HORT travels

Bermuda for 26 Hours (including sleep)

June 23, 2018 by kvsalisbury Leave a comment

Around Palm Island Nature Reserve Bermuda

Around Palm Island Nature Preserve Bermuda

grrrrtttttttche

tttttsssssschhheee

How do you spell the sound your bicycle tires make as they skid to a halt on a gravelly path? That is the sound I would like to spell now. This onomatopoeia is the sound my sister and the tour guides heard as I braked to a sudden stop on my rented mountain bike on a rail trail in Bermuda. “Don’t worry”, my sister said to the guide, “she will catch up, she probably found a plant.”

I have been on a couple cruises in the past. My trip to Alaska and one to Belgium and Holland were aboard smaller ships. This was my first cruise on an enormous ship (though the smallest in this company’s fleet) and our destination was Bermuda.

This five day August cruise had us out on the open Atlantic for 2 days out and 2 days back and just over one day in Bermuda. This included sleeping time. So we had about 16 hours of time on the island.

In this time my sister and I managed a bike ride along the Bermuda Railway Trail National Park and enjoyed the aquatic wonders of a kayak excursion, to do some window shopping and a eat nice meal off-ship. Not bad for a few short hours.

Find plants I did. This is the one that had me screeching my tires:

The incredible fading bloom of a night blooming cereus

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Transformation

June 16, 2018 by kvsalisbury 7 Comments

A honey bee forages for nectar in a dandelion while gathering pollen.

A man told me a story about his friend, a new homeowner with a yard for the first time. He said his friend called him to ask some help with lawn maintenance. He asked about the yellow flowers popping up throughout the grass. They are dandelions the man told his friend. They chatted about options and pros and cons of not doing anything about them at all. The following week, his friend called again. He tells the man he didn’t do anything and all of the yellow flowers disappeared! But now he says there are white puffball plants all over the place!

I am not sure this isn’t an urban legend being repeated to me, but it is a good story and not completely implausible.

This got me thinking about transformation. In a past post I explored transition, the process of changing, but here I am thinking about the actual change.

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Jamaica State Park, VT

June 12, 2018 by kvsalisbury 3 Comments

The Dumplings in the West River in Jamaica State Park VT

Welcome to Jamaica. Jamaica, Vermont. No Caribbean for me, but that is just fine. I am happy to be where the days are cool and the evenings cooler. While spring sprinted by in what felt like just a few short days at home in southeast Pennsylvania, happily it is still spring here. 43 degree evenings, days in the mid-70s. Heaven to me.

I am house sitting in this area, the southwest corner of the state, near where Vermont, New York and Massachusetts all come together and attempting to make this an inexpensive bit of time away. Spending lots of time writing and exploring and not spending money. I brought all the ingredients to make my meals and stayed away from places designed to separate me from my money opting for hiking and other botanical explorations.

If you ever find yourself in the area, plan some time to explore (botanize?) Jamaica State Park.

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Snug Harbor – April 10, 2018

April 21, 2018 by kvsalisbury 2 Comments

Snug Harbor Sign

Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanic Garden is located on the northeastern corner of Staten Island. According to their website: this is “One of the largest ongoing adaptive reuse projects in America, Snug Harbor consists of 28 buildings, fourteen distinctive botanical gardens, a two acre urban farm, wetlands and park land on a unique, free, open campus.” It certainly is a model for how other urban places can work with their aging infrastructure to create an important and vibrant space.

Just some of the historic architecture to be found at Snug Harbor.

This is a great place to visit because it has something for everyone – plants and gardens, historic architecture and visual and performing arts.

I visited on a spontaneous trip to Staten Island to visit my sister for breakfast and decided since I was in the area I would stop in and explore the gardens. I enjoy visiting gardens in ‘off-seasons’ to see what I can find of interest, admire the bold little blossoms blooming in the cold, and to admire the bones of the gardens. Thrillingly, this spring is coming slowly, allowing a gentle wave of flowers throughout the early months of the year rather than one glorious tsunami of everything blooming at one time.

Prunus mume – The Japanese Apricot flowers early.

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Johns Island, SC

June 28, 2017 by kvsalisbury 3 Comments

Live oak leaves blanket the floor beneath the angel oak

Recently I was at a going away party for a friend who earned her horticultural dream job out in Portland OR. As a horticulturist, in a region just full of them, there were many of us in attendance. Quickly after arriving, I knew this was my kind of party.

We were sitting around and someone mentioned a ‘horticultural bucket list’. Yes! These are my people! Of course I have a horticultural bucket list. When I said this, the person looked at me and asked if I have ever travelled some place just to see a plant.

I mean, who hasn’t?!

This got me reminiscing about my Easter trip this year designed specifically to check off something on my horticultural bucket list.

For the three day Easter weekend, a special someone and I travelled down to Johns Island, SC to see the Angel Oak. Do you know it? Have you been?

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Vulnerability

February 10, 2017 by kvsalisbury 3 Comments

The waxy, fragrant blooms of Wintersweet (Chimonanthus praecox ‘Grandifloras’) in late January at the Arboretum of the Barnes Foundation.

You can change the world again, instead of protecting yourself from it. ~Julien Smith

As I wandered through some gardens recently on some cold winter days, I noticed buds and flowers. That’s right, winter flowers. Blooming their fool heads off with snowflakes tumbling around them seemingly oblivious to the weather and our perceptions of when flowers should be blooming.

