New Girl in Town: On our Fabulous Spring (and Phipps)

For me, the first sign of Spring is when the daffodils punch through the dirt like so many tin soldiers at attention.  Spring has arrived! they seem to proclaim, and the rest of the flowers fall in lockstep:  hyacinth, forsythia, magnolia...  I’m struck by how Spring springs here in the ‘burgh – it doesn’t really spring so much as it pounces, and suddenly Ol’ Man Winter is but a distant memory.

I’m also amazed at the depth of knowledge my fellow Pittsburghers have around flowers and trees.  Seeking illumination, or maybe just because I love flowers, I pay a visit to the Phipps Conservatory and its Display Horticulturist, Ben Dunigan.

I immediately relate to Ben – he also went to California to find himself but found that he loved plants and returned to the East Coast, settling in Pittsburgh after majoring in Plant Sciences at Cornell.  It’s the final week of the Phipps’ annual Spring Flower Show so Ben takes me through the various rooms in a whirlwind flora-tour.

The show blooms thanks to over 15,000 bulbs that are changed out three to four times during a month-long run.  All of the flowers grow in Pittsburgh and Ben lets drop that the mountain laurel is the state flower of Pennsylvania.  I make a note to quiz my son Steven on this when he gets home from school.  The factoid I really want, however, is the answer to why Spring is so intense in these parts.

“It’s because of our much stronger winters,” Ben explains.  “Really showy flowers need vernalization, or a cold period to produce showy blooms.”  I resolve to embrace my (inner) winter.

In the Victorian Room, dark plants rule and they’ve dyed the pond black in keeping with Queen Victoria’s bleak demeanor.  I take it as the Phipps’ attempt to snag a new demographic:  angst-ridden teens.  I note that hydrangeas are in ample supply.

“Filet mignon to deer,” Ben teases.

A butterfly motif is prevalent in the Broderie Room, done up as a French garden a la  Versailles.  “The beds here are curvilinear whereas an English garden would be boxy and square,” Ben tells me.  This is also ground zero for the “rocket series,” snapdragons grown high to the sky.  Since these flowers are often grown low to the ground, it’s great to see how much better they look when they are tall, wild and free – which is how much of my own garden looks.

“We grow ordinary flowers extraordinarily,” Ben continues, and I have to agree.

The Sunken Garden is next, a festival of eye-popping color.  From there, we pop over to the East Room, Ben’s favorite.  There is a waterfall at the back of the room and colorful (faux) butterflies swoop and glide amid grape hyacinths, snapdragons, pansies and tulips.  I want it!  I try to explain to Ben how smitten I am with East Coast flora and he totally gets it.

“It’s different out here,” he says.  “You won’t find rose gardens like in Golden Gate Park but we have more flowering trees in the cool season, things like cherry.  And we get magnolias, azaleas, rhododendrons throughout the region.  We’re in a power zone for flowers.  When I tell people I live in Pittsburgh they say ‘that must suck’ but it’s my little secret.”

In the South Room, I find the delphiniums tall and the hyacinths fragrant and they lead  us to the “Headwaters of the Amazon,” Ben’s playpen at the Phipps as its resident expert on tropical plants.  The three-year exhibit was unveiled this past winter and it is as lush as it is educational.  A meandering path guides us past trees and flowers that showcase the beauty and frailty of this vast ecosystem.

I learn that the variegated tapioca packs more carbs by weight than any other plant in the world and is used to make manioc, a food staple for much of the Amazon basin.  Ben goes on to say that poison dart frogs lay their eggs in bromeliads (tho not at the Phipps) and that the region’s jatropha plant is being used to make biodiesel fuel at the same time the natives are focused on its ability to cure dysentery and intestinal parasites.  I walk by a red powderpuff plant and revel in its fluff.

We weave our way into the Serpentine Room, where Ben quickly points out that “the daffodils snake through in a contrary way.  If you didn’t notice, that means the designer did his job.”  He did.  I ask my knowledgeable host if anyone every stumps him with a plant question.

“In my room, hardly ever,” he smiles.

Our last stop is the Butterfly Garden, lying fallow on this early Spring day.  “You’ll see the most butterflies if you come on a partly cloudy day,” says Ben.  “When the sun is in and out and there’s that convection in the air, they like it.”  I vow to return once the butterflies are in full flight, sometime in early May.

As we take an outdoor table at Cafe Phipps, Ben summarizes the mission.  “We’re making a push for native plants.  Planting exotic species has made them invasive.  Native plants will do well with less water and still look great.”

The plant man’s natives of choice are echinacea, yarrow and bottlebrush buckeye and these tips and more are part of Project Green Heart, an initiative by the Phipps to promote a more sustainable relationship to the environment.

As for me, I’m thrilled that lilacs are both native and non-invasive and that they’re growing happily in my back yard in Pittsburgh.

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Elaine Labalme moved to Pittsburgh from San Francisco after thoroughly researching the best city in which to live.

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Photographs copyright Brian Cohen, who moved to Pittsburgh with his wife and four children after visiting for a weekend.