Category Archives: Gardens

Mid-Summer Flora

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How is it that, in stereotypical gendered thinking, men are supposed to have little interest in flowers? Or, put another way, how is it women are supposed to have so much?

There might be scholarly tomes on this very question, but I’m going with my usual reductionism and point to the usual suspects: Victorians, who encouraged upper- and middle-class women practice floral arrangement and paint botanical still lifes, as activities considered suitable for the fair sex, with florists and their ad men partners in the 20th century taking up the task of selling the products of a burgeoning flower-growing industry to women. So here we are.

Yet all sorts of flowers appear in heraldry, which evolved from designs on shields, helmets and crests – elements of armed combat, in other words, and what could be more manly than that? It was the Tudor rose, not the Tudor quince.

On the other hand, I’m not particularly interested in receiving a bouquet as a gift. Gender norms are pretty sticky.

Some of us have been known to name girl children after flowers. Except that her mother is also named “lily,” since the Japanese for that flower is ユリ(yuri). And I insisted that the name Lilly be distinct from the flower Lily, but of course the latter spelling is actually more common these days in the English-speaking world as a name. Ain’t language fun?

Never mind. I enjoy looking at flowers. Also, taking their pictures, since they don’t move much (except in a high wind), you don’t need their permission, and they can make highly aesthetic images. Not long ago we visited Volkening Lake in Schaumburg, as we often do, and July is an especially good time and place for flowers there. Such as along the shore.

Through the marvel of Google Images — something I didn’t really appreciate until recently — I can look up which flower is which, including common and scientific names.

Such as Oakleaf Hydrangea (Hydrangea quercifolia).

Smooth Oxeye (Heliopsis helianthoides), also known as the False Sunflower. I can see that.

Bergamot or — and this is a fine alternate common name — bee balm (Monarda fistulosa).

Ironweed flower (genus Vernonia).

I liked this one so much I played around with the image. Reminds me of something you might see in the distant reaches of space. AI Prompt: Refashion into a nebula. So you have it: The Ironweed Nebula.

One I knew: Queen Anne’s Lace. But not the scientific name (Daucus carota). I didn’t know it’s the wild carrot. One of the most common flowers of summer around here, though not originally native to North America. Our back yard is lousy with them.

Near the lake are some flower beds. I knew this one, too: Marigolds (Tagetes erecta).

But not New Guinea Impatiens (Impatiens hawkeri), though if I remember right, my mother was fond of them.

Or the Globe Amaranth or Button Flower (Gomphrena globosa).

AI Prompt: Refashion as stars being born in a nebula.

The Button Flower Nebula. Not especially celestial, but nice to look at.

Geneva: Pink Flamingos & Pocket Parks & Sewing Machines

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Not long ago, I was reminded that I need to acquire at least one pink flamingo for the deck, since the previous one — a dollar-store purchase when $1 was still the usual price — had fallen to pieces after repeated summers and winters. I was reminded because I saw some out in the wild.

We’d parked on Hamilton St. in Geneva, Illinois, a street distinctive for its plantings on the odd land shapes created by the various angled meetings of streets, parking lots and sidewalks.

Other examples, among a number on the street.

Nice. I suspect volunteer planting and maintenance, but that’s only a hunch. A nice scattering of greenery in a hard-surface context regardless.

Or they might represent a city-sponsored activity, since greenery is an important aspect of the grounds around the 1913-vintage Geneva City Hall.

Going for that prairie look, and not the kind attributed to FLW, but actual grass prairie.

A little more municipal whimsy.

Not far from City Hall is a handsome brick building with “Sjodin Est 1961” on a lunette on top and a smaller stone plaque over the door that says “L. Warber 1928.” Sjodin must be an early version of Shodeen, the residential developer that occupies the building.

On the same street is Creative Sewing & Quilting, a sizable shop devoted to the sewing arts. Yuriko was keen to spend a while there, and as I prepared to continue my stroll, I noticed the shop’s collection of antique sewing machines.

Everyone knows Singer, but there were also other brands.

All news to me, since it’s an industry I know little about. But I know this: without sewing machines, in the days of hand-stitched clothes, I’d probably only have one set of workday clothes and one of Sunday clothes, which would be the case for most people.

Tinker Swiss Cottage

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As usual for a Northern summer – the best thing about it, really – the heat has been on and off even in July. Last week we had highs only in the 80s, and sometimes lows in the 60s at night. Those days gave way to hotter temps today, with the promise of more heat to come. For a few days.

Back on July 3, a fairly hot day itself, we buzzed out to Rockford, the furthest I’ve been for months now. After a hearty lunch at the Stockholm Inn, we visited the handsome and distinctive Tinker Swiss Cottage Museum & Gardens, which is just south of downtown Rockford. Known about the place for years, finally made time for it.

