Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Building for Growing: An Inspiring Talk from Peter Korn
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 »