In the Washington Park Arboretum’s Winter Garden, hellebores like these are among the many plants in bloom.
Mary Henry
Chocolates are expensive and fattening. Flowers are expensive and wilt. Consider giving your Valentine a free experience: calorie free, wilt free, money free. Visit the Washington Park Arboretum and stroll the Winter Garden this month for Valentine’s Day. A multifaceted gift, the beauty is romance inducing, the garden lessons edifying, and it will showcase your outside-the-box creativity.
A small pocket tucked into the 230 acres of the Washington Park Arboretum, the Winter Garden is easy to reach. From the Graham Visitors Center, cross the road, then follow the main trail to the south and west for a short distance. There it is!
Filled with broad-leafed evergreens, plants with vividly colored bark and winter-flowering trees, shrubs and perennials, the garden assembles, coordinates and amplifies the most beautiful aspects of what is often (and erroneously) referred to as the dreary season. After absorbing it all as a whole, each component merits close inspection: leaf, blossom, bark and structure. Many of the four appear on the same plant at the same time.
The dark green, slightly crinkly leaves of Garrya elliptica will form a background for the abundant clusters of flower tassels that can dangle down as much as 8 inches.
The glossy and prickly foliage of mahonia “Arthur Menzies” will be crowned with bouquets of vibrant yellow flower spikes. The varieties of witch hazel (members of the Hamamelis genus) will likely still be in bloom, sporting their intoxicatingly spicy fragrance.
These survivors know what they are doing. It takes that kind of perfume to coax an insect into braving the cold, often wet weather to pollinate.
Down at ground level, look closely for the handsomely patterned leaves of hardy clematis or the emerging blooms of the hellebores. Don’t miss the carpet of black mondo grass on the western side of the garden. This sight would be arresting on its own, but with the brilliantly colored tracery of yellow twig dogwood branches crawling above it, the planting dazzles.
Take time to look at tree trunks and limbs. You’ll spot the large flakes of exfoliating bark on the cinnamon-hued branches of paperbark maple (Acer griseum). The pink-barked, sculptural trunks of Chinese birch (Betula albo-sinensis) soar nearby. Throughout the garden our palette of indigenous mosses will catch the winter moisture and specks of sunlight to sparkle like emeralds. Take your camera. You’ll want to snap pictures.
Time and energy permitting, you may want to hike on in the arboretum. The 3.8-mile Loop Trail is gentle and takes about an hour and 20 minutes to walk.
Stop in the gift shop in the Graham Visitors Center. It is filled with beautiful objects, all related to nature and horticulture. The selection of books for sale is chosen for education and inspiration. There’s hardly a thing in that little shop that would not thrill your Valentine. Give some thought to signing up as an arboretum volunteer. Working side-by-side with someone, being tandem philanthropists with your time, is highly bonding, love inducing, relationship building … think about that!
Visit complete, you may want to take your sweetheart to dinner or, given one of our surprisingly warm sunny February days, lay out a picnic. You might also want to throw in the chocolates and flowers (totally optional, but why not?). Be prepared with some erudite and passionate language. Nothing says devotion and love quite like a poem, earnestly recited. The whole idea is to propel your lover into a stupor of romantic euphoria.
At a loss for words? Look up Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet #43 — How Do I l Love Thee?” Paraphrase it to suit the moment and the object of your affection. “How Do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee like a winter garden. I love thy leaves, thy blossoms, thy bark and thy structure.”