Douglas Justice's March 2020 in the Garden - UBC Botanical Garden blog is particularly interesting this month, talking about winter temperature recording, how it's done here, and its usefulness in assessing hardiness of marginal plants. This month's features some of these marginal plants. As usual, there are lots of good photos (and a very nice photo viewer). The survival of this South African tree heath, Erica oatesii, was apparently not a sure thing. Douglas says these "sumptuous rich-red flowers" have been blooming since January. I had a hard time finding these from above, but they're perfectly visible from the path below. I am disappointed in my Stewartia pteropetiolata photos - I like fuzzy branches, and this has them. The photo in the blog is better. I wasn't going to look for the Nothaphoebe cavaleriei because I didn't understand the location, though "top of the Service Road near the Plant Centre" is exactly where it is, outside the plant sales area at the Shop in the Garden, right at the top of the path at the fence. But Eric La Fountaine was helping me identify something I was about to mis-identify, and he pointed it out, right in back of a magnolia I spent quite a while looking at. The leaf undersides have tiny hairs that make them look glaucous greeny-white. I found an interesting history of these trees at Nothaphoebe cavaleriei - Trees and Shrubs Online. Douglas mentions that this tree has died back to the ground three times (database shows "Data Correction - Alive"), so maybe it wasn't expected to crowd out the very special Larix speciosa - see the posting at Unusual trees - two pines and a larch.
Here is the Magnolia zenii that has everyone excited right now. Last year it was at this stage about a week later. Many of the flowers were open two days after this stage last year, but we're to have freezing temperatures for a few days, so maybe it will take a bit longer. Another attention-getter in this same area is the Corylopsis pauciflora. Practically underneath that is the plant I was looking to name, Pachyphragma macrophyllum, in the Brassicaceae family.
I ran into Linda Layne in the food garden, asked her if there was anything she wanted to feature. Her choice was the wasabi, Eutrema japonicum, a Brassicaceae that looks a little like the Pachyphragma in the previous posting, just enough to be confusing unless you can compare them. Linda was digging around these purple sprouting broccoli, Brassica oleracea Italicum Group. The cultivar name seems to be 'Purple Sprouting'. I photographed a tag, but I can't read it, and can't remember what Linda said that was something about Sulfur, which is what that second word on the bottom looks like.
About the wasabi, I wonder if it was protected during the -8 degree low temperature in January. I threw a few layers of floating row cover material over my wasabi, and it had no problems. By the way, it is incredibly easy to propagate from offshoots; and the whole plant is edible. I've been harvesting the flower shoots and stems; they are much milder than the paste made from grated stems.
