Holly Scoggins

Pigmented Mulch in Paradise

Just back from a quick vacation to Little Cayman island. Truly a dot on the map – the whole island is about 7 miles long and a mile wide. Only 150 locals and a couple hundred tourists are on island at any one time. It’s beyond laid back, with few attractions other than the resident iguanas and red-footed boobies (booby jokes abound).

Airport terminal/post office/fire station.

The big draw is diving – LC is the home to Bloody Bay Wall, one of the most famous dives in the Caribbean. The reef drops off like a sheer cliff, from 40-60′ to more than 1000′.

All the action is underwater!
(Let me know if you want to see more slightly blurry diving photos.)

“Fascinating, Holly. But what does this have to do with painted mulch?”

The extent of the landscaping for most yards: conch shells arranged in interesting designs and/or piles. But as we pedaled past a rather upscale condo, I came to a screeching halt. A gorgeous Bismarckia nobilis had caught my eye, but then I saw what was under it. Egad.

Everything comes to Little Cayman by a weekly barge or little prop plane and is wildly expensive. Four-pack of batteries? $15. A six-pack of beer is $20. TWENTY DOLLARS!!!

So, good readers, what we have here is possibly the most expensive mulch on the face of the earth. I can’t even imagine.

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GP Hit List: Ligustrum sinense (Chinese Privet)

[And I don’t mean “greatest hits”, I mean “Mafia hit”]

Gardeners, yardeners, and designers are on a perpetual lookout for a good hedge species. Hedges are useful in so many ways: providing backdrop for a border, making good neighbors, containing football players, etc. In reference to the latter, the field at Sanford Stadium at the University of Georgia (cue woofing!) is known as “Between the Hedges”. In the extensive lore of UGA football, everyone makes like it’s some sacred plant, but (gasp!) it’s just plain ol’ privet. Aside to Jeff, my fellow UGA alum: CNN just reported the dubious distinction that Georgia is the #1 party school in the country (again). Maybe this is why I can’t remember the Krebs Cycle.

Variegated Chinese Privet in all its shrubby glory; photo from University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension.

Back to privet. Designers of D.O.T. landscapes such as medians and interchanges seem especially enamored. Clouds of variegated privet (L. sinense ‘Variegatum’) dot interstates throughout the South. Yes, it’s tough, useful, variegated, and touted as “wildlife friendly” by some leading gardening resources. The berries are indeed good bird food; therein lies the problem. Seeds pooped out by birds results in the green, non-variegated version – much more vigorous and deposited everywhere. For the record, the variegated form also reverts like crazy.

My family’s farm in northeast Georgia is bordered by the North Fork of the Broad River. Over the years, the river bottom, and then the fence lines at all elevations, have filled with privet. It is, pardon my language, a total bitch to remove and almost impossible to eradicate. The State Botanical Garden of Georgia in Athens has an entire squad dedicated to eliminating it from acres of river bottom; ironically, only a few miles from Sanford Stadium. Thought of mostly as a Zone 7-9 plant; we have lots of it in the woods here in the mountains – an entire zone cooler.

Distribution of L. sinense; USDA PLANTS Database http://plants.usda.gov/

Ligustrum sinense is on at least two official Invasive and Noxious Weeds lists by the Southeast Exotic Pest Plant Council and Florida Exotic Pest Plant Council as well as several international lists. Nursery growers and landscapers across the South know these things. So why, why, why, do they continue to produce and spec it? “Variegated foliage sells. People see it, like it, and then ask for it. It’s a bread-and-butter item.” This comment came from the owner of a fairly large nursery that sells to independent garden centers.

Our industry yelps whenever a state or federal mandate threatens to impose restrictions on a best-seller (Hedera helix, for recent example). There are LOTS of terrific woody plants out there, people. The Dirr book is now up to 1250 pages – thumb through and pick a few alternatives. Cease and desist with the Chinese privet.

The Importance of Not Leaving Your Veg Garden Unattended for a Week in July

Small dog snout + normal-sized cucumber provided for scale.

This problem is self-explanatory and probably not at all atypical for our readers. Pattypans became UFOs; grey zucchini, footballs. Note that it’s been very dry here in the Blue Ridge. I shudder to think what would have happened with normal rainfall.

Beans amuck! Scared the hell out of Joel when he opened the fridge. But they wouldn’t fit in the bucket!

If you haven’t tried yard-long beans, give them a shot sometime. Super easy to grow, just need the usual pole-bean structure. Pick daily, or they get out of hand. They have a rich, “beany” flavor and no strings attached. Best sauteed – I toss them with a bit of sesame oil and soy sauce in honor of their Asian heritage. Leave ’em long to impress the kids! I bet one or two beans equals a full serving of vegetables.

