Another Greenhouse visit!

Lucky me, I went back to the Smith Greenhouse again this week. I met my wonderful friend, Kate, and we wandered through the rooms together, chatting.

The bulb show was over, but, (who knew?) the plants were still there and blooming, some looked a little tired, but it was still wildly beautiful and fragrant.  It gave me hope that spring would come.  Smelling the hyacinths is what did it.  It felt like proof and brought up such a visceral body memory of spring and warmth, I love how scents do that, go right to the brain.

The colors were very pleasing to the eye, too.  The volume and variety of flowers is really quite decadent.




This time we stopped and peeked into the horticulture classroom for the students.  I went to Smith and I LOVED my year long Horticulture class. It was intense and life changing. I got to learn about propagating plants and nomenclature. We had quizzes on the latin names of large groupings of plants. We grew things. It was amazing. I knew it was really special at the time and even then I wished I had more time to focus on each assignment, book and plant, but I was a busy girl.

Looking in this room now as an outsider, I felt a pang of envy. I wanted to be in there working on the orange tree or watching the progress of the seedlings. The layout reminded me of Harry Potter's Herbology Professor Sprout's Greenhouse. It is magical to be around plants, to see how they turn water, sun and dirt into green growing life.

This glorious variegated Ivy is so delicious to me. I remember loving the yellow tinged edges as a student. I've grown it twice from cuttings but I can't keep it alive. Seeing it growing so large in the greenhouse made me want to try again, but I'm still not quite attentive enough to keep any fickle plants alive at home.




Outside on campus this Magnolia bud is looking like a plush little rodent, hopefully it will crack open into a floppy fragrant blossom soon.  One of our assignments in the Horticulture class was to look at 25 different trees every week from winter to spring, watching the buds change and burst open and drawing and describing the transformation every week. I learned so much in that class and I would have missed it if I had tried to cram in all those pre-med classes I thought I should take. Hooray for the plants winning out!