Under the Baobab Tree

Botany Sunday

Today was Rogation Sunday -- which celebrates Spring and has to do with God exhorting us to all grow like vines and produce something useful (He suggests fruit) -- but which the rector at my church calls Botany Sunday. Most of you know that I am kind of obsessed with amateur botany. So today I did all sorts of botanical things.

I drove over the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens this morning. For those if you who don't know, it's in Anacostia right across the Anacostia River from the National Arboretum. It's an amazing place. It has been there since right after the Civil War when an old Union Soldier named Walter Shaw bought the property from his father in law and started growing lotus plants and water lilies. Eventually the Department of the Interior bought it and has been trying to restore the marshes and wetlands ever since. The result is a bizarre, watery place right smack in the middle of town that makes you feel like you're in a third world rice paddy or maybe the Great Dismal Swamp. Highlights:

• There are over a dozen lily/lotus ponds right inside the gates. Every conceivable kind of lotus plant and water lily grows there. They even has some East Indian lotuses grown from an ancient seed an archaeologist found in 1951 on a dried-up Manchurian lake bed. The Park Service estimates the Manchurian lotuses to be between 350 and 575 years old. The park also has Amazonian lotuses and other tropical lilies. I couldn't really tell them apart but you can get a brochure that tells which pond has what in it.


• In the lily ponds there are also a number of good bald cypresses. They're not as good as the cypresses at Teddy Roosevelt Island, but they are still pretty good. Their roots/knees separate the lily ponds and provide footing. That's pretty cool.


• I met several families of Canada Geese. The geese families have just hatched their goslings -- one family had six of them in tow, another family had only two. I don't think I'd ever seen goslings before They pretty much look like chicks only bigger and they don't like to be alone apparently because they are always running in to the back of Mommy Goose. There are so many geese at this place that it was a little hazardous at times. The geese are all walking around, on account of the goslings I suppose (can't fly yet) and they're kind of big and dangerous birds so a couple of times I had to lurk around and wait for a goose family to amble across the path before I could keep going. There were more geese than people.


• I met one goose who extremely angry at a duck. The duck was sitting in the marsh, minding its own business and the goose was standing a few feet away from the duck honking right at it really loudly. It honked at the duck for a long time. You could hear this goose all over the park. Poor duck. It probably went deaf.


• I learned some more about swamp plants. I learned to identify arrowhead arum, pickerelweed, duck potatoes, spatterdock, swamp roses (my favorite) and wool grass. I checked all these plants out in my book, Common Plants of the Mid-Atlantic Coast: A Field Guide. Wool grass grows elsewhere around town, too.


• I learned to identify wild yellow irises. They look like yellow irises. They are invasive and non-indigenous so the park people spend a lot of time trying to dig them up. It does not look like they are succeeding.

These aquatic gardens are a great place to go walking. I walked around for about 2 hours -- and a lot of the marsh has a boardwalk so you can get way out in the swamp and see a lot. You can't tell that you are anywhere near civilization except that you can hear freight trains go by pretty near every now and then and you can see the main flight path to National. Otherwise you just see the fishies jumping around and hear the geese honking at the ducks. Once an Air Force helicopter went over pretty low but that was it.

Later in the day I ended up at St. Alban's to celebrate the aforementioned Botany Sunday. I was early so I sat on top of the hill (from which you can see over the Capitol and all the way to the Aquatic Gardens). They just planted a new japanese weeping cherry up there next to the Peace Cross. Then I went inside and passed the most amazing looking little tree I've ever seen. It was a little dumb looking tree, like a sassafras or a tupelo, except that it had this weird white stuff all over it as if it were a giant seeding dandelion. It is apparently called a Fringetree and its females are the last ones to bloom in the spring. It's genetically a member of the Olive Family, which includes Ash trees (who knew). The Olive Family has a number of equally obscure non-Ash members, such as the Swamp Privet and the Devil-wood Tree. These trees I looked up in my National Audubon Society Field Guide to Trees (Eastern Region).

Then inside I learned it was Botany Sunday and the sermon was about some cloistered nuns in Spain who make great marmalade. Fruit, get it?