Jamaica Plain News (https://www.jamaicaplainnews.com/category/environment)
If you haven't made it to the Arnold Arboretum in the last several days than you are missing seeing an amazing array of cherry blossom trees in peak bloom. The last few years late spring frosts knocked off buds, and prevented trees to be able to have full branches of beautiful flowers.
The Arnold Arboretum is inviting you to come celebrate Japanese culture among the beautiful cherry blossoms with Taiko drumming on April 24. Karen Young and KASA Taiko will perform, and there will be calligraphy and Japanese games by the Showa Boston Institute. The Taiko drumming will be taking place from 6 to 6:30 pm, with Showa activities before and after. Seating for the performance will be on the ground, but you are welcome to bring a blanket to sit on. This program will take place on mowed grass in the Bradley Rosaceous Collection.
Among the plants growing at the Arnold Arboretum, few embody the spirit of horticultural collaboration and cultural exchange as well as this nearly 300-year-old compact potted cypress. The story of this tree’s arrival at the Arboretum begins with a wealthy American plant lover named Larz Anderson. In 1913, Anderson, a Harvard College graduate who had previously served as a diplomat in the Foreign Service in Europe, reached the end of his appointment as “Ambassador extraordinary” to Japan. During his post, Anderson had developed a keen interest in Japanese horticulture, writing fondly of his experiences with miniaturized trees in the gardens of the villages of Yokohama alongside his wife, Isabel: “About us were dwarf trees of fantastic shape and stunted plum in fragrant bloom, white and pink, and gnarled trees hundreds of years old with branches blossoming out of seemingly dead trunks in pots of beautiful form and color.”
So taken was Anderson with these meticulously trained miniature trees that he and Isabel purchased at least forty of them from the Yokohama Nursery Company, a reputable distributor known to have supplied many of the earliest dwarf trees to arrive in Europe and the United States from the newly opened ports of Japan. Among the selection was this ‘Chabo-hiba’ (accession 877-37*A), one of several of this cultivar of hinoki cypress purchased by the Andersons.
Mass General Brigham employees are no longer required to wear masks when interacting with patients. The change affects two Brigham sites in Jamaica Plain: Faulkner Hospital and Brookside Community Health Center. In a letter to patients, Mass General Brigham's Chief Medical Officer Dr. Tom Sequist explained the change. "We have been monitoring respiratory virus activity in our community since the fall. Respiratory viruses in our community have been decreasing for several weeks.
Are the orioles back in Jamaica Plain? You'll find out on Saturday at the first spring bird walk at the Franklin Park. This walk is with Nature Man Mike, sponsored by the Brookline Bird Club, Franklin Park Tennis Association, and the Emerald Necklace Bird Club. And they'll be hosting bird walks all spring. Meet at the Shattuck Tennis Courts on Saturday, March 30, at 8 am.
It's time to prepare for gardening season, and the Jamaica Plain Branch Library has a lot of seeds for you. They've got marigold seeds, they've got nasturtium seeds, lettuce seeds, bush bean seeds, and more. Just head to the library and ask for seeds -- they're free!
A solar eclipse will happen on April 8, and people are making plans all across the area to view it in certain places. So how about the summit of Peters Hill in the Arnold Arboretum? Join Arnold Arboretum docent Kevin Schofield for a tour of Peters Hill, the Arboretum's tallest hill, and home to white pines, dawn redwoods, bamboo, ginkgoes, larches, and a truly magnificent crabapple collection. The tour will start at 2 pm end at the summit, where you will get a chance to view the partial eclipse through eclipse-safe sunglasses provided by the Arboretum. Note: How well the eclipse can be seen will depend on how much cloud cover there is that afternoon.
The following article was originally published on the Arnold Arboretum's website and is republished here with permission from the Arnold Arboretum. The Arnold Arboretum is an outdoor classroom and community resource for education that connects our community with trees and the natural world. Public programs like practical classes, workshops, talks, and special tours are free to all and leverage the unique knowledge and expertise of staff, volunteers, and external instructors—so they can fill-up quickly, meaning online registration has felt a bit like the Hunger Games to some. Fear not, though, because signing up for a class at the Arnold Arboretum just got a whole lot easier. As part of ongoing efforts to improve accessibility for all, the Arboretum has unveiled an improved program registration system offering many exciting new features and user capabilities.
On December 18, more than two inches of rain and wind gusts exceeding 50 miles per hour wreaked significant damage to trees in the Arnold Arboretum. Nearly 40 accessioned plants were lost across the landscape, many uprooted or—in the case of nearly a dozen hemlocks—snapped in half. While the storm was formidable in terms of tree loss and the enormity of the continuing clean-up effort, the immediate and coordinated response of the Arboretum’s horticultural team ensured safety for visitors and renewal for the plants either lost or severely compromised. It was an unusual event in many respects, breaking records for highest minimum and maximum temperature for the day and generating some of the strongest winds—outside of thunderstorms—seen in Boston in a decade. “When intense wind is accompanied by heavy rain—which softens the ground and further compromises the ability of older or compromised trees to anchor themselves—we tend to see the most damage inflicted on the collections,” said Rodney Eason, Director of Horticulture and Landscape.
Among the wonderful benefits of the Arnold Arboretum—where plants gathered from around the world grow side-by-side under the watchful care of staff experts—is that when something interesting or unusual happens, it typically gets noticed. Case in point is a spontaneous mutation of a single branch (or sport) of an Eastern redbud tree in the Arboretum’s collection first observed by a staff member in 2009. After more than a decade of research and testing, the Arboretum has introduced a beautiful new redbud cultivar, Cercis canadensis ‘Arnold Banner’, published last month in HortScience magazine. What sets ‘Arnold Banner’ apart from other Eastern redbuds, which are distributed across a wide swath of the eastern U.S. from New England to Florida and west to Texas and northeastern Mexico, is its flower color—or rather, the almost total absence of color. This species in the pea family grows as a large shrub or small tree and is known for its pink to magenta clusters of flowers that appear in early spring before the plant leafs out.