Rendez-vous horticole

Each spring, the Montreal Botanical Garden hosts their Great Gardening Weekend. The highlight of the event, for many gardeners, I’m sure, is the plant sale. Both plants from MBG growers and from area nurseries are available. Somehow, we’ve always missed this weekend in the past, but on Friday we finally made it out to Montreal.

We arrived about 11:00 AM. The first flush of anxious diehard gardeners who stormed the gates at opening time was done, and the lazier afternoon gardeners hadn’t yet arrived, so it seemed like good timing. Many of the shoppers had children’s wagons or some sort of transport for their purchases. Note to self: Be better prepared next year! As it was, Railguy carried our purchases back to the car while I continued to shop.

Of course, a bonus to this sale is that you can enjoy the Botanical Gardens when you’re done shopping. We first ate lunch at the restaurant, which has the rather unimaginative but accurate name of Botanical Garden Restaurant. Then me moseyed out into the gardens themselves. At this time of year, the tulips are a highlight.

While the perennial beds are just getting started, the flowering trees are spectacular.

Likewise, the vegetable gardens are just being planted, but how about this patterned plot? That’s lettuce!

We didn’t try to cover the entire grounds but just visited a few of the gardens. Here is the Vertical Crevice Garden. Crevice gardens originated in England. This one was planned by the Czech designer Zdenek Zvolanek. It features flat stones stacked vertically on their edges to simulate the open face of a stratified, upthrust rock wall. The alpine plants growing throughout the garden are natives of North America, Europe and Asia.

In the Lilac Meadow, the lilacs are just coming into full bloom. We tried out the Muskoka chairs (or Adirondack chairs, depending on what part of the world you’re from). They were very comfortable, and it was pleasant sitting there, in spite of the whine of lawnmowers and other machinery in the distance. The chairs seemed to be new. The scent of cedar overwhelmed that of the lilacs!

You can sit down by the little lake, too. We watched the swallows dip and weave.

It’s not quite peony season yet, but there were some gorgeous irises blooming. This one is the miniature dwarf bearded iris ‘Ditton Purple’.

We made our way over to the shade garden. Many woodland flowers take advantage of the sunlight available before the trees leaf out and bloom in the spring.

Then we headed home, hoping to beat rush hour traffic out of Montreal, though it always seems to be congested. Here’s my plant bonanza. I spent the weekend getting them tucked safely into the ground.

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Greenhouse Monday

On Monday, it was still bitterly cold but bright and sunny, a good day for a drive, and we set off for the Montreal Botanical Garden. The MBG features a set of linked greenhouses that are like paradise on a cold winter’s day. The photo above shows a model of the greenhouses and gives you an idea of their layout. Each house features different plant species. We especially wanted to see the Butterflies Go Free exhibit, which opened February 20th and runs until April 27th.

When you step into the first greenhouse and are enveloped by the humid, earth-scented air, it is easy to leave winter behind.

This vivid orchid is xLaeliocattleya Ptarmigan Ridge ‘Mendenhall’. What a beauty!

Check out these fiddleheads! They belong to a tree fern.

You can get an idea of the size of this tree fern from the person standing to the right.

Here’s a bit of information about tree ferns provided with the display.

You can walk behind a waterfall and look out over a pond featuring two sculpted cranes.

Here’s yet another reason for banning plastic water bottles!

Look at these monster cones! They belong to a cycas.

I’ve gotten lazy about taking down information. The digital age makes it easy to record whatever information is on offer and read up on topics at your leisure back at home.

The begonia room may be my favorite. There are so many diverse varieties of begonias with all manner of interesting leaf patterns. One of my favorites was the one shown above. The leaves look green in the shade, but when lit by the sun, they are fired with red.

And how about this swirly pattern? This rex begonia is appropriately named Escargot.

After the warmth of the other greenhouses, the bonsai room felt distinctly cool. The bonsai are just awakening from a dormant period and many, such as this Chinese Elm, featured tiny leaves, just beginning to show.

Our last stop was the butterfly exhibit. It’s totally wonderful, with a large, bright, two-storey structure filled with beautiful flowering plants, a tall waterfall and brilliant butterflies everywhere. What a pleasure.

Here’s the chrysalis house, where you can look for emerging butterflies. The butterflies are easy to observe and photograph, a great spectacle. A helpful full-colour guide is included with your admission so you can identify different species. I’ll leave you with a few photos of some of the butterflies, and a giant moth!

