Gardens by Kelly Productions

From time to time, the biodiversity of the world imparts pearls of planty wisdom.  Gardening is a lifelong learning experience, one that never ceases to amaze me.  Though I’ve gardening for around 19 years of my life–at one time on a scale of marigolds and pumpkins, and at present on a scale of acres–I’m still just a learner.  The beauty of this buzzing 21st century life is that we grow together as a community of learners in a more connected way than we ever have before.

A few that have come to mind again lately, particularly during recent browsing on Annie’s Annuals website (a truly great source of plants)…

1) If it’s a kickass Salvia that I like, it’s naturally, not hardy. See here. I’m afraid this applies to more than Salvia.

2) It wouldn’t take much (only a truly suitable climate) to be completely beguiled by “hardy” Impatiens.  See here.

3) Certain specific epithets make you go “woah, that’s gotta be cool”.  Three I’ve encountered lately:  kilimanjari (from Mt. Kilimanjaro), namchabarwensis (from Namcha Barwa Canyon), michauxii (named for French botanist Andreas Michaux).

4) True plant nerds scour every public landscape for sports and mutants–constantly. (reminded after a student today goes ‘what are you doing?’ as I casually gawked my head at every overgrown viburnum, dogwood, lilac, etc. we walked past on campus)

5) We need to grow more bush clovers (Lespedeza spp.).  At first guess, I’d say they get a bad wrap because a few are weedy and invasive, but I’m not sure that many know even those.  The slender bush clover (Lespedeza capitata) blooms in July and has glistening foliage, a native of the Midwest.  I have found forms with superior, silver coloring than wild-type specimens that virtually shine.  Any mention of bush clovers must include ‘Samindare’, a cultivar of L. thunbergii.  I’ll take a photo of me doing a mosh pit in this thing in a few weeks.  It’s too damn terrific for words.  For now, a photo of flowers from last year.  Cultivation note–cut back to a foot high in spring (it’s a pseudo-woody kinda plant).

If you need someone to blame for yet another diatribe on Gen Y gardening, direct your browser to my friend Doug Green.  Feel free to give him credit too if you find this post praiseworthy.

I guess I feel like a broken record sometimes, preaching the good word about why Gen Y is the next best thing for horticulture (heck any new generation of consumers is, right?)  But I also realize that it can take the human mind 15-20 instances of repetition before committing a fact or impression to long-term memory.  I’m honestly not being facetious here, I just realize that it takes adamancy and tenacious repetition to effectively communicate worthy ideas.  Without getting too long-winded on a subject that’s dear and close, here I go again.

Here’s the best way I can state the problem:

Retailers and trade professionals are concerned that Gen Ys (and even Gen Xs to some degree) aren’t consuming horticultural products like generations before them.  They feel like the industry isn’t connected or geared to understand this generation and generally vex over change.

Fair enough?

Here’s the best way I can frame the solutions (for there are many):

Trade professionals need to fess up to one unyielding fact–the way we do business must change.  A classic example of what happens when you don’t change can be found in the headlines earlier this week: Park Seed Sold for $13 million.  When you fail to change your business model to meet the needs of a new audience, you’re doomed to failure.  This is likely the beginning of more sad news for Park Seeds, a could-have-been success story.  A company with tremendous history and a rich legacy buckled under poor management and waffled in world of stifled credit because it lacked (and no doubt will continue to lack) a cogent philosophy about how to sell gardening in the 21st century.  I could list more examples, but I digress.

I don’t know how plainly to make this case.  Gardening is a three-p concept:  people, plants, and passion. Watch this Youtube clip of yours truly if you need a visual.  Our business is about connecting the dots between those three or finding the point at which those intersect.  Let me break it down p by p…

People–In the last few years, we’ve learned something huge about gardening that may have been lost on us before.  Gardening can be a highly social activity while also being a very personal expression of self.  Gardeners of all ages photograph their favorite plants, post them to Twitter, Facebook their questions to their gardening friends, and blog about their experiences.  Great!

Now after stating the obvious, what does that imply for those of us in the trade?  We have to become vital parts of those networks.  Why?  Because we’re the leaders, the experts, the sources of information that people need for basic support and look towards for inspiration.  A lot of businesses and professionals get the first part.  They’ve got high-tech websites, their doing social networking, etc.  Again, great.  But it’s the last part that I find lost to blank stares.  In this age of high social connectivity, the last thing we should do is surrender our talents, creativity, skills, and knowledge to our audience.  We have a role to play in inspiring gardeners to want what they don’t know they need, to expose them to new, progressive ideas about how to garden sustainably, and new plants.  People are looking to us for information and inspiration, but are instead finding their questions sucked into a vacuum.

