NARGS Emerald Chapter

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 »

On Sunday, September 19, eleven hardy members drove out to Fall Creek to join me making troughs for our plant sale. We also decided to try something new and have our annual end-of-summer picnic at the same time. Despite a few showers, we had a good time and got a lot of work done. Most everyone made a couple of troughs, one to keep and one for the chapter. We’ll have a good selection of troughs to sell next year including a few left over from this year’s sale. We’ll need people to “adopt” and plant some of these, and we’ll sell a few empty ones as well.

Thanks to all who made the drive out to the country to help out. It was great to catch up with members after we’ve all gone off to do our own things this summer. I think combining the picnic with the workshop worked well. Maybe we’ll do it again in the future.

Looking across Kathy's garden to some of her sales tables

The Siskiyou Chapter of NARGS is really lucky to have Kathy Allen as a member. Not only does she have an amazing garden down in Central Point (2850 Taylor Road, click here for map), but she shares many of her treasures by propagating her plants from seed. She also grows an amazing assortment of other unusual rock garden plants from seed she buys. Each year, she holds at least three plant sales at her house. It’s a long drive, but going to one of her sales and visiting her garden is well worth it.

Loren and Kathy examining plants in some of Kathy's many troughs and planters

I just went to her fall plant sale this week. Loren Russell also made the trip down. He purchased extra plants for members of the Portland Chapter, where he’ll be speaking next week. I bought a number of plants for my own garden and some to bring to sell at our meeting in October. These will be sold at cost as a favor to our members. We know it is hard for people to get down to southern Oregon.

As usual, she had many new plants in addition to plants she’s grown in the past. There were at least 8 kinds of Penstemons, lots of different species of Aethionema, and a number of gentians. It’s hard not to want to buy one of everything. You’ll never see a selection of rock garden plants better than this anywhere else. We’ll announce her spring sale next April for anyone who is interested.

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 »

Tasha King photographing a drift of fawn lilies

Last Sunday, eight of us headed up to the Portland area for a day of garden visits. While the weather was overcast and gloomy when we met at the Sebring Garden in Eugene, as we drove north, the weather steadily improved, blessing us with a wonderful warm spring day for our trip. It didn’t cloud up and start sprinkling until we headed back down the freeway at the end of the day. Perfect timing!

We started our day at Elk Rock Garden at Bishop’s Close (www.elkrockgarden.com), just north of Lake Oswego, and one of the hidden gems of the Portland area. The garden was as beautiful as I remembered. It was first built by Peter Kerr around World War 1, making it nearly 100 years old, and was given by his daughters to the Episcopal Bishop of Oregon with the stipulation that it be open to the public. It contains an amazing collection of some of the grandest trees you’ll ever see in a garden. Rather than high maintenance perennial borders, it is mostly filled with mature woody plants. Their fresh spring foliage and flowers color the grounds in an elegant manner. Many of the trees were clearly chosen for their attractive bark, and there is an amazing variety of foliage texture from both deciduous trees and conifers. 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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