Atlas or Cobra Moth (Attacus atlas)

Blue morpho (Morpho helenor)

Asian swallowtail pair (Papilio lowi)

Rice paper (Idea leuconoe) and Pink rose (Pachliopta kotzebuea)

 

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Mosaicultures at the Montreal Botanical Garden

All in a Row Madagascar

On Monday, RailGuy and I went to see the Mosaicultures Internationales show at the Montreal Botanical Garden. This competition takes place every three years in a different city. This year’s theme for the Montreal show is Land of Hope, emphasizing the importance of protecting the biodiversity of our planet.

We had a wonderful day. The weather was perfect for a walk around the garden. The fifty or so works are spaced along a 2.2 kilometer circuit of the grounds, a very pleasant walk, and the displays were spectacular. Photographs just don’t capture the impressive scale of the figures or the infinite detail afforded by the variety of plants making up the sculptures, but I’ll share some of our favorites here.

The most incredible entry was the amazing Bird Tree. You can get an idea of how gigantic the tree is by the size of the people walking around it. If you look closely, there is a gardener working at the base of the tree.

The Bird Tree Canada

The birds represented a variety of species, readily identifiable.

The Man Who Planted Trees was surrounded by a flock of sheep, galloping horses, and his shaggy dog.

The Man Who Planted Trees Canada.

I loved the Chinese entry of a girl who loved cranes.

A True Story! China

And here is Mother Earth, looking serene, with wild animals, a waterfall, and horses splashing through water.

Mother Earth Canada

Frogs graced the water garden.

Fragile Frogs! United States

This chameleon blended in well with his surroundings!

Disappearing Into Nature Yemen

This is a representation of the Uffington White Horse in England.

Uffington White Horse England

This beekeeper made me think of Natalie!

The Insects’ Garden Belgium

We finished off the day with a visit to my favorite Tiger Eye Sumac tree and a cold one on the patio, which you can see at the left of the photo.

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Butterflies Go Free

Giant Owl butterfly (Caligo memnon)

This snowy weather is a good time to revisit the Montreal Botanical Garden displays that we saw on February 21st. The most popular winter feature is probably the display of live butterflies. There are actually two separate areas, one for Creatures of Darkness and another for Creatures of Light.

We visited the Creatures of Darkness greenhouse first. The greenhouse isn’t really dark, but the light is somewhat muted. There are five species listed for this display in the flyer that accompanies the exhibition, but we just saw one, the Giant Owl butterfly (Caligo memnon), pictured above. There were quite a few of them though, and they were easy to spot.

Giant Owl Butterfly with wings open.

The photo above shows an Owl Butterfly resting in a dim corner with its wings spread. The genus Caligo includes about 20 species. It’s obvious that the common name, Owl butterflies, refers to the owl-eye pattern on the underwings. it’s quite convincing, with even a streak of white mimicking the glint of an eye. Caligo is derived from the latin for darkness. Owl butterflies prefer to fly at dusk, when there are fewer of their avian predators about. Caligos are found in Mexico and south through Central America to South America.

Below is a view of the second and larger butterfly exhibit room, which houses the Creatures of Light.

Creatures of Light greenhouse

What a wonderful experience! There are butterflies everywhere, big, colourful tropical beauties, floating, nectering, resting. The most eye-catching are the blue butterflies, Blue Morphos.

Common Morpho (Morpho helenor limpida)

So far as I was able to conclude from research via Google, the Blue Morphos include assorted subspecies of Morpho helenor. The Blue Morphos are residents of the neotropical rainforests. Limpida is at home in Costa Rica, while peleides hails from Columbia.

Emperor Morpho (Morpho helenor peleides)

When the Blue Morphos close their wings, they look like an entirely different butterfly, as their underwings are a richly patterned brown. The blue upper wings actually have brownish-grey scales, but their special structure reflects light in a manner that makes them appear blue.

Blue Morph (Morpho helenor)

We also saw a few ‘butterfly balls’, a mass of Blue Morphs congregating together. I found references online that say Blue Morphs engage in a mobbing activity meant to discourage predators, so perhaps that’s what is happening in these butterfly balls.

Blue Morpho "Butterfly Ball"

Most Morphos are blue, but there are a few other colours represented in the genus as well. Here is a White Morpho.

White Morpho (Morpho polyphemus)

Here’s a neotropical resident you might recognise from your own backyard! It’s a Monarch, famous for its incredible migration from the rainforests north to Canada each spring as it follows the blooming of milkweed plants.