Yard-longs (Vigna unguiculata subsp. sesquipedalis) come in both green and a dark red that keeps its color after cooking! They’re actually in the cowpea genus. Normal green bean at top of plate for scale (it now has a complex).

Lamb’s Ears Revisited

A bit more on my recent travels to the big floriculture conference in Columbus, Ohio. I always try to make it out to the Chadwick Arboretum & Learning Gardens, on the campus of THE Ohio State University. There are several components, including trials, a large arboretum, and several small gardens. My favorite is the Steven Still Perennial Garden. It’s a lovely mixed garden, designed by Adrian Bloom (Blooms of Bressingham), and was installed in ONE DAY by their garden volunteers – 2005, I think.

Watching it grow has been fun. I noted [ with pleasure] that they’ve already had to start cutting back and removing some things. This makes me feel better because I am The Queen of Planting Too Close

A few highlights:

I thought of y’all when I saw
this…remember our conversation about Stachys the other day? Here’s a
new one on me: Stachys byzantina ‘Silky Fleece’. What teeny, tiny
little leaves! And seemed to be limiting itself to a small area on the
edge of the border. Introduced in 2006 by German seedmeisters Jelitto
Perennial Seeds. They missed the boat on naming it…could have all kind
of fun with ‘Little Lamb’ or even ‘Mary’s Little Lamb’ as the director
for their North American office is Mary Vaananen. Heh.

My foot is just in there for scale – I’m really not that inept a
photographer.

A gorgeous flock of Rhus typhina ‘Tiger Eyes’. Hardy to Zone 4, the foliage is golden in summer, blazing apricot in fall, a wonderful shrub accent in any garden… What? Hang on a sec.

Correction:
That’s Rhus typhina ‘Bailtiger’ PP16,185. Trade name is First Editions® Tiger Eyes® Cutleaf Staghorn Sumac. Well, that took all the fun out of it.

Moving on…

Belamcanda chinensis – Blackberry or Leopard
Lily. A tough cookie, this midseason bloomer takes drought and even
reseeds a little bit in my home garden. The pods burst open to
reveal a cluster of seeds that look exactly like a blackberry. These
weren’t quite that far along, but in between flowering and seed setting, they
do something else interesting..

The petals twist up into these hilarious
little bundles. I have no idea why or what for. Just kind of neat.

All for now!

What’s New?!

Just back from OFA – my discipline’s humongous tradeshow and conference in Columbus, Ohio. All things Floriculture – new perennials, annuals, and seasonal plants, technology, structures, and equipment for greenhouses, and plants and products for floral designers. The bulk of the show and educational sessions is focused on growers, but garden center owners and florists are also targeted. I was part of two team talks for growers on “Perennial Production Problems and Solutions”.

Aside from the thousands of attendees and hundreds of exhibitors, it’s like a big family reunion for floriculture faculty involved in teaching, research, and Extension. We introduce our latest graduate student to our own back-in-the-day classmates and our “old” major advisors. Beers are consumed. We’ve come to determine that we’re quite inbred; most floriculture researchers and educators received degrees and/or are employed by Michigan State, North Carolina State, Purdue, U. Florida, Cornell, or Minnesota. Many of our collegues have left academia to R&D positions in the horticultural corporate world, the conference also gives us a chance to catch up with them.

One of the highlights of OFA is the amazing array of new plant introductions from industry leaders such a Ball, Ecke, Syngenta, Dummen, Proven Winners, etc. Most of these names are not familiar to gardeners – they are wholesale (business-to-business) brands that provide growers with seeds, plugs, and liners, to be grown on and sold at retail. Proven Winners is one of the few vertically-integrated brands that market throughout the supply chain, from grower all the way to the consumer.

‘Gryphon’ – an exciting new begonia from PanAmerican Seed.

There are a slew of begonias out there – so what’s so special about this one (besides reaching almost 2′ in height and width)? Most fancy-leaf begonias are propagated by rooting vegetative cuttings that wholesale for $0.50 to $1.25 per liner. This one’s grown from seed ($0.05 per), enabling the grower to produce a beautiful plant yet still make a decent profit margin. The margin in our industry is ridiculously miniscule – wholesalers seem to constantly undervalue their product compared to all the costs involved in growing and shipping.

But I digress. I’ll post more from the “hot and new” front in ornamental plants on my next installment!

John Bartram Lives!

