hummingbirds in the Winter Garden

Today I went to the Arboretum to see the Winter Garden, and the hummingbirds alleged to be there; tried to get there via Pacific to the Montlake bridge, but Pacific got out from under me. Anyway. Got there. Before too long (I was a little confused, thinking that Azalea Way on the map was a vehicular-type road) I saw yellow up the path, witch hazel flowering, and had found my way to the Winter Garden. More yellow from a Mahonia's flowering sprays, and here, already, saw my first hummingbird. It looked black with a red throat-patch -- others, later, sometimes looked greener, or differently decorated, but with the way they move, and the way they iridesce, the parsimonious hypothesis seems that they all were the same kind. (Ruby-throated?) This one sang hummingbird song, trebly electronic patterns built of ultrafast sweeps and accelerating/decelerating pulse trains like glass marbles chinked together.

Each Mahonia flower stalk had flowers increasing in maturity as you go down: green buds at the tip, chartreuse half-open, yellow full-blown flowers -- then just slightly-thickened rods sticking out, all the way down. This is where the berries would be, and these Mahonias (the big ones all Arthur Menzies hybrid, I think) didn't set any?

Yellow witch hazel growing in planes, forming a net over the sky. A woman with her boy came down the path and waved for a picture. She pressed me to go down that path to the right there and smell the sarcocarpa. It's so beautiful you'll wish it was a perfume. I went down the path; I smelled the sarcocarpa. The smell was pleasing, but I don't remember what it was like. Orange-red witch hazel, and red.

A hummingbird drinking from the Mahonia, and perching in the the camellia, turning its head back and forth, pausing to thrust its tongue rhythmically out of its beak. Yeah baby.

I walked around the paths, out of the Winter Garden core, among conifers, and curving back in, by the bench that looks over the lawn, to the fabulously twisted Harry Lauder's Walking Stick, a contorted hazelnut. Then back around to the camellia and Mahonia to look for more hummingbirds. One was disputing the Mahonia with a much larger small bird, something in yellow and gray that sent flower-petals fluttering down.

A witch hazel just barely blooming: its yellow petals ooze coiling from brown bean-shaped cases set in threes. A witch hazel with blooms, with glaucous crustose lichen, and with moss, the kind that grows short stalks with spiky leaves all around.

Wintersweet smelling something like honeysuckle.

Chinese red birch. I'd like to see its peeling bark backlit by the sun setting.

Finally through the woodland garden, and across, to a place where a shrub's curving branches with bright green with moss, and the ground was bright red-brown with the fallen needle-fronds of a dawn redwood. Up the Azalea Way, and home.