Last weekend I spent some time in Deerfield, Illinois, for a family wedding, and an uber-class act it was. In between the family, and the food, and the hospitality suite, and the food, and the schmoozing––and did I mention the FOOD?––I managed a quick trip to the Chicago Botanical Garden.
It’s been a long time since I saw so many of the Zone 6B flowers I grew up with, and the intense sort of greenness we just don’t get here in southern California. I couldn’t remember when I had last saw hydrangea, coneflowers and weeping willows (weeping willows!)
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I’ve always missed “real” lilacs since moving to California––the kind that are dark in color and actually have a fragrance, but alas, it wasn’t the season for them.
I have a special soft spot for weeping willows, because when I was little I imagined them as being quintessentially part of the landscape in China (an imagination based mainly on Blue Willow restaurant dinnerware, lol.)
There were also willows at the Roslyn Duck Pond, a park in the colonial part of town near the library, where I’d spend a lot of time in high school. Besides having ducks (a favorite part of the park for me,) the park was crisscrossed by rivelets and bridges to tiny islands, each one with its own weeping willow. When I was lucky enough to snag an island I’d read or write in a journal while sitting under the willow, much as if I were a figure in a Blue Willow plate.