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Transition

November 15, 2016 by kvsalisbury 6 Comments

The late afternoon autumn sun setting over a meadow. At this time autumn is beginning to look wintery.

“Kaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaathy!!!!” my sister would yell across the 2 1/2 pine barrens acres we called a playground growing up. This bellow could easily take the tone of joy or anger. We often yelled across the yard to each other and, in the silence of the rural pinelands, I am sure the neighbors heard our calls too. When we would do this within ear shot of my dad he would find us and remind us that we had “two legs and one mouth which means you can walk twice as far as you can yell.” I am not ashamed to say I have used this exact same phrase with students and interns in the past. Seems logical to me.

Just the other day I took a gentle walk along my favorite rail trail and instead of having a goal of miles or a time to beat or number of steps to worry about, I ventured on this day with the specific intention of using my two legs and just looking.

The sun highlights a swath of goldenrod seedheads. Insects and mammals alike will find refuge here, protection from winter winds and snow. Birds find nourishment here in the fluffy seeds.

There have been a lot of words lately, an overwhelming amount of opinions and facts, love words and hate words and one word that keeps popping up: transition. Of course this realization of transition of political leadership coincides with the transition of seasons from fall to winter. It occurred to me, in addition to having two legs, I have two eyes. This means, by my father’s logic, I can see twice as much as I can say. So I decided to quietly witness this transition of fall to winter, during this time of transition for the country and, if I am going to be honest here, during personal transition of my own. Remembering with every dormancy theres comes a rebirth, after every winter follows a joyous spring, that autumn leaves provide the nourishment for next year’s wonderment, and that winter snow sustains us all.

So what follows are some snapshots of my small wander through transition, acknowledging we all are transitioning all the time; sometimes in small ways, sometimes in ways we have never imagined. Remembering none of this is permanent and if we stop talking and start looking, seeing, we will find the beauty and potential in the change.

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Portillo and Valparaiso Chile

October 15, 2016 by kvsalisbury 4 Comments

No tree to be found around the Chilean resort of Portillo – the Cruise Ship of the Andes.

“Portillo crazy – that’s what they call it here”, said a new found friend at a tiny bar in Portillo Chile. A bunch of us, some new friends some old friends but now all friends, were sitting around a table, the center of which has a giant plate of meat and all of us were drinking a local beer. We had been taking runs all day and were currently the only folks in this local hangout, which would soon be filled with resort employees, laughter, good music and lots of dancing.

We are in Chile for an August snowboarding trip. For someone like me, not such a fan of the hot humid summers around here, finding snow in August and being able to ride on it in South America was a dream come true. When our new friend was describing Portillo crazy, he noted with exasperation that when things are getting frustrating around the resort, he works the registration desk there, there isn’t even a tree you can go sit under; there is no green and that certainly contributes to the Portillo crazy.

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June 19, 2016
by kvsalisbury 7 Comments

Plants that Rock

Mystery (to me) plant growing from an old stone wall in historic Harpers Ferry West Virginia.

Succession. A short, terse word for something so fascinating and beautiful in nature. Though it sounds a bit harsh, you are clued into its ecological meaning by looking at the first part of the word – success.

Sure this word has uses outside of the natural world – some things happen in succession and businesses and boards plan for leadership succession, but the ecological definition of succession is this: the process by which a biological community evolves over time.

This may happen slowly over eons or within a lifetime or maybe even within a generation depending on the place and the community. And sometimes it occurs in the most seemingly lifeless locations.

There are three lessons I take away, or think about, each time I see a plant growing, thriving, flowering in what seems an impossible location.

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Bouquets with Benefits in the Netherlands

February 28, 2016 by kvsalisbury 1 Comment

Pick-Your-Own Bouquet

Plants around here are just starting their slow, groggy awakening. Tiny green tips of daffodil leaves are poking through the duff. Crocus, winter aconite and snowdrops are blooming. Buds on red maples are swelling and new signs of the next season can be found each day. This has me thinking again of the trip to Holland and Belgium we took last Spring. Small colorful flowers coupled with the recent passing of Valentine’s Day has me remembering a small tulip farm having an incredible influence on the community.

Annemiekes Pluktuin is a small tulip farm located in Hillegom, Netherlands (a town that once hosted the Beatles as they recorded a television show and features a Henry Ford Museum). Hillegom is in the western Netherlands and is part of the “Dune and Bulb Region (Duin- en Bollenstreek)” of the country. This area boasts coastal dunes and is where many of the flower bulbs the Netherlands are so famous for are cultivated. So it makes sense that Annemieke has her bulb farm here.

Each season the bulbs in the Pick-Your-Own fields are changed.

She and her husband guided us through her facility and tulip fields. They began the garden in 2009 after noting a lack of picking gardens in the area once so famous for its tulip cultivation (many of the tulip fields have given way to development in the region). Pluktuins are “Picking Gardens”, places where a visitor can go and pick their own bouquets of flowers. There are many around the country, catering to the tourism industry as well as residents looking for cut flowers for their homes. While the idea of a picking garden in Holland is not unique, certainly you can find them dotting the country, Annemieke’s is special.

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