NARGS Emerald Chapter

Archive for the ‘Plants’ 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 »

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 »

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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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.