Author: Linda Chalker-Scott

Dr. Linda Chalker-Scott has a Ph.D. in Horticulture from Oregon State University and is an ISA certified arborist and an ASCA consulting arborist. She is WSU’s Extension Urban Horticulturist and a Professor in the Department of Horticulture, and holds two affiliate associate professor positions at University of Washington. She conducts research in applied plant and soil sciences, publishing the results in scientific articles and university Extension fact sheets. Linda also is the award-winning author of five books: the horticultural myth-busting The Informed Gardener (2008) and The Informed Gardener Blooms Again (2010) from the University of Washington Press and Sustainable Landscapes and Gardens: Good Science – Practical Application (2009) from GFG Publishing, Inc., and How Plants Work: The Science Behind the Amazing Things Plants Do from Timber Press (2015). Her latest effort is an update of Art Kruckeberg’s Gardening with Native Plants of the Pacific Northwest from UW Press (2019). In 2018 Linda was featured in a video series – The Science of Gardening – produced by The Great Courses. She also is one of the Garden Professors – a group of academic colleagues who educate and entertain through their blog and Facebook pages. Linda’s contribution to gardeners was recognized in 2017 by the Association for Garden Communicators as the first recipient of their Cynthia Westcott Scientific Writing Award. "The Garden Professors" Facebook page - www.facebook.com/TheGardenProfessors "The Garden Professors" Facebook group - www.facebook.com/groups/GardenProfessors Books: http://www.sustainablelandscapesandgardens.com

Maybe an early demise is better?

Yesterday I gave a presentation at an Urban Forestry symposium here in Seattle.  One of the sidebar conversations I had came from a urban forester who had (to my mind, anyway) a different way of looking at urban street trees.  I’ve bemoaned for years that our trees die far too young – we plant species that should live for decades or even centuries, only to watch them fail and die in a fraction of that time.  Urban conditions take their toll: compacted, poor soils, reduced sunlight, increased temperatures, etc.  It’s not surprising that our trees just don’t hang on as long as they should.

But…what would happen if we took the “planned obsolescence” route?  In other words, rather than planting species that have long life spans and somehow expecting them to overcome all that the urban environment flings at them, how about choosing trees with shorter life spans?  Sure, there will still be replacement costs, but they will be expected and planned for.

So – should we continue to fight against ridiculous ordinances, unrealistic planting plans and unworkable tree selection lists?  Or should we lower our expectations of our urban forests?

Thoughts?

(And now I’ve gone completely off track mentally, remembering the “Lowered Expectations” skits on MadTV.  Feel free to watch one!)

Answer to Friday quiz

Lots of good feedback on this one!  Full marks, however, to our retired copyeditor Carolyn who nailed it cold. Maybe you should consider coming out of retirement and helping at the Seattle Times 😉 

Thanks to everyone for contributing!  If you see EPEs in your local newspaper (that’s egregious plant errors), feel free to send them along for inclusion in a Friday posting!

A Friday treat for taxonomy buffs

I can’t match Holly’s post for cuteness, so I’ll have to settle for constructive criticism.  Below are photos that appeared in the Seattle Times earlier this week.

 

 

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to identify the errors in nomenclature within each caption.  (This may seem insignificantly picky, but scientific names need to be uniformly constructed to avoid confusion.)

Anyway, have fun!  Answers on Monday.

Podcasting returns! Season 3 begins

It’s spring…flowers are emerging and so are the podcasts. Here’s the first of our eight episodes for the season.  The theme this week is “Spring Cleaning” and it’s the wide world of weeds.  The podcasts are now hosted on i-Tunes, so I can follow you anywhere you go.  Just sayin’.

I’m trying to get some listener questions “on air” as it were, so if you have a burning desire to be on a podcast with me, just drop an email to lindacs@wsu.edu and let me know.

I love Sechelt in the springtime

I’ve been out and about (oot and aboot?) much of the spring giving talks to various gardening groups, including the Sechelt Botanical Garden Club last weekend.  Sechelt (in English, pronounced "seashell" with a t at the end) is on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, and we did have a sunny April day (reason number one).  That made for an enjoyable visit later to one of the lovely private gardens (reason number two):

 

And then, there’s that Canadian sense of humor as evdienced by a locally made product (reason number three):

Have a great weekend!

The new American chestnut tree: resistant survivor or Frankentree?

Recently ScienceDaily.com posted an article about American chestnut trees due to be planted in New York City. Researchers hope that these trees will be resistant to chestnut blight, an introduced fungal disease that pretty much wiped out mature specimens over the last 100 years.

When I lived in Buffalo, I was a member of the American Chestnut Foundation and every spring I helped with efforts to replant chestnuts in the hopes that resistant individuals might be found.  The problem is that the disease doesn’t kill young trees: it can take many years to find out whether a particular tree is resistant or not.


Chestnut suckers from live roots of blight-killed tree. I saw these a lot in western NY forests in the 1990’s.

Part of the earlier research efforts involved crossing resistant European chestnut with American chestnut in hopes of creating resistant hybrids.  The downside, of course, is that such offspring would not be “pure” American chestnuts.  More importantly to many people, these hybrids might not produce the same quality of nuts.

The research mentioned in the Science Daily article involves creating transgenic plants: a wheat gene resistant to the fungus was inserted into the chestnut genome with the hopes that the resulting trees would be immune to blight.  These trees are genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.

It’s worth noting that it’s this kind of work that has been branded as “Frankentree” research, which incites a lot of fear and hysteria.  It’s what caused ecoterrorists to mistakenly firebomb the UW Center for Urban Horticulture in 2001 when I was faculty there.  It’s what causes people to freak out about eating GMO foods.

So my question for you – does the fact that transgenic chestnut trees will be “on the loose” fill you with fear?  Or does it make you hopeful that we’ve possibly found a way to overcome an introduced disease?  (As I just noticed in reading this over before posting that I used some form of the word “hope” in nearly every paragraph.  I guess it shows where I stand.)

Quiz answer – difference between spores and pollen

You got it!  Horsetails don’t produce pollen, and those airborne particles are spores.  Primitive plants such as mosses, ferns, and horsetails don’t have the same reproductive structures as flowering plants and conifers. Instead of producing seeds, they form tiny, windborne spores that can be mistaken for pollen.

(To its credit, the Seattle Times corrected this error the next day.)

WOW returns! (Why oh why?)

It’s spring, and everyone is itching to buy stuff at the nursery.  I’m there too, with my camera as well as my wallet.  I thought you might enjoy some of my “Things to avoid when you are plant shopping” collection:


These are called “Serpentine.”  I call them unnatural.  Like foot-binding.

Rootstock revolt.  The surest way to kill off your grafted scion.

A botanical bow?  Or a horticultural harp?

And check out the pot!  If there’s enough root mass in there to crack the pot, you can bet it’s long past its potting up date.

Love broccoli?  Then why not have a broccoli tree???

Looking for a maintenance nightmare?  Then this beheaded beauty is for you!

Don’t ever unwrap this plant.  It will immediately fall over and/or break.  Just keep it as is – call it your turtleneck tree.