Another legacy of an American who traveled to Europe long ago. Apparently he was besotted with the Swiss design of the time. That American would be Robert Tinker (d. 1924), though his story is more convoluted than most. During the boom early days of mechanical reapers in the 1850s, one John Manny ran a reaper works in Rockford as one of the more nimble competitors of Cyrus McCormick (who sued Manny for patent infringement and lost). John Manny died suddenly in 1856, as even wealthy people sometimes did in those days, leaving his widow Mary in control of the company.

Young Robert Tinker (younger than Mary) worked in a management position at the company. He had not, himself, come from a wealthy family, but apparently was a man of sideways ambition. In 1862, Mary paid for Robert to spend an extended period in Europe, while still drawing a salary from the company. So not only was he able to take a sort of sabbatical from factory operations, and skip out on risking his life for the Union, he got to take a Grand Tour.

The docent was clear on all this as we toured the interior of the house – and I later discussed it with the museum’s director of education and collections, who affirmed the gist. Less clear is exactly how that happened. Mary and Robert were obviously close, very close, though their exact relationship is obscured from prying minds of the 21st century by a screen of Victorian propriety. Eventually (1870) the two married, and lived a long time as prominent Rockford citizens.

Robert was already at work on the Swiss Cottage before that, starting construction in 1865 on a limestone bluff overlooking Kent Creek, near when it meets the Rock River, finishing it around the time he got married. (Germanicus Kent being one of the founders of Rockford.)

I understand the gardens in the name used to be more extensive, but much remains.

Behind the house is a bridge across the creek, leading to an undeveloped patch of land, formerly part of the gardens, along a rail line.

Of course we had to cross the bridge, despite the heat. It’s a personal motto of mine: cross that bridge if possible. In this case, you’re rewarded by a view of the back of the Swiss Cottage, perched above the creek.

The property, now belonging to the Rockford Part District, also includes a three-story Swiss inspired barn. Formerly home to cows and horses and such, these days it’s a shop and visitors center and such. An unusual sort of barn, I’d say.

After Robert Tinker’s time, a factory was developed near the house. Nothing to do with reapers or the Tinkers. Just an opportune spot near the Rock River. Its hulk remains behind sturdy brick, lorded over by a rusty water tower.

The factory has been abandoned for some years. But I understand that socks, and indeed sock monkeys, used to be made there.

As they have been for a long time in Rockford.

Fabyan Japanese Garden

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For someone who has never written for television, and surely never will, I’ve got a few ideas. Just today: the wacky comedy adventures of three Florida Men who manage to kill themselves in a humiliating way – getting drunk and naked and trying to drive a cherry picker on the highway, say, with them in the basket.

They return as ghosts, condemned to haunt Florida retirement communities, though sometimes they find themselves in Miami Beach among the crabby ghosts of former retirees who came to live there in the ’60s. A twist: a fourth Florida Man, their friend who was driving the cherry picker, survived the accident and now he’s the only one who can see them. Hilarity does what it does, ensues.

In the 1890s, Japan was still newly open, and apparently exotic to the likes of wealthy Illinoisans George and Nelle Fabyan. The story is that they came away from the Japanese Pavilion at the 1893 Columbian Exposition deeply impressed by Japanese culture. It was a common reaction, I’ll bet, and most people might have bought a book or two, or a bit of art, and left it at that.

Not George Fabyan, the Great Collector of the Fox River Valley (gardens, windmills, mummies and more!). He had a Japanese garden built downslope from his home near the Fox. During the summer, visitors can go there even now, though ownership long ago passed to the Kane County Forest Preserve District.

He tasked Japanese garden designer Taro Otsuka to undertake the project, which was completed not long before the Great War. Otsuka, an early 20th-century immigrant, found his niche on these shores. Namely, in designing a wave of Japanese gardens in the Midwest.

Through cycles of decline and restoration, the Fabyan garden has abided. Free admission, donations accepted.

The garden designer’s raw material is the local flora, resulting in a garden on traditional lines that nevertheless has a look apart of the models of the old country, taking aspects of the new country. Don’t ask me the details, that’s just the sense one gets.

Lanterns.

Structures.

Teahouse of the Fox River, you could call that one.

What’s a Japanese garden without an impressive bridge over an elegant water feature?

The assortment of possible Japanese garden bridges is extensive, and of course they’re found other places besides gardens, such as the magnificent bridge at Sumiyoshi Shrine in Osaka.

Cantigny ’26

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At Cantigny in late May, I wasn’t feeling that photo urge. Yuriko was, at least when it came to flowers in arrays.

