September 2016 in the Garden
This year’s unusually early, warm spring has produced exceptional fruit.
August 2016 in the Garden
Summer at UBC Botanical Garden means flowers. Some of the most popular summer flowers are salvias (sages) and their relatives.
Renewal of the Espalier Fruit Tree Collection
By Richard Hallman, UBC Botanical Garden Pomologist in Residence UBC Botanical Garden was established on the UBC campus in 1916. The Garden is now celebrating its 100th anniversary, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that the Garden moved to its current location on Southwest Marine Drive. The first of the espalier fruit tree collection was […]
July 2016 in the Garden
In the Entrance Plaza outside of the Shop in the Garden sits a small, sparsely branched deciduous tree with showy, summer-borne, lavender-pink flowers. The tree is known as a chitalpa and there is another, smaller specimen near the Roseline Sturdy Amphitheatre, but it is otherwise a rare tree around Vancouver. Deconstructing the rather daunting scientific […]
June 2016 in the Garden
June is high season for herbaceous perennials at the Botanical Garden. There are half a dozen areas around the garden where herbaceous displays are prominent, but in terms of sheer real estate, the Asian Garden’s herbaceous collection overshadows all the rest. Foremost among the summer-blooming herbs are the rodgersias. A genus of five herbaceous perennial […]
Climbers
UBC Botanical Garden has an impressive collection of climbing plants. Climbers may have woody stems or they may be herbaceous—the stems dying back to an overwintering crown every year. Woody climbers are known as lianas. In nature, lianas typically climb up and over whatever vegetation they are growing on, smothering or strangling individual plants in […]
Mountain Ash
UBC Botanical Garden has an extensive and diverse collection of Sorbus species. Sorbus is a member of the rose family (Rosaceae) in the group that includes apples, pears and hawthorns. The genus Sorbus comprises about 120 species of small trees native to mountains and moister regions of the Northern Hemisphere. Nearly all of the species […]
Ferns
UBC Botanical Garden has a diverse collection of about 100 different ferns and fern allies. These represent 26 separate genera in 13 families. More than 30 species in the collection are British Columbia natives. Ferns and fern relatives are known as Pteridophytes. Unlike seed plants, ferns and their allies reproduce by spores. A spore is […]
May 2016 in the Garden
This year, like last, will go down as one of the better years for flowers and strong, healthy growth. Conditions are so similar to last year’s that I could just insert the May 2015 in the Garden article, change a few names, and no one would be the wiser. Let’s see…because spring arrived early on […]
April 2016 in the Garden
Like last year, we’re well on the way to one of the warmest springs in recent memory. A number of plants flowered two to three weeks early and many familiar April-blooming plants long since put out their flowers (how about those magnolias and cherries?). But again like last year, there are plenty of plants sitting tight, waiting to flower as they normally would—or at least within only a week or two of their usual time. On this list of conservative bloomers are many in the genus Rhododendron, a group of plants that numbers around four hundred and fifty species varieties and cultivars in the Garden.