I'm now back home and recovering from jet lag. Getting ready for some cold weather here with -5C predicted, hopefully it will slow down the advent of spring, though the snowdrops are already going. While in Portland, I made a brief visit to the Hoyt arboretum, where I had the luck to chat with curator Martin about the collection and particularities of growing in the environment. (This was a chance meeting, I asked the desk person a question she couldn't answer, so he came out to help.) Unfortunately it was the end of the day, so I wasn't able to spend as much time as I would have liked, nor take many pictures. It is a fantastic arboretum, I look forward to a more extensive visit. They had some of the finest A. mandshuricum I've seen, and some very nice A. miaotaiense, as well as some good looking, young, wild sourced A. pycnanthum (an important ex situ conservation). Edit: I forgot to mention, the second picture is a tree labeled A. pseudoseiboldianum var tatsiense. I find no reference to this, does anyone know what it is? The following morning we visited the famous Portland Japanese gardens, which were very beautiful in winter. I always feel maples (and gardens in general) offer a rewarding experience during the dormant season, and this was particularly true here, with the magnificent shapes of the many established dissectums, some venerable. Staff pointed out several which they said there are often lines to photograph during the other seasons. I was glad to avoid that, although the garden wasn't empty, it's very intimate and I'm not sure how well it would deal with hoards of picture snappers! They do sell the (rather expensive) tickets for specific time slots, however, though one can spend as much time as desired in the garden. In spite of the price and season, there were plenty there enjoying the lovely and authentic symbol of the ties between the city and Japan. -E
Hoyt also has a collections database on web site with photos of individual specimens. Perhaps no longer in effect but some years ago saturation labeling was accomplished by tagging based entirely on map location. Rather than visual characters. Resulting in a high degree of mislabeling - we stopped by the office afterward to point out what we had discovered and were told the labeling by map position only was the reason for this. My first thought was that arboretum visitors had probably being going to local garden centers asking for specific plants by the wrong names for perhaps years as a result. This was long enough ago that looking up newly encountered plants on the spot using cell phones probably wasn't a thing like it is now.
Martin is a gem, hope you get another opportunity to spend time with him (and revisit Portland in doing so).
There were a few obviously (even in winter) wrong labels, and the usual mishmash of taxonomy. It's hard to keep everything up to date in such a big collection, though, and I was impressed to see some maples correctly identified, like A. shenkanense, that are rarely rightly labeled. I thought so, he was kind enough (or bored enough) to take the time and have a reasonably long conversation. I suspect that Portland and Normandie are represent quite similar challenges in gardening (lots of rain, acid soil). He said they have a lot of Verticillium. I certainly intend to go back and spend more time there on my next visit, as well as get up to UBC. Google comes up with this, but it seems an unusual error to make. Maybe someone scrawled the species and the paper got smudged, so the person making the label got it wrong, lol. -E
We were told the placement of labels on specimens out in the collection was based on existing mapping. If a tree or shrub had so and so coordinates, then it was automatically this species or that - whatever was supposed to be in that spot, regardless apparently of what was there actually looked like. And the labels we saw were "permanent" display labels, hard plastic or whatever the particular type was. This was some years ago. But at that time, so many plants had the wrong labels that it would not be a surprise if quite a bit of this problem was still present.