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American Idol
Landscape
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The next American Idol may be
from Nebraska. The popular TV series is conducting
auditions in Omaha this week for Midwesterners who
want a shot at the fame and stardom that winning,
and sometimes just participating in, the show
brings. The process of winning the year-long talent
show is grueling, to say the least, and not for the
timid. Contestants are poked, prodded, insulted,
and forced to perform in front of large live and
television audiences. As fans of the show know,
the winning contestant wins a career of being poked,
prodded, insulted, and being forced to perform in
front of large live and television audiences.
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The American Idol—Landscape show itself is going on
continuously in trial gardens and test plots mostly
at universities, nurseries, and botanical gardens
all around the country. The University of Nebraska
West Central Research Station in North Platte has
produced several landscape idols—Husker Red
Penstemon—being the most famous, and has several
more future landscape celebrities in the works. The
Denver and Cheyenne Botanical Gardens are always
conducting live shows of potential landscape stars. |
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Pink Cloud Hibiscus
American Idol-Landscape Winner
Previous Articles
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Yardner March 8
Urban
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Que
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Grocery Store or Garbage Dumpster Plants April 5
Planning Your Landscape Project April 12
Planting
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Keeping
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Thrillers, Chillers, Spillers May 03
Will
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Gardening is not Childs Play
Versatile
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Yardner Plants
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Summer
Landscaping July 5
Cutting Your Lawn Down to Size July 12
Some Like it
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When a Tree
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Green
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2006 Articles |
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Most homeowners are probably
not aware that their landscapes and gardens are
filled with the winners of years’ worth of “American
Idol—Landscape” winners. Before any plant makes it
to your landscape it goes through a process that
often includes years of being poked, prodded,
insulted, and being forced to perform in front of
large live and television audiences. OK, maybe the
part about the television audiences is a stretch.
But the rest is all true. All of the plants in
your landscape or garden are “stars”.
The American Idol—Landscape
contest often begins just like the TV show—with a
“talent scout” on the lookout for promising
newcomers. More often than not, the newcomers are
found in out of the way places like road ditches,
native prairies, or abandoned gardens. But just
like with the TV show, winning the audition doesn’t
automatically guarantee stardom. Winning an
American Idol--Landscape audition usually means
winning the opportunity to be planted in a test plot
or trial garden for a year, or two, or three, to be
poked, prodded, insulted, and forced to bloom and
otherwise perform in front of live gardeners,
horticulture professors, and various and sundry
other plant experts. Sometimes winning an American
Idol-Landscape audition means spending your entire
career in a trial garden being cross-pollinated with
other audition winners to produce some sort of new
hybrid. It is a concept that the Fox Network may
very well be trying to figure out how to incorporate
into their show.
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Harlan Hamernik, the owner of
Bluebird Nursery in Clarkson, Nebraska, has traveled
the world to discover future landscape celebrities,
and over a 50 year career has brought hundreds of
audition winners to his nursery for poking,
prodding, insulting, and performing. Hamernik’s
efforts have produced a long list of landscape
stars, including the hardy hibiscus blooming in
Wyobraska landscapes right now. So Wyobraskans
have several opportunities to be the live audience
in our regional editions of the American
Idol—Landscape show.
As with the people version of
the show, the winners of the landscape version of
American Idol occasionally have character flaws
that don’t show up until later. That’s because the
process of selecting the winners focuses more on
showy flowers or foliage with pizzaz than on things
like vigor, adaptability to a variety of landscape
soils and climates, and the other more mundane
aspects of being a true garden or landscape
celebrity. But fortunately, it’s hard for a plant
to fake vitality, so most American Idol—Landscape
winners are also vigorous and widely adaptable
plants that grow well in most garden and landscape
settings.
Here are some American
Idol—Landscape winners commonly found in Wyobraska
landscapes.
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