Shanghai Springtime

Spring has sprung here in Shanghai and there are lots of flowers blooming all over the place. While they aren't the cultural phenomenon they are in Washington, DC or Japan, there are quite a few cherry trees as well as lots of peach and plum trees all blooming very nicely. The Chinese are very good and quite particular about their gardening. Traditional Chinese gardens are very specifically planned so that you have good views of different plants, rocks and water features everywhere you look. They do a good job in public parks and they are some nice blooming spots in them right now. The willows and the forsythias came on first as usual. I was happy when the metasequoias have started to leaf out. For the uninitiated, these are redwood looking trees with deciduous needles. When the new needles come on in the spring they are very tender, bright green and super pretty. I hate the winter so I'm a happy man again.

Anyway, this time of year I usually reread the A.E. Housman poem about cherry trees. As I get older I suppose the lines regarding how many more springs I will enjoy have a slightly different feel to them.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my three score years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.

Flower markets

Today after stopping in at a design company to look over some plans for a new office we’re moving into I stopped in at the Hongqiao flower market to get some flowers for Jenny, today being Valentines Day. The flower markets here are fantastic, particularly if you’ve got botanical leanings. There are quasi-wholesale markets in different parts of town with a huge variety of plants and flowers. I love just wandering around in them. The orchids are the best part for me. They have long been my favorite flowers – the colors, the shapes, the symmetries. In college when working on a paper for an evolutionary biology class I remember checking out this book by Charles Darwin on orchid pollination and evolution. It had been there for probably 20 years and it had been checked out maybe twice before! Anyway, orchids, cut flowers and plants are cheap in China so I load up.

Portulacas

Here's pictures of some portulacas planted on the edges of the beds in our front and back yards.

I first planted portulacas in a small patch of land next to a little studio apartment I lived in in LA about 10 years ago. The apartment was above a garage and next to it there was this little weedy patch about 10 x 20. I asked my landlady if I could dig up the weeds and plant a little garden and since it was sort of out of the way and people rarely object to anyone voluntarily pulling weeds, she consented. I ended up planning tomatoes, some red and yellow peppers and then a bunch of flowers -- mostly seasonal stuff with lots of zinnias, petunias and impatiens. In the dead of the summer I planted portulacas, which I'd never known before, but are really nicely flowering things once they get going. They're annuals, which are both fun and sad, since you get the satisfaction of seeing them bloom quickly, but then you have to seem them die off quickly as well. They are heliotropic (the flowers turn to face the sun as it moves during the day) as well as diurnal (the flowers open in the morning and close at night). I felt obliged to shoehorn those words in somewhere just because I spent a lot of time learning what they meant and you can't really throw them into a normal conversation. Anyway, I showed my kids some morning glories in our neighborhood recently told them that the flowers open and closed. They were a bit skeptical but we did a check before and after sunset and I was justified in the eyes of my 4 and 6 year olds. Abby came up to me the other day and said that portulacas were related to morning glories since they closed up at night. I thought it was pretty observant and I was pleased to see that my botanical indoctrination was beginning to bear fruit. It's always nice to close on a bad pun

Shanghai in bloom

Shanghai isn't alive with green space, but it has some nice little parks tucked away here and there. We have a backyard here, but the landscaping is controlled by our landlord so I miss my gardening. Perhaps that makes me a bit more attentive to the botanical happenings around me. If we're still doing this next year and we're still here, I'll do more of a blow by blow of spring blooms -- bet you can hardly wait. In college I read part of one of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello garden logs. It listed the specific dates of the sprouting, blooming and harvesting of every plant in the garden. Needless to say, there weren't too many people who had checked it out before me. I recognize that the attention span for a botanical blog entry is short so I'll skip to some pictures. There are a lot of these camellias in Shanghai. The symmetries are amazing as is the scent.



There are also some hollyhocks around. I always liked hollyhocks. They have a very cottage-y feel. Here are some of the last blooms of the season.