Most of the world celebrates New Year's, retiring one calendar to hang another on January 1. For the naturalist, the calendar begins instead in the springtime, when dormant plants show the first signs of renewed shoot growth.
Each individual has a personal favorite harbinger of spring. While enrolled as an undergraduate at a university in snowy Ohio, each year I combed the campus and nearby woodland as winter waned, searching for the earliest spring flowers: tiny Draba verna, veronicas, hepatica, Lamium amplexicaule, and even skunk cabbage. There forsythias, pussy willows, crocus, and, of course, daffodils were among the first cheerful garden messengers of warm weather ahead. Fast forward, and on the "hills of Westwood" are the fragrant floral sprays of the evergreen Ceanothus spinosus, as now growing at the new Getty Center. Around our campus, where so many plants are evergreens and some flowers can always be found, the choices are less obvious. My candidate is the widely planted California sycamore, which by early March shows its pendulous clusters of reddish female flowers as velvety leaves emerge from winter buds. Within the Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden, the dormant buds of our massive specimen of California buckeye and the Taiwan cherry burst open in early March--El NiŅo notwithstanding.
When spring has sprung, our garden staff must become as active as the plants that we cultivate. Immediately, we convened our spring training course for perspective docents on March 16, one day after the "official end" of the rainy season. This session attracted twenty-two attendees--eager, willing, and soon to be able. On the first sunny days, our staff and volunteer gardeners attacked the herbaceous weeds that had become dense and robust following February's heavy rains. On many mornings we hear the sounds of schoolchildren, excited to be in the garden to learn about our plants. Teams of workers have been planting out hundreds of new accessions from the lathhouse, experimental field, and Botany Building rooftop. The staff knew that I had been antsy--no, pushy--to reinvigorate the outdoor collection with greater diversity, emphasizing plants with unusual botanical features.
This growing season we are not planning any major construction projects. After three years of masonry, trenching, and hauling, we need to take time to invest most of our effort in the plants. Our expanding collection of Hawaiian endemics is being assembled for the our dedication in May. Watch this spring as we begin new gardens along the wheelchair paths, fill in gaps on perimeter fences, replace old stumps with new shrubs and cluster palms, and, in general, add some colorful flowers to our palette.
This is the type of spring renewal that should bring joy to our visitors. And we hope that each of you will make the trip to see what MEMBG has to offer.