Wintersweet and More
One of my favorite winter activities is a weekend visit to the US National Arboretum in Washington DC. It reminds you over and over again that plants don't really have to be in leaf or flower to have real presence in the landscape. You could smell the fragrance of Chimonanthus praecox, shown here, from yards away, and the very pale yellow flowers were simply gorgeous against the clear blue sky.
I even admired the feathery structure of the bare Mock Orange and vowed to plant one at the house up in Massachusetts, where there's a lot more room. This one, in the
Arboretum's Asian Valley, had the added attraction of a well-structured bird's nest, which will disappear as soon as the leaves emerge.
We strolled through the hollies, always one of the winter wonders, and then ambled by the magnolia collection, punctuated here and there by brilliant red splashes of winterberry. We admired the smooth grey bark on the deciduous magnolias and noticed that the sun shining down on the leaves of Magnolia virginiana gave them a silvery, almost ghost-like appearance.