Yep, there he is. Showed up at our state Master Gardener College, just last week. I even went to dinner with him. The snake-on-a-stick startled the bartender just a bit.

The elder Bartram (his son William was also a great botanist and explorer) was the Royal Botanist to King George III and a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Stockholm. As with many of the Great Plant Explorers, his life combined botany with politics,
adventure, and lust [for plants,anyway]. Someone should make a movie…

Probably best know as the discoverer of the soon-to-be-doomed little tree, Franklinia
alatamaha, he also was responsible for the introduction of lots of
other North American native garden staples such as rhododendrons,
Kalmia, and deciduous magnolias. Bartram died in 1777, but has recently been resurrected by Kirk Brown, master thespian and all-around talented guy.

Kirk works with Joanne Kostecky Garden Design in Allentown, PA, and is a director for Garden Writers of America. But his passion for the life and times of fellow Pennsylvanian John Bartram takes the audience far beyond the usual gardening lecture. His presentation "John Bartram: The King’s Gardener" unveils the travels, collections, and psyche of the father of the nursery industry in the original thirteen colonies. I love the review by Stephanie Cohen (The
Perennial Diva!) "Kirk Brown did not imitate John Bartram, he actually
became him…anyone who has an interest in history or horticulture will
be spellbound by this presentation." She’s absolutely correct. For more on John/Kirk, check out www.johnbartramlives.com.

The Other Lamb’s Ears

I’m assuming even you tree people (aka other
Garden Professors) are familiar with the soft, silvery leaves of Stachys
byzantina or Lamb’s Ear (variously Lamb Ears and Lamb’s Ears). Not to
disparage S. byzantina, but in our part of the world it looks like a
pile of wet dryer lint in the winter; and can become similarly
disfigured during a hot, wet summer. Spring brings bright,
pet-able new ears, followed by woolly flower spikes that could serve as
Q-tips for Shrek. Runs/reseeds like a banshee in my home garden.
As
Dr. Allan Armitage notes, “We’ve been lamb-eared to death.”

But there are several other species of
garden-worthy Stachys, one of which is garnering lots of attention in
our campus garden at the moment. Behold, Stachys officinalis ‘Hummelo’ – Wood Betony or Alpine
Betony.

Also sold under S.
officinalis and S. densiflora. Most nurseries seemed to have settled on
S. monieri, but that specific epithet does not appear in the ITIS
(Integrated Taxonomic Information Systems) database. Armitage lists it as a cultivar
of S. officinalis and then has S. monieri as a separate species.

Regardless of pedigree, ‘Hummelo’ is a terrific perennial.
Clumps of glossy green scallop-edged foliage are topped with
spikes of rosy-lavender flowers throughout the summer. Heat- and
cold-tolerant; it’s hardy from Zones 4 to 8. Full sun or part shade,
drought tolerant, deer resistant…what’s not to like?

Back to the ubiquitous version of lamb’s ear…we
have a superior selection of S. byzantina with the fabulous cultivar
name of ‘Countess Helene von Stein’. Rarely flowers, and has bigger, tougher leaves that hang in there regardless of humidity. Very effective
when barked at students with a Teutonic accent: “Countess Helene von
Shtein! You vill learn dis plahnt!” You may find this in
the U.S. under the comparatively boring ‘Big Ears’.

Creative Uses For Old Water Breakers

Why, oh why, can’t someone engineer a sturdy, long-lasting, horticulturally-correct water breaker.

We have, at last count, six hoses in use at our very spread-out garden & farm. I go through a lot of breakers, and am down to two, which I rotate around. In dire need of some new ones (as well as a huge bale of TP), I perused the garden aisle at our local big box (rhymes with “Target”). Pistol grip schnozzles abound – these things that propel the water
like a 95 mph fastball. Just what your plants want. Some had the “dial” for various water flow patterns, but these are never satisfactory. Not a single real water breaker for plants among the 20 choices. So I shall do mail-order from FarmTek.

Dramm seems to makes the only functional water breaker, but alas, most of what’s in my busted-breaker-bucket are old Dramm heads (at $10-$12 a pop). Their commercial line is a bit better than the consumer items, where a rainbow of colors seems to be more important than structural integrity. Anyone who’s worked in a commercial greenhouse has used their aluminum models or the plastic RedHead soft flow breaker, The only solid brass item in their line is the super-fine Fog-it Nozzle… I’ve had the same one since 1996.

A solid brass version of the full-size breaker would be great. The point of failure (always) is the interface between the screen plate and the body/shell. I hate replacing things. I’d pay for quality.

