NARGS Emerald Chapter

Peter photographing in the lava.

Last week, the Emerald chapter was host to Peter Korn, an extremely knowledgeable gardener from Sweden. He was in town for three days as part of this year’s NARGS speaker tour. His October 14th talk, “Building for Growing: How to Create Different Environments in the Garden from Deserts to Bogs,” was a virtual tour of his 5-acre botanical garden near Gothenburg. For the last 8 years, he has been transforming the original spruce forest into an amazing garden where he seems to be able to grow almost anything. Much of it is an extraordinary rock garden built by dumping huge amounts of glacial till sand (he brought a little for us to feel!) directly onto old lawn and his soil, which he claims is so bad even the weeds don’t grow in it. His site is blessed with a natural bog, something he has taken full advantage of, growing numerous wetland plants and also growing tricky plants that like the good drainage of sand but need cool conditions and moisture from below. I don’t think I was the only one in the audience to be inspired to go home and redo their garden. Read Loren’s write up (Building for Growing: An Inspiring Talk from Peter Korn) for more details about the talk. For more about Peter’s garden, visit his website at http://peterkornstradgard.se/english/eindex.htm.

Peter grows thousands plants from around the world, mainly from seed. While here, he was hoping to see some of these plants in the wild as well as to collect some new seed. Before coming to Eugene, he spoke to the Siskiyou Chapter. Loren Russell picked him up at Jeanne Mehl’s lovely garden in Glendale and took him to the North Umpqua in Douglas County to see the native habitat of our treasured endemic, Kalmiopsis fragrans (now officially considered a separate species from K. leachiana in the Siskiyous). On Thursday, before the talk, Ed Alverson brought him ought to see the West Eugene Wetlands and to the Northwest Garden Nursery, one of the very best gardens in our area. The following day, Loren and I and my friend Sabine Dutoit took Peter out to see some native rock plants in the Cascades. We started out with a hike to Horsepasture Mountain where we were eventually able to find a few plants Peter wasn’t already growing (for more about this hike see my personal blog at Natural Rock Gardens at Horsepasture Mountain). He really enjoyed a stop at the milepost 7 lava area along the McKenzie Highway to look at all the rock ferns hiding in lava caves (I wouldn’t be surprised if he was trying to figure out how to build a lava tube in his garden!). And what would a trip to the McKenzie be without a stop at Sahalie Falls? Saturday, Loren took him up to the wonderful Dancing Oaks Nursery before he headed up to Portland to continue his tour.

Loren and Peter collected seed of skyrocket (Ipomopsis aggregata) at Horsepasture Mountain to replenish Peter's garden as, without hummingbirds in Sweden, his don't set any seed.

I hope he enjoyed his time here as much as we enjoyed having him. Thanks so much to Loren for hosting and driving Peter around, to Paula and Ted Hewitt for hosting him for 2 nights, and to Ed Alverson for taking him around on Thursday. It takes many volunteers to make a visit like this go so smoothly.