Plants–The ABCs of horticulture right here.  I’ve always chuckled at phrases like “plant-driven” design.  How else should garden design, or gardening in general be driven?  Gardens aren’t built of patio pavers, hardwood mulch, and high-priced ceramics.  They’re built from the ground-up with plants.  Recent estimates by academics show that of the over 250,000 flowering plants on this planet, we use just 5-6% horticulturally (~15,000 species).  The frontiers for exploration are vast!  Cool plants abound!  I firmly believe, regardless of demographics or generation, that people want to populate their spaces with cool plants.  They may not always appreciate every botanical or horticultural nuance, but they want a distinctive, dynamic space that spells them across their landscape, indoors or outdoors.  For anyone following the Gen Y beat, look to promote more native plants, tropicals, succulents, and outrageously colorful, versatile plants (hmm, edible landscaping?) in an effort to pique the taste and curiosity of people my age.  I’ll talk more about this in the weeks and months ahead, rest assured.

Passion–Here’s the big one.  We presently have no clue as an industry as to why people garden.  Little to none!  We’re scared to ask most times.  I find most garden centers much more concerned about things like “buying habits” and “display design.”  Think a little more macro for a minute.  Why do you garden?  Why do your clients garden?  When we can find some authentic answer to that question, we’re going to see gardens on every corner, more municipalities investing in high-quality public landscaping, and green everywhere.  Look at older cultures like that of the United Kingdom.  Gardening there is a fiber of society, a good and right thing to do “just because.”  In fact, I’d go so far to say that have one of the hippest gardening cultures on the planet.  Pick up an issue of Gardens Illustrated or The Garden, and you’ll see what I mean.  There gardening is an identity (read: I am a gardener), something I do believe we’re close to developing in this country given the resurgence of interest in growing food in the last few years.  I mean if foodies can translate passion through culinary arts, why can’t hortiholics translate passion through gardening?  We can, sure.  But we need to do it more.

In analogy form, we’re selling car parts, without telling our customers the difference between a Toyota and a Corvette. Or we’re selling the ingredients to the best chocolate cake without teaching them how to cook (we’re really good at recipes, but we all know how fatal just “following a recipe” can be).  We’ve got to own this challenge, not waffle in its wake.

Strategies:

1.  Let’s quit moping already.  I’m so sick of hearing frustrations vented about “lack of interest by Gen Ys in gardening” that I could scream.  Invest that worry time in a solution.  If someone prominent professed a lack of hope in my generation, quit listening.  They don’t get it.  Do you really think something as magnanimous and time-honored as gardening will disappear with one generation of American consumers?

2.  Let’s start talking about plants like they’re plants instead of furniture.  Sure it’s a worthwhile strategy to find the interface between home and garden and what plants mean to people.  I’m not knocking that.  But let’s do things like Pistil’s Nursery is doing in Portland, Oregon–creating a lifestyle around sustainability, cool plants, and the passion for growing plants.  This little destination garden center in an old neighborhood of North Portland sells everything from tomatoes to Allium sikkimense and Indigofera heterantha.  Crazy cool and it works!

3. Let’s craft a national narrative about gardening.  Our trade organizations could pool resources and have tremendous impact here (the florist organizations did this a few years ago).  The media and marketing environment is prime for this.  Let’s find gardening “celebrities” less interested in merchandise packages on TV-shopping channels and product tie-ins and more interested in why people garden, what plants they want to garden with, and inspiring people to garden and make art (see Growing a Greener World on PBS for an example).

I could go on.  Doug Green wants more gardening in gadgetry.  I can get behind that too.  What are your thoughts and ideas for making gardening more hip, fresh, and sustainably good-looking as a lifestyle choice?

Iowa weather is admittedly strange.  We whine about the cold in the barest months like January and February, while often sporting a few degrees more than places farther north.  We whine about the sweltering heat in stifling months like July and August, while still registering cool temperatures and less humidity than climes farther south.  But what we really can complain about, on nights when we’ve got nothing better to write about, is the change–constant change.

