a few inches high, the petals are yellow with white tips, and it spreads by multiplication of the bulbs and by seed, even in grass. Don’t deadhead the seed bladders that follow the flowers and you will have more and more of them without depleting the strength of the parents. See a long row of them planted between the stone foundation of a wall-fence and the sidewalk, at 4930 Woodlawn. Again at 4851 Kenwood see them planted with large yellow daffs and blue-flowering vinca minor.
The stunning shrub
of the week is surely the intense rosy purple rhododendron. How can it fail
to catch the eye? It trumpets. The PJM rhodos are almost lurid and it is difficult
to find the right shades to mix with them. Difficult too to place them against
a wall whose color is
flattering to them. The mansion at 4939 Greenwood has done this color smashingly
by combining larger rhodos of the same shade (they may be Catawbas, which do
well here) with a raised row of blue hydrangeas in stone planters under French
doors. I can’t tell whether the hydrangeas are real or a very good fake,
but the combo is stunning. Do note the simple square knot garden in the lawn
in front of this planting. And don’t fail to take in the extensive bed
of Virginia bluebells, mertensia virginica, all along the front fence in the
shade of large shrubs.
Now that the scilla
has faded, Virginia bluebells become the blue flower of the week. Not as intense
a blue as scilla, the pink buds open to sky blue flowers on top of plants a
foot or more high. I used to have them under a saucer magnolia--dreamy! They
are great for shady borders, but don’t think of them as a groundcover,
because they are spring ephemerals which will die back and become dormant by
late May. They require no care, and just keep
coming back delightfully spring after spring. They multiply.
Forsythia is still in bloom, the foliage now appearing. The only other yellow shrub of spring that I know of is Kerria, kerria japonica, which isn’t well known but should be. There is a group of them at the northwestern corner of Bond Chapel on campus. Kind of fluffy golden-yellow flowers, crisp foliage, shade tolerant, and repeated blooms during the summer. Take a look.
Viburnums are blooming in a number of varieties. Do smell them. Some, like Korean Spice Viburnum, will call out to you to do so. They are usually ivory-white, often with pink buds. Other clove-scented kinds are Burkwood, Judd, and Fragrant Snowball. Elegant foliage too: many have sunken veins making the leaf look quilted; many color up beautifully in the fall, and of course, they bear fruit for the birds.
One doesn’t often see flowering quince, but there is a nice planting of the orange-flowered, rather low one against the building on the northwest corner of 57th and Dorchester. And another (thanks to Laura Gloger) scarlet-flowered quince hedge that forms a robust line of 5 to 6 foot bulky shrubs standing against the building at the northwest corner of 61st and Ellis. Quinces are beautiful when they first flower on bare wood in abundance; all I have seen to date have the green leaves emerging while the flowers are still sturdy. This one, with its red and green, looks downright Christmasy.
Redleaf plum, blooming now, has white to pale pink flowers and reddish-purple foliage. It is somewhere between a shrub and a small tree. The foliage gets deeper purple and stays that way all season.
Lilacs are budded!
Our earliest flowering trees are exquisite. The whites are showy right now. There’s ornamental pear, flowering crab, and shadblow. If it’s tall and like a pointed oval it’s pear. If it’s more round-headed or shaggy-headed, it’s crab, and if it’s multistemmed and looser in blossom it’s probably shadblow. Lots of these in Nichols Park. Of course, everybody’s favorite, seen all over, is redbud, the intensely mauve or purple-pink bloomer on naked branches. It is sometimes one-stemmed, sometimes multiple-stemmed. The effect is oriental and stunning. In Greece there is a related species which is bigger but the same color; pretty stunning against ages old ruins. But our American native has a delicacy that can’t be beaten. And there is a white redbud--I know no other name for it. They are here and there around the neighborhood. One shows behind 1357 E. 56th.
I’ve spotted two weeping flowering plums or cherries, I don’t know which. One is hanging over the fence at the northwest corner of 49th and Greenwood. The flower petals are the palest pink, with a lavender hint. The other is in front of 5645 Woodlawn, where its lovely weeping habit and delicate pink blossoms can be seen to best advantage. The owner says it is Japanese flowering cherry. It’s a poem in blossom.
Two locales not to be missed throughout the spring & summer: 5625 Woodlawn, with a marvelous belt of mixed bulbs; and the four houses on the southwest corner of 48th and Woodlawn, all of which have planted extensively and imaginatively in front, where all of us can enjoy it.