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We do look up occasionally, we gardeners – up to the leafy green canopy that is. Come winter, what do we see? Now that the trees are bare, the stars seem especially bright. That is in fact true and is a result of winter’s low humidity, which results in greater sky clarity. Follow me if you want to know more.

Start out simple with UMass’s McGraw Hill astronomy text book. It provides beginner’s level methods to find Orion, the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia. There are sky charts of each season. Print out winter, grab your hat and go out into the dark.

At www.space.com/nightsky there are calendars of sky events and you can download good monthly sky charts. I liked learning about star magnitudes from open clusters to diffuse nebula. There is a dictionary and a pronunciation guide to help your tongue around some of terms. As gardeners, we can appreciate this, having similar difficulties with plant nomenclature.

www.earthsky.org provides a nightly “news report” of celestial happenings. Go to “earth sky tonight” and listen to some excellent podcasts . This site makes the science accessible.

www.astronomy.com provides specialized information for urban sky dwellers and links to learn about light pollution. There is also a kid’s section including the ABC’s of astronomy (good for any age) and directions for making a Milky Way with 4 old CDs and a hunk of Styrofoam.

Finally, we come to “Rhapsody of a Winter Night,” at www.richardbell.net/huygens.html. Turn up the Tchaikovsky and pass the cocoa! Read about the fathers of astronomy: Christian Huygens; Charles Messier and Carl Sagan. If you’ve been bitten by the star gazer bug – there are links to many groups who meet regularly for “star parties.”

Come next summer, when the trees do their best to monopolize your attention, the sky behind them will be more than just a patterned background.

– Lesley Parness

Lesley Parness is Superintendent of Horticultural Education at The Morris County Park Commission. She can be reached at lparness@morrisparks.net.

What is the meaning of this parable posed by 16th century tea master Sen-no-Rikyu? Sen-no-Rikyu built a garden enclosed by a tall hedge that blocked the view of the sea. The wealthy merchant for whom the garden was built was unhappy – until he bent to wash his hands in the water basin.

Why? Visit these websites on gardens of Japan and see if you can come up with an answer.

Let’s get warmed up at http://phototravels.net/kyoto/zen-gardens-index.html.

Now, just dive in at http://learn.bowdoin.edu/japanesegardens, where 29 Japanese gardens are featured in a most user friendly manner. The midori taki (green waterfall) at Kenroku-en is positively dreamy. Check out the “Elements” listings for a plethora of lanterns, bridges, stones and other garden features.

http://www.mojg.org (Meditate on Japanese Gardens) is a modern site complete with blogs. Look at the featured gardens on the right hand side scroll – the moss temples are otherworldlike and the essays by William Will are spot on and give a sophisticated topic its due. There is a wonderful glossary as well with cogent definitions.

More photos, this time in black and white, at http://www.tokyo-gardens.com/gardens.htm.

At http://en.wikipedia.org, search botanic garden in japan for a list of almost 100.

So niwa shi, (garden master) do you know the meaning of the parable?

The merchant smiled when he bent to wash his hands because the sea then became visible in a gap between the hedges. As Sen-no-Rikyu had hoped, his client then realized the intent behind the design. As his mind made the connection between the water in the basin and the great ocean it also connected the merchant and infinite universe.

– Lesley Parness

Lesley Parness is Superintendent of Horticultural Education at The Morris County Park Commission. She can be reached at lparness@morrisparks.net.

Any virtual exploration of Arbor Day must begin at www.arborday.com where you will find lots of information about the importance of trees. Arbor Day’s founder, J. Sterling Morton understood how trees impact all life of Earth. As Secretary of Agriculture under President Grover Cleveland, he helped to establish the National Forest Reservations. His home, “Arbor Lodge,” is now a state park. See it at http://library.thinkquest.org/J0111463/arborlodge.htm. You can take a house tour of some of its 52 rooms and their furnishings, including his walnut desk, apple wood chair. and indoor blowing alley. His eldest son, Joy, founder of the Morton Salt Company, transformed his own home, “Thornhill Estate” into the Morton Arboretum. You can read more about Morton family’s history, whose motto was, “Plant Trees” at the history pages of www.mortonarb.org

Arbor Day is celebrated all across America. In the state of Washington at www.dnr.wa.gov/arbor/celebrate/timetocelebrate.html there are lists of planning tips for scout leaders and school teachers. I love the poem by Henry Abbeys under “celebration,” “What Do We Plant When We Plant a Tree?”

In Idaho there are really into it. Visit www.idahoforests.org/arborday.htm#02 . There’s a photo of President Theodore Roosevelt giving his “Arbor Day Proclamation to the School Children of the United States” in 1907, 100 year ago. The things he said then ring true today. Plus, they have a cool word puzzle. At our Arbor Day program on April 27 we’ll have a contest with this puzzle.

In Nebraska, at www.dnr.state.oh.us/tabid.5103/default.aspx, they’ve a short and nicely done biography of J. Sterling Morton with this most excellent quote from him – “Other holidays repose upon the past. Arbor Day proposes for the future.”