Just a week ago, I left the house for an hour or less a day, driven to hibernate in the wake of a warm, humid streak that made for highs in the upper 90s and dewpoints that hovered around 80.  This morning I woke to find a cool, September-esque breezing floating through the house and never saw the thermometer rise about 69 all day.  How Seattle…

I smiled as I walked around the garden tonight.  The lawn has all but disappeared in some places, retreating to dormancy and leaving behind dying algae and moss–stark irony indeed!  Some newly planted acquisitions, like two hardy sweet peas (Lathyrus vernus ‘Flaccidus Roseus’ and Lathyrus aureus) aren’t sure what to do.  After spending most of the spring and early summer in rich, humusy potting soil, I imagine my now, hard excuse for topsoil seems like a sick joke.  August stalwarts like rosinweeds (Silphium spp.) and tube clematis (Clematis heracleifolia) rage on against the dying of good growing conditions, delighting me almost daily with their perseverance.

My trip round the garden tonight after the rain reminded me of an ever-present list of chores.  I have three Ozark bluestars (Amsonia illustris) that need moved, badly, but I’ve been putting it off so as not to sacrifice their lovely fall color display.  I may bite the bullet and relocate them to the corner of the house I’m revamping soon, possibly tomorrow if all works right.  They’ll join a host of ornamental grasses, false indigos (Baptisia), ironweeds (Vernonia), and new bearded irises (no surprise).

And after donning a jacket for this thoughtful poke-around, I’ve decided I can “feel” fall.  What garden chores top your list as fall inevitably nears?

Though you may be familiar with the story of Sisyphus from Greek mythology involving a boulder, my version involves a 10-gallon nursery container of black bamboo (Phyllostachys nigra).

According to mythical legend, Sisyphus was a Greek king punished in death for his deceitfulness with the endless and unavailing task of pushing a boulder up a hill only to watch it tumble down again as he neared the top–an eternity of frustration.

In some grossly overblown way, I think Sisyphus would feel my pain, hauling buckets of water to an ever-thirsty bamboo as I do on a near nightly basis.  If I sunk it into a swimming pool, I’m positive it would wilt by evening.

Of course the easiest way to end my condemnation to hydrological eternity would be to just plant the damn thing.  But my plans for a bog, sterling and firm last fall when I inherited this bamboo from my gardening friend Rosemary, seem to have fallen through.  So without any immediate home, I’m sure I’ll continue to prolong its plastically confined existence one 5-gallon dousing at a time.

I’m beginning to think a boulder wouldn’t be that bad.

Quick gardeners, race for the newsstands and check out the latest issue of Fine Gardening (October 2010 issue).  If you’re a subscriber, you’ve no doubt received your copy in the mail already.  Flip forward to page 30 and you’ll find yours truly with a “dirty”-y, devious look writing about the five stellar deer-proof plants.  It is indeed my Fine Gardening debut.  Check it out!

, at least in places with real summers, requires a tenacious constitution and a steady supply of hard liquor (for us drinking sorts).  As for a tenacious constitution, I indulge in aimless teeth-gritting, occasional swearing, and fitful stamping as rivulets of sweat run down my nose.  But I grow on in spite of whatever weather throws my way.  I may rip out some corner of the garden this weekend, saving it from further melting.  But then again I may just retire at day’s end from my nursery work.  That’s what the hard liquor is for.

2011 ISU Extension Horticulture Calendar

So I decided to add an additional category for blog posts–shameless self-promotion.  And here’s the first one!

The 2011 ISU Extension Horticulture Calendar is now for sale!  And guess what?  The photography is courtesy of yours truly (including the cover shot!)  For only $6.00 and written by two of ISU’s top extension horticulturists (Dr. Cindy Haynes and Mr. Richard Jauron), how can you go wrong?

Great gardener’s Christmas gift!

For as long as I can remember, Augusts in my Midwest garden call to mind the word baked.  Particularly the last few years.  It rains, rains, and rains for days and months on end, breaking records and flooding fields.  Yet just as abruptly as it began, it comes to a fast halt.  Then it gets hot, and then we bake.  The ground splits open in revealing cracks, and the garden gets dry and parched.  Happy August!

But three plants caught my eye tonight.  Three toughies that know how to stick it out, even better than this gardener who retreated long before dusk tonight as a hard line of mosquitoes doggedly pursued his every step.

