NARGS Emerald Chapter

Archive for the ‘Chapter Meetings’ Category

For the spring NARGS Speaker Tour, Alan Bradshaw is touring chapters on the West Coast, with Eugene as one of his first stops on April 5. Alan has operated his seed business, Alplains, in Colorado for over 20 years. He shared his considerable skills and knowledge with us, explaining how to germinate different species, showing us his propagation set up, and giving us valuable tips such as planting flat seeds like those of milkweeds (Asclepias spp.) sideways, so the radical will have an easier time reaching down into the soil mix. Read the rest of this entry »

For our March 1st meeting, we took a look at the wonderful insects who do such a valuable job pollinating plants. Nan Vance, a US Forest Service research plant physiologist who splits her time between Corvallis and Idaho, showed her photos of pollinators interacting with native Western wildflowers. She shared fascinating stories about the complicated connections between insects and flowers.

One species of Cypripedium (lady’s slipper) is pollinated by a wasp that is attracted not to the orchid but to the fungus gnats that are attracted to the flower. It parasitizes the gnats. Many pollination relationships are equally complex. I learned a lot about the large bumble bees (“bumbling Bombus“), smaller short-tongued bees, wasps, and flies. Flies are better able to handle cold temperatures and pollinate many of the early-blooming wildflowers. Yesterday, I saw lots of small flies on the snow queen (Synthyris reniformis) that are blooming right now as we are closing in on spring.

Thanks to Nan for teaching us about pollination and for encouraging us to look more carefully at the activity going on among the flowers we so enjoy. Nan brought several copies of a booklet on growing native plants from seed. For those who didn’t get one, there is one in our library now, or you can download it at http://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/pubs/pnw_gtr823.pdf

This past Saturday (February 12), we were lucky to have Christine Ebrahimi from the Columbia-Willamette chapter of NARGS as our speaker for our meeting at the Corvallis Library. She’s a terrific speaker, and her photos (and some from fellow C-W chapter member Dave Dobak) of the Bighorn and Beartooth Mountains of northern Wyoming were excellent. I am definitely putting the Bighorns on my must-get-to list of places to visit. Christine has been kind enough to share with us her wealth of information on traveling and botanizing in the Bighorn and Beartooth mountains. Below is her terrific advice on visiting this gorgeous area. And for those who didn’t get a slide list or want to see the names of some of the beautiful plants that were shown, here is the slide list: Wyoming slideshow.

View into the White Cloud Wilderness

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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 »

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. 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 »

Selaginella scopulorum, a spikemoss native to Oregon

At our March 9th meeting, Judith Jones spoke to us about her favorite topic—and one of mine—ferns. She showed us photos of many of the wonderful rock ferns, hard to find but worth seeking out, as well as larger ferns suited for the woodland garden. Lately Judith has been growing spikemosses (Selaginella sp.). These look very much like mosses, hence the name, but they are actually vascular plants. Many grow on sunny rock outcrops and are quite suitable for rock gardens. She brought loads of wonderful ferns and a few spikemosses with her for sale. Quite a few now have new homes in Oregon!

Judith is one of the experts on ferns in the Pacific Northwest. We were very lucky to be able to get Judith to speak to us on her way back to Washington after Western Winter Study Weekend. For more about her and her lovely ferns, visit her Fancy Fronds Nursery website at http://www.fancyfronds.com.