In bloom 🌸

Cherry blossoms and bonsai at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

In times of frustration I always make my way back to Nirvana. 27 years after his death in April of 1994, I still feel sometimes like Kurt is the only one who gets it.

It’s been a frustrating time for The Discourse the past few weeks, what with renewed debates about the slapstick inefficacy of American police and how many drone strikes it takes to make a country love democracy. So I’m listening to Kurt again. Bruises on the fruit/ Tender age in bloom. Same, Kurt.

Anyway, the cherry blossoms are in bloom at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and my friend Shira organized a trip with our respective parents. (If you’re reading this in your inbox, you may want to click through to the online edition; there are lots of photos here that will probably get truncated.)

Flowers are an amazing adaptation. Flowering plants often rely on pollinating animals like birds and bees to reproduce, and they use their energy-intensive flowers as lures. Older lineages like conifers and ferns have no need for pollinators, and thus no need for flowers; all a pine requires to spread its pollen and seeds is a strong breeze. But what a flowering tree loses in self-sufficiency and a substantial amount of energy, it more than regains in distribution and biodiversity. There’s a reason flowering trees vastly outnumber conifers, both in number of species and global coverage. Mutualism has its perks.

The Brooklyn garden has one of the largest bonsai exhibits outside of Japan. Since it’s in a protective greenhouse, it’s closed during the pandemic, but we were able to sneak some views through the glass.

I think these are the first bonsai I’ve ever seen in person, and you know what? All the cliches are true. A bonsai tells a story. As you view the tree from different angles, you can’t help but feel awe and wonder at the miniaturized immensity of an impossible thing. Actually, view is the wrong word. You encounter it.

I like to think that if Kurt had lived longer, he might have gotten really into gardening. I can see him raking leaves for the compost pile and fussing over his begonias.

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Tree reading

Until doing research for this post, I had never heard of kiku, a form of Japanese gardening all about creating great landscapes devoted solely to the chrysanthemum flower, which blooms for only a few weeks. [New York Botanical Garden]

Understanding the pandemic plant boom. [Brooklyn Botanic Garden]