And as singles.

We go to Cantigny every few years, usually in late spring or early summer, a time of exuberant greenery and, of course, vivid flowers. Not a flowerbed is idle.

An image from Cantigny in 2010. A favorite.

This time, I did take a few snaps of some of the Cantigny buildings and landscapes. Such as the former McCormick manse.

Some long views of the grounds.

As the publisher of a great metropolitan newspaper, back when there were such things, Col. McCormick had the scratch to keep the place running. What are tech barons doing these days with their lucre? Nothing so fine.

Summer’s Profusion

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My backyard is as cluttered as my house, at least in summer, but with a living profusion of grass and leaves and insects and birds and small mammals, instead of papers, books, clothes, furniture, nicknacks, etc., etc. – inanimate all, so the comparison mostly fails. Still, profusion is the thing.

Outside, flower buds taking turns according to however it is that flowers “know” when to bloom. At the moment, coneflowers are opening.

I was inspired to spend a little while this afternoon documenting other parts of the profusion. An exultation of color, this time of year.

Animals are out and about. Such as the ants that are vying to rule the world.

And monarch butterflies going about their business.

The odd thing isn’t that I saw one today, but that it was still long enough for me to successfully fiddle with my camera and take the shot.

Shelburne, Massachusetts

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I heard by chance that the Spurs are in the playoffs, again. NBA games are on the list of things I don’t care about, but this is the Spurs we’re taking about, so Go Spurs. I’m old enough to remember when pro sports were considered a modest-priced entertainment, which would have been the days when the Spurs huffed along in the ABA. When that league went under, that paved the way for the basketball monopoly we now enjoy.

I remember a print ad for the Spurs from their early NBA days. A basketball, mostly in shade, set against a pitch black background; a small but bright light is emerging from a crack in the basketball; the tag line says, In the Arena, Everyone Can Hear You Scream. Brilliant.

Here we go again with the incongruous Massachusetts place names: “The village of Shelburne Falls is located partly in Shelburne and neighboring Buckland,” notes Wiki.

So I suppose I visited Shelburne Falls the whole time when I visited Shelburne and walked across a bridge to Buckland, and then back to Shelburne on a different bridge.

Interesting that a town in the United States is named for Lord Shelburne, a British prime minister when the Revolution was still ongoing. On the other hand, it was on his short watch – at the end of that war – when the British government said, enough already, be independent if you want it so much. So there ought to be something named for him on this side of the Atlantic (and there’s another in Vermont, besides one in Ontario).

The Bridge of Flowers

I had good weather for my return to the Midwest from the Northeast, beginning on a clear, warm day in Massachusetts. Large towns hang like pearls on Route 2, and while I would have made a selection of them to visit even in chillier weather — and spend time on foot in those towns — the spring warmth was one of those travel bonuses you can appreciate right away. Pop off Route 2 in Franklin County and you’re in Shelburne.

Shelbourne hugs the Deerfield River, so Shelbourne needs bridges. You can still drive across one erected in 1890, which the city fathers of the time signed like it was a work of art. As well they should have. Better, you can walk across the structure, which is known locally as the Iron Bridge. Bridge Street goes across it.

One of the more unusual metal benches I’ve encountered, just off the Shelburne entrance to the Iron Bridge. More iron. Yes, you can sit on it.

The Dearfield, major tributary of the Connecticut.

The Iron Bridge takes you to Buckland, though I guess you’d still be in Shelburne Falls, but anyway, a few steps along river – and I mean that literally, maybe 20 or 30 steps – is the Bridge of Flowers. The view looking back across at Shelburne.

Not many flowers at that moment, but replanting was underway. Long ago the narrow bridge carried a trolley, but after that business went bust in the late 1920s, the Shelburne Woman’s Club facilitated its transformation into a linear garden.

Mid-way across the Bridge of Flowers. Even though not flowering (much), a bridge very much worth crossing.

The view looking back at Buckland.

The sign on the Shelburne side.

Nothing is far apart in Shelburne, so a short walk takes you to a geological oddity.

Glacial Potholes

Another sign.

Follow the arrow and you pass a mosaic celebrating the locale. A high-quality image of this would make a good postcard.

Then come the potholes.

I didn’t know glaciers could create potholes, but it seems that they can and have. Also known as giant’s kettles.

Different in details — stone and coloration and process — but erosion as much as Sioux Falls in Sioux Falls. Or on the Bruce Peninsula. Or the coast of Maine, for that matter. Water doing its grind beyond the timescales of humanity.

The spillway was busy. It had been a rainy day before.

Artful rocks, with no artist except erosion.

