fall – Page 3 – My Chicago Botanic Garden

Tips from the October Photo Walk

Fall is a great time of year to challenge yourself to compose images that include complementary color relationships. Wet surfaces make colors more vibrant. Stone and masonry take on rich tones and show more color variation than when they are dry. This photo by volunteer Bill Bishoff was taken during a light rain. Notice how the bricks appear with a vibrant rosy surface that otherwise would appear pale.

This image also takes advantage of complementary colors to make the subject pop. Complementary colors appear opposite one another on the color wheel— blue/orange, red/green, and purple/yellow. Together, complementary colors appear brighter. In this image, Bill includes two complementary pairs—purple/yellow and red/green.

It is important to make sure you and your equipment are protected from the rain. You don’t need anything more complicated than a plastic bag and a handkerchief. Poke a hole in one end of the plastic bag for your lens, and peek in the other side when you are ready to take a picture. The handkerchief helps to dry off any raindrops that fall on your lens. If you use a UV filter on the end of your lens, you can safely wipe it dry it without worry of scratching the lens. If any damage occurs, you need only replace the filter, not the lens.

Keeping yourself dry is also a good idea. If you are caught without an umbrella, there are plenty of dry vantage points around the Garden. You could appreciate the vistas from the comfort of McGinley Pavilion, or enjoy the solitude of McDonald Woods from the woods shelter.

During fall, sunny days can become scarce, but an overcast or rainy day can also be a great photo opportunity.

Join us on the first Saturday of every month for a photo walk in the Garden. We’ll cover a different subject each month and take some photos together.

Enchanted Kale Forest

We’re all adjusting to the recent drop in temperature, but some plants actually thrive in cooler weather. Check out the redbor kale in the Grunsfeld Children’s Growing Garden. Forget bonsai, these kale varieties look like a miniature forest. Notice the branching leaf shapes are very similar to the trees in the background.

If you look at the kale from just the right angle, it appears to be part of woods that surround the garden.

See what I mean?

Kale is a member of a plant group called Brassica, which also includes broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and mustard. These plants grow well in the cooler months, and so they make excellent spring and fall crops. Since they come in a rich range of colors (dark greens to dusty teals to deep purples), and have an attractive variety of leaves (from smooth to lacy to ruffled), they are a favorite for fall garden displays.

Come to the Garden this month and take your picture near our enchanted kale forest!

Visit chicagobotanic.org/learningcampus/growinggarden for more information on the Grunsfeld Children’s Growing Garden.

An Autumn Surprise

Every garden should hold a few surprises.

In fall, the Landscape Gardens deliver a good one: bright lavender patches of Colchicum, commonly known as autumn crocus or, less commonly, meadow saffron. Popping up suddenly through the groundcover, the flowers can stop visitors—and bloggers—in their tracks. With the current streak of balmy weather, the colchicum seem to be lasting even longer this year, begging a deeper look into the surprises that this bulb (actually a corm) holds up its leaves.

Surprise #1: It’s not a crocus.

Short, goblet-shaped flowers and spring-like color cause the confusion between colchicum and crocus, but there’s an easy way to tell them apart: count the long stamens in the center of the flower. Six stamens? It’s a colchicum. Only three? It’s a crocus. Colchicum’s flowers are much larger, too, and its leaves are long and strappy, rather than short and grassy.

Surprise #2: Spring leaves, fall flowers.

Expectations run high in spring, as colchicum’s wide leaves emerge, flowerless, to do their work, pulling sunlight’s energy into the corm underground. Then the leaves retreat for the summer. Time passes…and then the surprise comes, as clumps of flowers, leafless, emerge from the same spot in fall, a pleasing reminder that gardening is powered by patience.

Surprise #3: It’s not the source of saffron.

Although colchicum’s common name is “meadow saffron,” it doesn’t produce the flavorful red stamens of kitchen/culinary fame—that distinction belongs to Crocus sativus, a true crocus that also blooms in fall (along with its leaves—you can see why it gets so confusing). Unlike that crocus, colchicum has less showy stamens that cannot be eaten because…

Surprise #4: It’s poisonous.

The whole plant is: flowers, leaves, stamens, everything. Site it accordingly in your yard.

This weekend, three beautiful colchicum varieties will be sold at the Fall Bulb Festival—‘Lilac Wonder,’ which you can see in the Home Landscape Garden now; ‘Waterlily,’ a well-named, ruffled variety; and ‘Album,’ the classic white colchicum. Like most bulbs, colchicum corms are planted in late fall so they can settle in before next year’s bloom.

In the meantime, we wonder: what surprises does your garden hold?

Mumtastic Mums!

The fall mum display at the Chicago Botanic Garden is an annual tradition that requires careful planning and attention to detail. We wanted to let you know what it takes to grow over 13,000 mums each year and train them into interesting shapes and forms.

The first mums you’ll notice are located at the entrance to the Visitor Center. Four 10-foot tall obelisk-shaped mum towers were planted with gold colored mums, named ‘Golden Spell.’ The obelisks are fitted with an internal watering system that allows for easier and even water distribution to the sides of the towers. About 260 plants go into each one of these towers and it takes about 6-12 hours each week to maintain them through the summer months.

Our fall hayracks cascade over the bridge between the Visitor Center and the Crescent Garden. We grow two sets of these to provide blooms throughout the fall season. Each set lasts from 3-4 weeks. This year we grew a yellow anemone type named ‘Megumi’ and a bronze colored daisy type mum named ‘Vernal Falls’. Starting in February, we take all the cuttings for the hayracks from our stock of plants. Fifteen plants go into each hayrack frame and it takes 24 hayracks and 6 side planters to cover the bridge. We spend about 16-20 hours per week training the stems to grow down instead of up. We weigh the stems down with hexagon nuts and spend the summer pinching and trimming the plants to maintain the shape.

PHOTO: Mums being trained to a basket shape.

We also plant 108 giant mum containers for the display in the Esplanade and other gardens. Starting in June, with the help of our summer interns, we spend three days planting about 40-70 plants in each container. We use hanging basket frames to train the mums into a rounded shape. We shear the tops twice during the summer and use growth regulators to keep the growth compact. The last shearing is done no later than July 22. We are constantly feeding the mums and watering every other day to keep them in good health.

Finally, we planted two varieties of cascading mums this year in the Malott Japanese Garden: a white anemone flowered mum, named ‘Snowfall,’ and a yellow mum, named ‘Megumi.’ These mums are trained to cascade down a mesh screen.

What to see on the first day of fall

Boyce Tankersley, Director of Living Plant Documentation, takes us on a tour of what’s blooming in the display gardens on the first day of fall.

Sweeps of perennials on Evening Island, the cascading mums on the Visitor Center bridge, and masses of mums in the Crescent Garden, are found in the boundaries of our formal garden areas. Our show doesn’t end there, however — find gorgeous asters and sunflowers in the English Walled Garden, Japanese anemones and Endless Summer hydrangeas in the Waterfall Garden, mums mixed with later blooming annuals like zinnias and rudbeckia in the Sensory Garden, and an amazing array of colorful annuals in the Circle Garden.

We only visited six of the 25 display gardens, so come out to see them all this fall! Visit chicagobotanic.org/inbloom/ for more information on what’s in bloom.