Scutellaria incana-  You may remember me extolling the virtues of this plant, commonly and unfortunately known as hoary skullcap, during my travels through the Ozarks last year.  In effort to stem the tide of inevitable purple prose from my fingers, I’ll offer these brief words of praise.  This shade-loving, rocky woodland native glows in cobalt blue tones in the months of June and July.  Electric blue, in the shade, in JULY!?  What more should I say?  The habit can be a little lax on some forms, but not to the point of flopping over into a disheveled heap (unless you garden in 10 feet of pure compost, at which point most things will probably collapse).  If you can’t handle lax, prop it up with a shrub or something.

Sedum telephium ssp. ruprechtii ‘Hab Gray’- This unfortunately uncommon sedum deserves a place in American gardens.  The Royal Horticultural Society no doubt did a disservice to this plant when they decreed in their last sedum trial at Wisley that this plant lacked comely, ornamental traits.  For the record, I’m not quoting here, but at least trying to emulate the haughtiness.  They chided its cream flowers which turn to shades of chocolate (although they chose some ghastly adjective like brown to describe them in their report) as altogether unsplendid.  They bashed its mysterious marine-colored foliage as boring.  Bleh.  This workhorse plant deserves greater praise.  Only this year has it collapsed in my garden, likely due to extraordinary amounts of rain and not of any innate problem.  It’s foliage is exquisite, its stems red and contrasting, and its cream flowers merely creamy topping to an already pleasant dessert.  It even seeds around politely, so once you like it you’re guaranteed just a few more.

Rudbeckia subtomentosa ‘Henry Eilers’- Perennial followers of this blog know that I have a fetish for this plant.  It’s on my desert island list (as is the Scutellaria mentioned earlier), a list of a few dozen plants (or more if I choose) that I absolutely couldn’t live without, even if stranded on a desert island in an otherwise temperate climate.  Many personalities have had a hand in this plant, and a simple search of my site reveals too much about this plant already.  Bottom line–even when in a baked garden, it still looks fab.

P.S.–Dearest readers….I’m going to try a more regular, shorter, and truncated blogging strategy.  So you may be hearing from me more often in the form of little ditties like so, rather than the expository essays which you all, no doubt, find endearing and charming.  And so it goes with good intentions and all…

Pardon this rant on the business of new plant development.  A recent conversation on Facebook about the performance of a new, yellow shasta daisy called ‘Banana Cream’ led my wanderlust-prone mind to think about the how our green industry develops, promotes, and sells new products.  This whole post really has nothing to do specifically with that aforementioned daisy, which although I’m not giddy about, shows some promise in a market brimming in just the last year with several new cultivars of Shasta daisy.

One commenter retorted in response to my comment about “not getting Shasta daisies” (I don’t see what all the fuss is about frankly) that if I worked in a garden center, I’d understand why breeders (and apparently customers) are giddy about Shasta daisies.  A slew of other comments followed in reference to said variety–some glowing, some mixed.  But another commenter was careful to point out that as a landscaper, he didn’t really care what something looked like in a pot on a bench somewhere.  If it failed to perform in the garden and live up to the hype, why bother with it at all?

And that’s what got me thinking.  The analogy posed by the first commenter evinces a bothersome perception within our industry about the development of plants.  Basically, if it looks good at the point of sale, we’ve done our job simply because we’re satisfying a need, urge, or desire of our target public.  Sound fishy?  It should.  That’s like saying that as car buyers, we only expect our automobiles to look good on the showroom floor.  Wrong.  So why the double standard for our plants?  Who wants a landscape of sorry looking, poorly performing, and underachieving plants?

As a plant breeder, I demand ambition of my progenies.  I want “wow” plants (read: compelling)–specimens that make you stop and look, grab your attention and hold it.  People buy plants for any number of different rational and subjective reasons, and it would be false and incomplete of me to attempt to list those here.  But I do believe our vast, diverse buying public shares a common interest in the value of the product in their shopping cart (isn’t that a basic tenet of retail science?)  If we don’t value our own products by demanding and expecting the best from our work, why should our clients?  The most magical moment for me as a nursery owner is not when I can simply answer and fulfill a client’s questions and immediate needs, but rather when I can inspire them to want something they had no idea they really needed.  Call it savvy salesmanship if you like.  But I think it’s just the way we’ve got to do business.  I want to inspire people to grow more, better plants.

