NARGS Emerald Chapter

Author Archive

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! Read the rest of this entry »

David Sellars’ talk (4/21/10) was every bit the pleasure I had anticipated. David took us on an entertaining and informative romp as he invited us to see and think about mountain landscapes, where and how the most exciting rock plants grow in nature, and how we might incorporate this knowledge in designing and planting our rock gardens.

David Sellars photographing Lewisia tweedyi

David presented classic alpine views: some to illustrate his idea of landscapes built as ‘fractals’—that is, recurrent shapes and angles that are nested at successively smaller scales. Interesting idea, but perhaps not a direct clue for rock garden design—you might, as a famous 19th Century British Earl did, order up a garden-sized replica of the Matterhorn complete with fractal chalets and fractal chamois. More directive was David’s presentation of the ‘disorder’ of alpine habitats. He showed us Pyrenean cliffs dotted with Saxifraga longifolia; massive moraines and tiny outcrops in the Dolomites with Silene acaulis and Eritrichum nanum; cliffs, rubble fields and road ballast in the Bighorns with such treats as Aquilegia jonesii, and rocky meadows in the Olympics. Here, David said, the best habitats for alpine plants (or, perhaps, the habitats of the best alpine plants) are in disturbed soil, at the disorderly (chaotic) end of an ordered landscape. Nature may, perhaps, tolerate straight lines, but saxifrages, androsaces, and campanulas are not drawn to them. Read the rest of this entry »

This article was originally published in the April 2008 Emerald Chapter Newsletter.

For most of human history, bogs (and such kin as marshes, swamps, mires, fens, morasses, muskeg, pokosins, seeps—“wetland” is a very modern eco-euphemism) have been associated with disease, discomfort, and bad metaphors, yielding little of note but peat moss, mosquitoes, and Bronze Age homicide victims. So why would a gardener (especially a rock gardener—we’re the drainage nuts, you know) build one? And why wouldn’t his friends and neighbors think he’s really gone over the edge when he starts bragging about it? It’s about plants, of course: some very nice plants are limited in nature to bogs. Even more need constant moisture during the growing season, and in our climate, these can best be accommodated in an artificial bog.

The bog in bloom

I built my first bog about 12 years ago as a transition between a waterfall-pond system and a dry-stream built to conceal land drains. Only 2 by 5 feet, the bog has been a refuge for a variety of neat plants, most living on for years while my finer alpines in troughs and rock gardens prove to be rather expensive annuals. When I put in a new front lawn a year ago, I installed a second, larger and sunnier bog as a transition to shrub beds.

How does one make a bog? I’ve read a number of how-tos in garden books and magazines. Most, in my opinion, illustrate a deadly mix of second-hand knowledge and plagiarism. Nearly all lose courage at some point and tell the gardener to puncture, slash, or perforate their pond liner “for drainage.” Er… sir, madam, this IS a bog-high water table, you know. “Bog drainage,” in my garden, would be another term for tree root invasion, desiccation, and wasted effort.
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