Hammer Time!
Obsoive. My ingenious partner uses a water breaker body to keep bamboo from splitting (further) when pounded. Principle of transference of impact from smaller area to larger surface, etc. Tomato stakes finally installed!

Beantroversy

Castor Bean – Ricinis communis. Folks who make their living creating fabulous color displays for public gardens, municipalities, and commercial parks love ‘em. Civilian gardeners/plant geeks love ‘em. People who get their knickers in a twist about poisonous plants do not.

Pros: ridiculously rapid growth, huge leaves for that tropical look, tolerant of less-than-ideal conditions, cheap and easy to grow from seed, weird wild flowers and seed pods.

Cons: pretty darn poisonous. A few seeds (have seen figures from four to 20), chewed up to release the toxic protein ricin, will allegedly kill you. A Caster Bean seed looks like a really huge tick (head and all), which should be sufficiently repellent to anyone over ten years old. Pleh.

Beans with flowers. U.S. Botanic Garden, 2005, Washington D.C.

This topic arises because I was standing in our campus garden yesterday with said pot o’ poison (cultivar ‘Carmencita’, a red-leaf form), trying to find a place to plant it. Last summer, my department head noted them growing in front of our garden pavilion and asked that I kindly remove them. “They’re really poisonous, and kids will stick anything in their mouth, and I wouldn’t want my kids around them” (quoted best of my memory). He’s a wonderfully laid-back guy, so it struck me that he must really be concerned to bring it up. I teach Castor Bean in my Herbaceous Landscape Plants class for both the pros and the cons…heaven forbid a Hort graduate is unable to identify it, so I persuaded him into letting me keep it up if I removed the seed pods before they ripen. I’m not going to go into all the medicinal/industrial uses of castor oil (ick…I hope my generation was the last to have this foisted on us) nor the insidious uses of ricin – Google away if you’re interested.

We temperate-zone gardeners love anything tall and big-leaved to give vertical “oompf” to summer beds and container plantings. The tropical African native is considered an invasive plant throughout the subtropics; I’ve seen it in pastures and fence rows in far south Florida, the Cayman Islands and Dominican Republic. Apparently the cows and goats have learned to avoid it (natural selection?). I noticed it used en masse in the gorgeous beds lining the street in downtown St. Louis last summer, as well at several other public gardens I’ve visited over the past few years. So I’ll continue to use it in our garden’s palette of plants, but will remove the pods to keep everybody happy.

p.s. At the top of my summer reading list is Amy Stewart’s book “Wicked Plants”.

Duty Calls

As retirements have decimated our Horticulture Department’s faculty ranks, I find myself in the interesting position of teaching a course in small fruit production next fall semester. I’m working on the syllabus as was speak (hence this post). If you’ve read my bio (“About Us”), you’ll see that this is not my bag. But our students are clamoring for fruit and vegetable production courses, so someone’s got to do it. We are also currently without on-campus vegetable faculty, if you can believe it. Though I know a few full professors that could pass as vegetables – HA!!!.

Anyhoo, I volunteered because I know just enough to be dangerous, and am willing to learn more. I’ve been an avid home vegetable gardener
for years. My partner has a Ph.D. in small fruit breeding and genetics, and I helped him with some experiments back in our grad school days (and his field sampling/taste trials made me doubt my specialization in ornamentals). We now have a you-pick blueberry farm where I’m learning the finer points of blueberry culture (the pH thing is a really huge deal). All this vast experience obviously qualifies me to teach fruit production at the college level. I say this tongue-in-cheek, but many Horticulture departments are in the same boat, with early retirements used to meet budget shortfalls, compounded by hiring freezes (since 2007 here). Research staff, grad students, and hired instructors are picking up the teaching load and helping the already-spread-too-thin teaching faculty. I mentioned in a previous post about our brilliant state legislatures’ desire to eliminate urban Extension programs, leaving only the agriculturally–related specialists and offices.

This is depressing on many fronts, but what bothers me most is that I feel we’re missing the boat – just when Horticulture is getting sexy again. Think of how frequently this discipline is mentioned in the media, whether in the form of community gardens, safe food production, the popularity of native plants, sustainability, organics, etc….unfortunately, the writers/broadcasters rarely say the “Horticulture” word. But horticulture is exactly what they’re talking about: small-scale gardening and the art and science thereof. People want to do it, they’re thirsty for good information, and now, with the spotlight on us, we can’t meet their needs.

Nice tomato!

I can’t really think of an image appropriate to this rambling post, so will end this with a more cheerful photo of one of my tomatoes from last summer (variety is ‘Kellogg’s Breakfast’).