Unexpected rewards amid a lifting fog

Yesterday morning was the coldest so far this autumn. A smoky fog raising from the still warmish Lake Washington blanketed the surrounding hills where we live. In the backyard, our terrace looked like an ocean liner ploughing through the milky haze, with leaves of fire-engine Euonymus and golden Hamamelis shining like bright lanterns in the mist.

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When the fog started lifting, I discovered tall whips full of spidery witch-hazel flowers peeking out from bare branches at the back of the border. It turned out that the Hamamelis with bright golden leaves had been grafted into a stock of Hamamelis virginiana that now flowers for the first time.  H. virginiana is a hardy native from the eastern North America that grows up to 6 meters, and it is a common practice for commercial growers to use it as a grafting rootstock for the more tender Hamamelis varieties. I'd been thinking of cutting off the vigorous suckers for some time, but hadn't gotten to it. And looking at the sunny little tassels, I don't think I have heart to do so at least until the flowers fade. Sometimes you get an unexpected reward for being lazy...

More posts about witch-hazels, one of my favorite winter flowering shrubs:

Witch-hazels against midwinter gloom

Witch-hazels and other midwinter wonders

A blanket of mist

The perfect weather for photographing.

Blueberries in mist

Blazing rows of cultivated, northern highbush blueberries, Vaccinium corymbosum.

The weather doesn't seem to be able to make up its mind. Sometimes, we get all four seasons one single day, as the weather flicks through all its options like a bored teenager browsing the offerings of the cable channel. On Tuesday, I drove to Larsen Lake early in the morning, my sunglasses tightly on my nose, to snap some pictures of the blueberry fields before the glistening, horizontal autumn sun got too high. When I arrived, the weather had decided otherwise. The sun was hiding, and the whole plateau was covered in moist, milky mist that muffled all sounds and wiped out every trace of the surrounding busy suburbia, seemingly transferring the little blueberry farm back in time to its early days of glory more than a century ago.

The Thode log house from the 1890s. Originally situated by the nearby Phantom Lake, it was transferred to the Larsen Lake Blueberry Farm in the 1990s.

Somewhere out there... blazing red blueberry fields covered in deep mist.

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Larsen Lake is one of the many places near Seattle with Scandinavian connections. It was named after Ove Peter Larsen, who built his homestead and farmed potatoes and other vegetables there in the 1890s. Ove Peter's sons used to pick huckleberries and cranberries on the wetlands. Their harvest was transported to the young and fast-growing city of Seattle, first by horse to the Medina or Yarrow Point landings, and then with the ferries to the city. Farming business bloomed and many immigrants followed Larsen's example, covering vast areas of Seattle's eastside with vegetable, fruit and berry farms. Today, few of the farms exist and most of them are used as recreational areas by the busy, suburban eastsiders. Some, like the Larsen Lake or the nearby Mercer Slough Blueberry Farm, are leased out and cultivated as working farms, making nostalgic reminders of Seattle's not-so-distant, rustic past, when all its now world-famous tech companies were unheard and probably even undreamed of.

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As the sun crawls up behind the huge fir trees, blueberry bushes emerge from the mist.

Witch hazels and other midwinter wonders

It is only my first winter in Seattle, but I already disagree with all reports of a rainy and dull place that would better be avoided. Instead, I have fallen in love with these foggy and cold winter days; just look what I enjoyed this morning in the Washington Park Arboretum, only a couple of minutes drive across the lake. So many beauties flowering in the middle of January, gently wrapped in the fog, giving themselves off by their delicate scents! I first went to see the witch hazel collection in the Southern end of the Arboretum, but surprisingly none of the plants there were flowering. But then, I fortunately had better luck in the Witt Winter Garden, near the visitors centre.

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Most of the witch hazels at the Arboretum are of the Chinese species Hamamelis mollis or Hamamelis x intermedia, which is a hybrid between the Japanese witch hazel Hamamelis x japonica and H. x mollis. Especially lovely is the excellent, strongly scented cultivar of H. X intermedia 'Pallida', here in full bloom, looking like clusters of lemon zest are hanging from its branches.

Another beautiful, but less scented cultivar is Hamamelis x intermedia 'Winter beauty', with much darker orange petals. I just love the way the damp climate here makes mosses and lichens to grow so well and to cover many of the woody plants, often looking like green flowers themselves hanging to the branches.

The stinking helleborus, Helleborus foetida, with its pale green flowers in full bloom complements well the witch hazels.
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The European hazel, Corylus avellana, is quite common in the wild in Sweden, and my garden in Sweden had many of these large shrubs growing around it and producing small, dry nuts late in the autumn. Commercially cultivated hazels are called filberts. They are most often hybrids between Corylus avellana and Corylus maxima, the giant filbert, which achieves thirty feet and produces large, edible nuts. Corylus maxima 'Atropurpurea Superba', seen here with its large, purple catkins, is a beautiful and unusual relative of these cultivated hazels.

A new find was the fragrant wintersweet, Chimonanthus praecox, which flowers for the moment with a strong and sweet, hyacinth-like scent. It seems otherwise to be quite an unattractive shrub, a bit like the more common forsythias, but in the right place, where it can hide behind showy perennials during the summer months, it definitely earns its place in a garden for its scent.

Another "friend" from my time in Melbourne, Australia is the silk-tassel bush, Garrya elliptica that I used to admire when it was flowering in the middle of the mild Australian winter. This genus was actually named for Nicholas Garry, a Secretary of the Hudson’s Bay Company who assisted David Douglas in his explorations of the Pacific North-West in the 1820s. It is both an evergreen and a drought tolerant plant, and native to woodlands in Western USA, Central America and the West Indies. The male catkins are the most attractive, just like for so many other early flowering plants as hazels and birches. An especially attractive cultivar with extra long tassels is Garrya x issaquahensis (pictured above), cross that was found in a private garden in Issaqua near Seattle for some years ago.

And just one more picture - I just loved this bird's nest up in a large Magnolia, full of silky buds. What a beautiful place for the small baby birds to start their lives in when they hatch in the spring!

Bellevue Botanical Garden

On Tuesday, my older daughter's school class had field trip to Bellevue Botanical gardens. I volunteered to help, and took the opportunity to take some pictures of this quite lovely garden located on the East side of Seattle and Lake Washington. It was a wonderfully foggy day, a complete contrast to my trip to the Olympic Sculpture Park a day earlier.


Spreading on an area of totally 53 acres, Bellevue Botanical Garden has all the "display elements"of a traditional botanical garden; the Northwest Perennial Alliance Border, Waterwise Garden, the Japanese Yao Garden, Alpine Rock Garden and summer displays of dahlias and fuchsias. In addition to this, it has large areas of woodlands, meadows and wetlands, much of which are unlandscaped and in their natural state. Especially the tall conifers, as western red-cedar, Douglas fir and native schrubs give a hint of how the wilderness further around Seattle looks like today and how it used to look like here earlier.
As it is situated in the middle of sprawling suburban area, the Bellevue Botanical Garden give the visitors and locals a wonderful possibility for recreation. For the festive season, it will be lit with 500 000 electrical lights, a fact that the volunteering ladies happily advertised while I was there, telling that this is the most popular event during the year. Feeling like a complete bore, I am very sceptical of this kind of waste of energy - looking like a floral Las Vegas does not quite satisfy my garden design appetite... Despite this, the gardens are well worth a visit while in Seattle.