THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, May 10, 1995 TAG: 9505100448
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 65 lines
``It's a visual feast,'' said a woman viewing a vivid innovation at the Norfolk Botanical Garden.
``It's a living Monet painting!'' marveled another.
They were among 40 on a walking tour Sunday of the Bunny Morgan Memorial Wildflower Meadow.
The vivid flower-flecked fields reflect the spirit of the Virginia Beach resident who wished to share her love of wildflowers with others.
Seen when approaching from afar or from the top of the nearby NATO Tower, the 2-acre meadow shimmers in a haze of impressionistic colors, a spilled rainbow.
One wondrous spring Sunday, you must see it. Or on any day. Any season.
Mayhap the members of the Garden Club of Virginia will slip away at some point today from their convention schedule at the Norfolk Botanical Garden and lose themselves, if but briefly, in the meadow's loveliness. Then take word of its splendor to their 46 chapters.
A year and a half in research, design and construction, the meadow was seeded in September with a mix of more than 50 species of annual, biennial and perennial flowers and 10 kinds of meadow and prairie grasses.
``The red-winged blackbirds thought it was the best idea the horticultural staff ever had,'' said tour guide Sybil Kane. ``They moved right in. They keep it so musical.''
Red-wings were all about, the drab females on nests. Dark males, with red and yellow chevrons, clung to tall swaying reeds, Marines in full dress on guard. Their cheerful calls lent a lively air to the meadow by the lake.
The flowers change, many-staged rockets, with the season. Spring is in full swing and Kane, as we walked, noted a dozen species.
Dominant are orange California poppies that so lacquer that state's hills with gold that Spaniards called it ``the land of fire.'' They found gold above as well as below ground.
Vying with the poppies, red and white as well as yellow, are bachelor buttons with a hue so dark as to be almost royal blue and others well nigh purple and pink.
The meadow glows, a table set for a child's birthday party. Kane noted that bachelor buttons are so called because bachelors, who couldn't sew, affixed the tough, tiny blooms to their coats.
Other folk tales aver that if a maid puts a bachelor button under her pillow she will dream of her beloved. And if a man wears one, it will bloom in the presence of his bride to be but wilt if all is lost.
Kane found fragile baby's breath, intense scarlet flax, purple vetch that moved in on its own; tiny sunlike dandelions that colonized with the first colonists; dame's rocket, a delicate violet flower, a bouquet of which, smuggled to Marie Antoinette in the Bastille, rode with her to the guillotine. Or so folk say.
The land along the lake is as lovely as the lady for whom it is named. ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]
TAMARA VONINSKI
Staff
The Bunny Morgan Memorial Wildflower Meadow, named for a Virginia
Beach resident, covers 2 acres at Norfolk Botanical Garden.
by CNB