Mount Auburn Cemetery: The Landscape

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The weekend I spent with friends in Boston in April wasn’t actually in Boston most of the time, but its suburbs, and not with my friends quite all the time. On that Saturday, late morning to early afternoon, I passed some warm springtime moments by myself in the thrall of Mount Auburn Cemetery, mostly in Watertown, partly in Cambridge.

Mount Auburn Cemetery

How is it that I’d never gotten around to visiting Mount Auburn Cemetery until 2026? What kind of cemetery tourist lets that one go for so long? This is the Ur of landscaped American rural cemeteries, acknowledged as the first one, established in 1831. Did I also mention that it’s drop-dead gorgeous? So to speak.

Mount Auburn is one of those rare cemeteries – like Arlington National outside DC or Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1 in New Orleans – that attracts visitors even in our time. Not a huge number, at least when I visited, but a healthy trickle. Spring, I suspect, is a popular season there.

Arlington National inspires feelings of patriotism from as deep an historical well in North America has to offer; New Orleans’ tombs are dressed in mystery and garlanded with voodoo. What does Mount Auburn have? Landscaping of the highest order. A pattern by which all the following garden cemeteries can be judged: stones of great variety, plants equally various, and an alternation of flat and hilly contour.

The Massachusetts Horticultural Society, itself a recent establishment by the 1830s, created Mount Auburn during a time of peace and expansion in Boston, with the violence of the Revolution barely in living memory and U.S. sectional friction deepening, but not to the strife it would become by the ’50s. The president of the society, Henry Dearborn (d. 1851), is credited with designing Mount Auburn.

The site, with its twists and minor vistas, turned out to be just the place for a revolution in burial practice. Dearborn must have had a gardener’s instinct for the reinventing the wooded hills, but he was much more than a gardener, and the cemetery is much more than a garden. And anyway, Dearborn just set the thing in motion nearly 200 years ago, in collaboration with landscape architect Alexander Wadsworth and botanist Jacob Bigelow. The cemetery, a place to recall lives that are over, is ongoing.

Since then, every stone, every planting, all the small decisions and actions that go into managing 174 acres with 100,000 or more permanent residents, have formed a national treasure.

The Peony Crop of ’26

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Consistent spring-like weather has arrived at last here in northern Illinois. So we took the opportunity late this afternoon to visit Volkening Heritage Farm, an open-air museum with structures dating from the 1880s. It’s part of the larger (135-acre) Spring Valley.

Spin the wheel of time back – not that long, really – and German immigrant farmers put this part of Illinois, the future northwestern suburbs, to prosperous use. The open-air museum of our time echoes that previous time. Not in each detail, but the facsimile is pretty good. There’s a vegetable and flower garden —

Volkering Heritage Farm

— and farm animals. Chickens, for example.

The windmill is missing. Has been for some years now, but I know it was there in 2012.

We noticed peonies near the farm buildings.

That meant that Spring Valley’s former peony farm, about a 10-minute walk from the former German farm, was abloom with peonies. Like cherry blossoms in other places and other contexts, they don’t last long. Some years we miss them all together, partly because the blooming isn’t quite fixed. One year, for instance, I visited on my early June birthday once and found an embarrassment of peonies. Other years, they are earlier. This is an early year.

So we walked some of Spring Valley’s various trails, themselves flush with spring green, toward the peony field.

Across one of Spring Valley’s creeks, still vigorous from the heavy late-night rain a few days ago.

The peony field.

The blooms.

Digital cameras make astonishing images sometimes, but still pale compared to an eye view.

Lilacia Park ’26

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Finally a warm Saturday. Finally a warm day of any position on the calendar. They’ve been spotty lately. Warned that the day would be warm, we went to Lilacia Park in Lombard early in the afternoon, something we do every few years in mid-May, for nearly 20 years now.

Most of the tulips were gone, but true to the park name, lilacs are in bloom in profusion. Not just colorful to see, but put your nose close for a fragrant moment.

Lilaicia Park is a crown jewel of suburban parks, and yet not overcrowded on a pleasant Saturday during peak lilac bloom. Just busy.

One of these years, some fool influencer or two might make Lilacia an It Spot, and the crowds will show up in ridiculous numbers. Or considering its location in the thick of the suburbs – the sort of place where influencers might grow up, but never consider interesting enough to point their cameras – that isn’t very likely? I couldn’t say.

The view from over the water feature.

The water feature.

Over 700 lilacs and 35,000 tulips annually, according to the Lombard Park District. Plus some other flowers, for that extra variety.

In groups.

And singly.

Good to make it back. We met Kevin there this time around, at our suggestion, who came from the fairly close other western suburb of Downers Grove. He’d never heard of the park, and so I was glad to introduce him to it.