Monarch Butterfly (Danaus plexippus)

Butterfly hatchery

New butterflies arrive as a chrysalis and hatch in the greenhouse.  You can watch butterflies emerging within the glass nursery.  The Montreal Botanical Garden website has this to say about the sourcing of butterflies:

The butterflies in Butterflies Go Free come from butterfly farms in 10 different countries. Butterfly farms are a way to protect butterflies and their habitats by creating fair-trade, sustainable businesses that get local communities involved. By encouraging butterfly farms through the years, the Montréal Insectarium has preserved more than 50 hectares of rainforest in Costa Rica, the equivalent of 100 soccer fields.

Fruit Plate

The butterflies feed on fruit juices and you can watch an array of butterflies feeding at the plates set out around the greenhouse.

Emerald Swallowtail (Papilio palinurus)

The genus Papilio is also well represented in the greenhouse. Emerald Swallowtails are native to southeastern Asia, including Indonesia and the Phillipines. The green of the Emerald Swallowtail, above, is similar to the blue of the Blue Morphos in that it is not produced by pigments. Rather, it is created by the microstructure of the wing scales. They refract the light and give rise to blue and yellow visible reflections, which give the perception of green.

Great Mormon Swallowtail (Papilio memnon) male

The colours of the Great Mormon Swallowtail are more subtle. Papilio memnon is a wide-spread butterfly, found from India through southern China and Japan and south. It has four male and many female forms, the females being highly polymorphic. Some forms mimic unpalatable butterflies and as many as 26 female forms have been recorded.

Great Mormon (Papilio memnon) female

The Paper Kite is also native to the Philipines and Malaysia region of southeast Asia.

Paper Kite (Idea leuconoe)

In the dim recesses of vegetation, I noticed this pair of Scarlet Swallowtails mating.

Scarlet Swallowtail (Papilio rumanzovia)

Finally, here is a photograph of a group of Great Mormon Swallowtails forming their own butterfly cascade. The Butterflies Go Free exhibit runs at the Montreal Botanical Gardens until April 29th. It’s highly recommended as a beautiful and informative place to visit.

Great Mormon Swallowtails (Papilio memnon)

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Winter Greenhouse Visit

This winter has been incredibly mild and largely snowfree. We sure can’t complain. Still, the damp, the grey, the boots and coats, it all gets a little wearing, even so. For a break from the February Blahs, a trip to a greenhouse works wonders. So this week, RailGuy and I journeyed out to the Montreal Botanical Gardens for some leafy therapy. Although we have visited the gardens in summer, we have never toured the greenhouses before. We thoroughly enjoyed the visit from the moment we stepped inside and got that first whiff of warm soil. The greenhouses are linked in a series of themed gardens. Here are some of the tropical plants.

I love the Spanish Moss, dripping from these branches. Spanish Moss is native to the southeastern United States and south to Argentina. It hangs from trees in dense masses, sometimes several metres long. It’s an epiphytic plant, which means it is rootless. Its stems are covered in greyish scales called trichomes, which allow the plant to absorb water and minerals and protect it from excess evaporation.

Check out this adorable croc, situated by one of the many water features. His covering of leaves really does impart a scaly appearance.

These two big heron-like birds were stunning, standing before a tall waterfall and wreathed in mist rising from the water.

Here’s a selection of bromeliads. The Bromeliaceae family is diverse and includes plants as different as Spanish Moss and pineapples. Some bromeliads are adapted to store rainwater and dew. Their tightly overlapping leaves form a reservoir known as a tank. The water, plant litter and decomposing animal waste captured in the tank provide a complete diet for the plant. Some amphibians lay their eggs in the bromeliad tank. The hatchlings have a food supply of mosquito larvae and other goodies.

One greenhouse is devoted to bonsai plantings. The tree in the photo below is a 70-year-old Chinese Sweetplum (Sageretia thea).

Here’s a view of the cactus display. Cactus are mostly succulents, and are xerophytes, adapted to living in hot, dry environments. The variety of forms includes everything from the weird to the wonderful.

I especially liked these Golden Barrel cactus.

Another interesting collection featured the Begoniaceae and Gesneriacaea families, which share similar tropical and subtropical habitats. The latter includes a common houseplant, the African Violet. The former includes begonias. I didn’t realize that begonias can be epiphytes, climbers and even shrubs. They are all characterized by asymmetrical leaves.

Some of the begonias had eye-catching foliage. Here’s an Iron-Cross begonia, above, and the aptly named Begonia Rex-cultorum ‘Escargot’ below.

That’s just a smattering of the interesting sights. We also enjoyed the orchid display, the fruit and spice plants, and of course, the butterflies that fly free in the winter. I’ll save them for another post.

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