NARGS Emerald Chapter

Peter Korn is a real find, and I commend Maria Galletti and others at NARGS for bringing him to the National Speakers program once again. His talk in Eugene Thursday night “Building for Growing” was one of the most original, informative, enthusiastic and entertaining garden talks that I’ve seen in years.

Peter’s talk in Eugene concerned the building of his present 5-acre botanic garden/nursery, in only 8 years. He stripped soil and re-built mostly with pure glacial sand over much of his 5-acre property by hand and for the most part alone. He showed a wide range of scree, shade, and bog gardens, and—most exciting—cliff-like crevice gardens and creative use of peat blocks, all planted with an incredible range of plants. He says he has 14,000 species and varieties in his database, almost all grown from seed. His policy is to find hardier varieties by planting out 50 or 100 seedlings. If these die, he’ll try again. An idea of the scale he works on: one picture showed a new sandhill in his garden ready for planting as a “steppe”. There were over 4,000 pots in close array, all seedlings from his nursery. After planting these, he added a rock and gravel veneer, and broadcast more seed— mostly annuals and hemiparasites like Castilleja (he showed a lovely pink C. haydenii) and Pedicularis, two of the many genera that he grows in variety. A view a year later gave an idea of how rock gardening can create a spectacle!

Peter gardens in one of the coldest, wettest areas in southern Sweden, but he grows an amazing range of choice plants that certainly overlap widely with things we should be growing here. We shouldn’t be surpised that he can grow Meconopsis to perfection, but he is also able to grow 30 species of cactus on “hot” exposures of his sand beds. In this single rapid-fire program, I saw perhaps 50 plants in his garden that are completely new to me after 20+ years of attending NARGS lectures and winter study weekends. The most jaw-dropping perhaps, given his location, were a sumptuous series of Oncocyclus iris, including forms of I. paradoxa, I. iberica and I. sari—all seed-grown and mostly from his own, or his brother’s, collections in the Caucausus. He says that most collections of these species have been from lower elevations or more southern populations where they are winter-growing and therefore very vulnerable to frost damage and rot. The higher elevation Oncocyclus come into growth in early spring and survive without protection.

Another eye-opener was the beautiful presentation of silver-leaved beauties like the ”vegetable sheep” Raoulia hookeri and Helichrysum milfordiae in moraine-like sand beds with moving water under (or in one slide, in full freshet OVER the raoulia). Many of us have learned the hard way that not all silvery things are drought-adapted, but it is jolting to see them survive underwater!

I could go on about his meconopsis, primulas (including a couple of “geranium-leaved” Cortusoides species P. palmata and P. latisecta, and a stunning bright red P. maximowiczii, all unlike any I’ve seen in life or in slides), Diapensia lapponica and Loisleura procumbens (two Arctic-Alpines that we’re unlikely to succeed with in Oregon). Peter also grows many South Africans including ice plants and some unusual bulbs (e.g., an Androcymbium, perhaps A. fimbriatum and lovely little Ledebouria ovatifolia from Lesotho). Some of the truly oddball plants come by way of his brother, who’s both a globe-trotting adventure mountain-biker and a botanist, e.g., a tall yellow monkshood, Aconitum atlanticum, “from the edge of the Sahara”. I could go on, but you get the idea.

Again, if you missed this talk, you will be hearing about it from everyone who did go. And it is the best possible showcase for friends who wonder what the rock garden thing is about!