But lest we think that Arbor Tree is an exclusively American holiday, join us for this year’s Arbor Day program where we continue our international approach to “Arbor Day Around the World” when we travel to West Africa to learn about the Bottle Tree.

Along with providing oxygen, shade, habitat, wind protection, noise and pollution reduction, materials for thousands of products, respite and artistic inspiration, trees are the also protagonists in the literature and folklore of many countries.

There is practice of African Americans in the South to place bottles and other luminous objects onto the branches of dead trees. This custom was brought to America by West African slaves who continued their tradition of attaching shiny objects to trees. The bottle tree tradition holds that evil spirits are attracted to the bottles and are trapped inside, where they can do no harm.

Glass bottle trees are no longer just a Southern thing – their popularity has grown into a national interest. Recently, the bottle tree has seen new life as a tree-like metal structure with a steady base and branches such as at www.bottletree.com

Among those bit by the Bottle Tree bug are Elmer and his beyond kitsch Bottle Tree Ranch. Find Elmer by doing an advanced Google search with the following words: elmer + bottle tree + ca. If you belong to Flickr, Yahoo’s online image community, you can see a blue collar bottle tree for the bud crowd at #333291065 and a bottle tree that John Travolta would approve of (think disco) at #422810005.

We’ll learn more about the African Bottle Tree custom, decorate the Arboretum’s Bottle Tree and make table-top sized bottle trees to take home at our Arbor Day event.

– Lesley Parness

Lesley Parness is Superintendent of Horticultural Education at The Morris County Park Commission. She can be reached at lparness@morrisparks.net.

“Good God. When I consider the melancholy fate of so many botany votaries, I am tempted to ask whether men are in their right mind who so desperately risk life and everything else through their love of collecting plants.”

Carl Linnaeus
“Glory of the Scientist”
1739

From the depths of our armchairs let us consider the plant explorer. Driven by both a passion for plants and a limbic instinct for collecting, these individuals changed not only the look of our gardens but also the course of history. When did term botanist take on the shades of nerdiness? Certainly not with the “The “Indiana Jones” of plant explorers, George Forrest, who is highlighted here in a BBC webpage.

When did horticulturalist become a synonym for boring? Visit plantsgalore.com for brief bios that read like adventure tales, not science texts. This horticultural who’s who includes plant explorers, garden designers, nurserymen and academics.

For an in-depth online education in the history of plant explorers you can do no better than www.plantexplorers.com. The “explorer” is set apart from the “hunter” here and the 2 are traced from the earliest beginnings in the land of Punt through the Golden Age of Plant Exploration, the Wardian Age and the 20th Century.

The Scottish play a large role in the history of plant exploration. Good sites to peruse are the the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh with links to many small botanic gardens in Edinburgh and beyond. The author of the new book on plant exploration, “Blood and Beauty,” Ann Lindsay, boasts, “If you walk into a garden center, I can guarantee you that at least 50% of the non-natives there were found by a Scottish plant collector.” Okay, but let’s not forget the British.

The story of Englishman Ernest “China” Wilson is found at the National Council for the Conservation of Plants and Gardens. The list of plants Mr. Wilson collected is mind-boggling and includes 45 kinds of hydrangea alone. A number of plants in the collection at the Willowwood Arboretum were sent there by Mr. Wilson as past of his work with the Arnold Arboretum in Massachusetts. Willowwood’s upcoming 100th anniversary provides us the opportunity to highlight the story of plant exploration with a symposium, “The World at Willowwood: Plant Exploration – Past, Present & Future” on June 22, 2008.

In spite of the advent of the global village, and our seemingly shrinking world, plant exploration continues today. There are still unexplored regions and uncounted plants waiting to be found. In fact, the destruction of so many forests has spurred the urgency of plant explorers and scientists seeking to find plants before they are made extinct. Share some of the adrenaline with legendary plantsman Dan Hinkley on a recent trip to China at pbs.org. You can watch video of Dan and Prof. Yin as they trapse along roads and traverse hilly terrain, the joy of discovery lighting up their faces. Their travels were documented for a PBS special, “The First Flower.” This video will be shown this spring as part of Willowwood Arboretum Centennial Anniversary programming.

Finally at the University of Arksasas we meet up with modern day plant explorer Barry Yinger. Mr. Yinger has made more than 60 trips to Japan in search of the asiatica for which he has named his business. Recently Barry brought home Spirea thunbergii ‘Ogon. Mr. Yinger and other contemporary plant explorers, including Paul Meyer, Executive Director of the Morris Arboretum, will speak about their travels at “The World at Willowwood.” Please plan to join us for this very special day. Details will be online and in the spring education of Arboretum Leaves.

Are you interested in learning more about integrated perennial polyculture? If you would be interested in attending classes on this subject, please email me at lparness@morrisparks.net and we will see about bringing the authors of Edible Forest Gardens here to the Frelinghuysen Arboretum.

– Lesley Parness

Lesley Parness is Superintendent of Horticultural Education at The Morris County Park Commission. She can be reached at lparness@morrisparks.net.