For purposes of full disclosure: This post isn’t a subliminal message aimed at ‘Banana Cream’ Shasta daisy.  There’s any number of reason why my few plants in one spot in my display garden don’t look good.  When asked to opine, I simply suggested that I wasn’t flattered with them this year.  Next year could be different.  Maybe the spot isn’t just to its liking (I know I’ve not always thrived if my “spot” wasn’t just so).  We shouldn’t immediately jump to conclusions about why plants do or do not perform without a little evidence, some smart intuition, and half a clue about the plant(s) in question.  The biology of a living thing isn’t so straightforward.  Who knows, I might even end up liking this thing someday…when I get around to “getting” Shasta daisies.

It struck me during this last week that I hadn’t been on a single local botanizing foray this summer.  Not one.  After spending at least a day per week for the last two years in the field during the summer, I’ve let my busy schedule come between me and one of my favorite, pleasureful pasttimes–foraying into the remnant wilderness around my home.  So today I fixed that.  I spent the afternoon, albeit a hot one, in the field in search of local flora blooming at the height of summer.  Another realization I still find most troubling–it’s August 1st.

August 1st, for me, marks the peak of high summer.  High summer, as garden writers of old wrote, marks midsummer, the time at which many gardens succumb to heat and humidity and during which many gardeners retreat for the cool shelter of air conditioning.  Despite my abhorrence for the heat and humidity, I relish my garden the most during high summer.  Maybe because the norm among gardens at the height of summer is drab, blah, and burnt.  I’m good for sharing my secrets too.  Stay tuned to the folds of Fine Gardening magazine in 2011 for my run-down on how to beat the heat of high summer with a palette of dependable, hardworking plants.

When I think of that palette of plants, which really is quite encompassing, I think of the prairies of Iowa–environments where plants must thrive through heinous bouts of heat, wind, hail, and torrents of dashing rain, often repeatedly from June through August.  I spent some time remembering and rediscovering some of these plants in their raw beauty today amid the buzz of dragonflies and the cajoling calls of nesting songbirds.  Take a look…

Clematis virginiana–Known commonly as devil’s darning needles, this native clematis rightly reminds many of the favorite sweet autumn clematis (Clematis terniflora).  This native counterpart differs by forming a more sprawling vine perfect for ambling up shrubs and small trees with bevies of smaller flowers borne earlier than its Asian cousin.  I found these faintly scented flowers just opening this afternoon.

Echinocystis lobata–I love vines and honestly never have enough vertical space in my garden.  If you gave me two hundred trellises, pointed towards the horizon, and said “go west and create a garden,” I’d hit the road with nothing more than seeds and a well-polished trowel.  One vine that I keep meaning to try, and that I think has some promise in the “annual vines with fragrance” department, is the cucumber vine.  It will easily engulf a trellis by midsummer only to outdo itself again with loads of sweetly fragrant white flowers.  The fruits are equally entertaining, harboring four seeds that develop under hydrostatic pressure.  These spiny, prickly, hedgehog-like pods explosively pop late in the fall, reportedly ejecting seeds at speeds of up to 11.5 m/seconds.

Elderberries and American plums looked tasty today.  Made me think of preserves, jams, and jellies.  My “foodie” mind is never far away.

I visited this local prairie today to find it awash in yellow daisies–members of the genus Silphium to be exact.  These rosinweeds (Silphium integrifolium) are some of the most underused late summer-blooming yellow daisies.  Sure, some chalk them up haughtily (or boringly) as just another in the encumbering class of “ADCs” (another damn composite).  But these starkly textural, tough, and zoneworthy perennials laugh in the face of high summer bringing much needed color to an otherwise tired and often burnt garden scene.  I believe strongly that some seasons of the year have a “just so” kind of look–and for August, that “just so” look is blended yellow and gold against clear blue skies.  See also Silphium spp.

Scrophularia marilandica–I was so tickled to find this common figwort today.  I’ve never seen one before, but immediately knew what it was when I dashed by it at 30 mph along a dusty gravel road.  I ground to a halt, sped backwards a few hundred feet, and waded through a ditch of head-high weeds to get this photo.  I remember marveling over these obscure flowers in field guides as a kid, and sure enough found it today just a five miles from my house–a lesson in how easily we take native plants for granted.  Though I don’t see much hope for common figwort in American gardens, it’s truly a nerdy plant that you just have to see to appreciate.