Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2023 i Horticulture

Lately my teenage daughter and I have taken to sharing music with each other. We make playlists of songs we like and think that the other might enjoy, too. Among the tunes she accurately guessed I would love is “Priscilla” by a band called Sea Wolf. It was released in 2012, so this supports the theory that Mom Music is always at least a decade old. Anyway, a piece of this song comes to mind as I watch the growing season fade: “I believe in springtime / I believe in dead leaves in the wind / And I know that endings are the best place to begin.” Winter really is such an opportunity for us gardeners. With the past seasons’ highlights and lowlights fresh in mind and the daily to-do…

THE CLIMATE-CHANGE EMERGENCY has been at the top of my mind throughout the 2023 growing season. This year I’ve been evacuated due to wildfires. I’ve dealt with flash flooding and record-breaking rainfalls, and I’ve tried to overcome months of soaring temperatures and high humidity. It was a challenging year in the vegetable garden, but thanks to a handful of climate-change tactics I put in place, the garden still thrived. Climate-change gardening is all about learning to adapt and create a space resilient to weather extremes. It’s about building and nurturing soil, as well as supporting pollinators, beneficial insects and other wildlife. It also conserves resources like water and encourages the reduction of plastic waste. I can share six strategies to help your garden adapt to our changing climate: 1 FEED…

Few flowers are as iconic as the Phalaenopsis orchid. Also known as the moth orchid, this plant with its rounded petals and tall, arching flower spikes is no stranger to controversy—it is considered by many to be a challenge to grow. How many times have you heard someone say, “I just can’t keep orchids alive”? If you’ve ever bought an orchid for your mom on Mother’s Day, chances are you’ve heard something similar at least once. But the truth is orchids aren’t as difficult to care for as people think. They’ve just fallen victim to myths that have alienated houseplant growers over the years. Let’s go over some of the biggest myths surrounding orchid growing, and how to ensure your orchids don’t end up in the compost. myth One: TO…

Have you ever looked at a garden and it seemed to get lost to its backdrop? Without visual guides created by an overarching structure, the eye doesn’t know where to rest, or where to register the end of a garden. When this happens, the garden becomes confused in its setting. Thoughtfully placed objects, trees and shrubs solve the problem. Knowing where to add these elements simply requires a slow walk around the garden. And winter is the ideal season for such a walk, as these items are the ones that do not retreat with the first killing frost. In a small garden, just a few structural elements can suffice to define the space, but on larger property it helps to create vignettes—mini gardens that make up a unified, cohesive garden…

MY WORK as a horticultural therapist bifurcates into two distinct tasks at every facility or residential site that employs me. On the one hand, I develop and implement programming tailored to a specific population’s or individual’s needs. On the other hand, I design and install—sometimes with the help of clients, sometimes not—therapeutic gardens to be enjoyed by my clients, their families and the staff. When I design such spaces, I lean into the guidelines for therapeutic gardens developed by the American Horticultural Therapy Association (AHTA), the national professional organization of horticultural therapists. Of the seven guidelines, three offer ideas and elements that can make any residential garden more pleasing and meaningful. Here are those three principles: PROFUSION OF PLANTS AND PEOPLE/PLANT INTERACTIONS In my therapeutic garden designs, I’ve been struck…

Most garden centers typically carry one size of any given perennial. So why spend time thinking about perennial sizes if your choices are limited? Because learning about them can help you plan better and plant smarter, and changes in the industry’s supply model are giving gardeners more options. FROM START TO FINISH To understand sizes, it’s helpful to know a little about plant production. With perennials, young or bareroot plants are stepped up into larger sizes until they reach the final “finished” size. The starter plants are supplied by wholesale growers who specialize in producing starter plant material. Further down the supply chain the “finished growers” take the starter plants and grow them into the larger sizes destined for retail sales or the landscape. In this article we’ll focus on…

Sometimes gardeners shy from using plants with a propensity to seed themselves around the garden, for fear that these self-seeders will outcompete neighboring plants or upset the overall planting design. These are valid concerns, but gardening with self-seeding plants has many upsides: It can be of great benefit to bees, butterflies and other pollinators as well as birds. Plants that self-sow are often those that flower abundantly, providing plenty of food for these insects while also creating a lively, colorful display. Birds may help themselves to the seed while it’s still standing or after it has dropped to the ground. Self-sown plants may require less resources. If plants are happy to volunteer in your garden, and those seedlings go on to thrive, they are happy with its conditions—no need for…

ABOUT 50 MILLION YEARS AGO, India was a large island off the Australian coast. In one of the great tectonic movements of the Earth’s crust, India sailed off northward at a rate of about 1.5 inches a year, crunching into the Asian land mass. It heaved up the hulking Eurasian plate and created the east–west-oriented Himalayan mountains and the high, lonely stretches of Tibet. From Afghanistan on the west to Tibet on the east, the Indian plate slowly crunched northward, but on its eastern side, it also crunched eastward, forming north–south mountains. A look at a topographical map shows these folded ranges, where a horticultural menagerie of plants found nowhere else on earth can be located. Why the geology lesson? Because in the northern part of the Indian plate, from…

JOHN GRIMSHAW is a British plantsman with wide interests across horticulture. He serves as Director of the Yorkshire Arboretum in North Yorkshire, England, and Editor-in-Chief of the International Dendrology Society’s Trees and Shrubs Online, a web-based encyclopedia of woody plants for the 21st Century. (Explore this resource at http://www.treesandshrubsonline.org). SCOTT BEUERLEIN: When did you know that you had a passion for plants and gardens and how did your path into the profession evolve? JOHN GRIMSHAW: I was immersed in plants from a very early age, as my mother took me botanizing while still in the pram, and by the age of four or five I had been given my own little plot in the family garden in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. I remember planting pansies there, beneath Crataegus ‘Paul’s Scarlet’, which…

Sometimes we all want that one curiosity in the garden to get people talking. That unique plant that’s a little… weird. A little…out of this world. But who needs an intergalactic trip when there are many unusual plants native to the United States, and often your own back yard? And while Earth’s oddest plants can demand special care, these surprisingly widespread natives are easy to grow and will still wow: BUTTONBUSH Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis; Zones 4b–11) is a charming three-season shrub that will “make you believe.” A widespread East Coast to Midwest North American native with extant ranges dotted west toward California and south to Mexico, this shrub is found along wetland margins. Therefore it thrives in marshy, wet, clay conditions—but it tolerates more upland loam and moist garden soils,…

THIS ARTICLE will be my end-of-the-growing-season report, seasoned with some general observations and a couple of tidbits that defy classification. USE ALL THE TOOLS Over last fall a couple of plants that had “most favored” status with me suffered what could have become serious, if not fatal, injuries. One was a four-foot-tall potted fig tree that resides on a patio located on Fleming Island in northeast Florida. The other was a prized yellow-blossomed ‘Capistrano’ rhododendron, which is the first of my rhodies to bloom here in southern New England. Both favorites looked as though they were damaged by marauding deer that were perhaps rubbing the velvet off their antlers. (It is only fair to mention, though, that a portable soccer net was parked nearby the fig.) In any case, the…