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See You
Next
Spring
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This week’s column marks the
end of the 10th year of gardening
columns. That’s a lot of color-related adjectives,
horticultural nouns, sissified verbs, and run on
sentences for a reluctant English major to come up
with. Diagram that sentence, Mr. Alberding! (He
was my high school English composition teacher).
Thank you to those readers whose occasional kind
comments about this column continue to give me the
flattering misimpression that someone actually
thinks I know what I’m writing about.
I suspect that most true “experts” on any subject
would admit that there is a certain Wizard of Oz
quality to their expertise. In other words, the
more one knows about a subject, the more one also
realizes how much they don’t know about the
subject. Knowledge and certainty are rarely
companions, and when they appear together, you can
be sure that certainty is the screen behind which
the Wizard is hiding his or her doubts and
insecurities. |
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It would be great if all of
these new plant prospects could be tested and
evaluated in Wyobraska landscapes before they began
showing up in the region’s garden centers. On the
other hand, the gardening public has always been a
more than willing and generally forgiving
participant in the process of trialing new landscape
plants. Indeed, Wyobraska homeowners are already
helping test somewhere upwards of 50 hardy shrub
roses, 20 or so viburnums, 5 to 10 hydrangeas, a
like number of hardy hibiscus, perhaps 25 clematis,
five to ten each of new shade, ornamental, and
evergreen trees, and perhaps 50 or more perennials
and ornamental grasses. Did I mention about 10
butterfly bush, three or four promising new
ninebarks, and up to 20 prospective xeric and native
plants?
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Previous Articles
It's
Finally Spring - March 13
Spring Garden Calendar-March 20
No
Garden Left Behind-March 27
Planting Trees for a Cooler Earth in a Warmer
WyoBraska-April 3
Viburnums - Shrubs for Wyobraska Springs-April 10
Want A Water Conserving Lawn? You might already have
one-
April 17
Creating Long
Term
Tree-lationships April 24
Bigger, Bolder, Brighter,
Better—and Back In The Landscape May 01 & 08
Hardy Shrub
Roses
May 15
Another Look
at Native Plants
May 22
No Child
Left Inside
May 29
June
is Tree Care Month June 05
Summer Blooming Shrubs
June 12
Roses Are
Red.....
June 19
The Plants They will be Talking About Next Year at
the Garden Walk
June 26
Busy Summertime Gardens
July 03
Cutting Your Lawn Down to Size
July 10
July 17
Insect Paranoia
If It Will Grow In Wyoming...
July 24
Rain Gardens
July31
WyoBraska Native Grass & Wildflower Lawn
August 7
A Real WyoBraska Peach?
(Fruit Trees) August 14
Fall is for Planting
August 21
A Recipe for Enjoying Autumn Landscapes August 28
Seeing Red in your Landscape
September 4
Four Questions to Ask A Plant
September 11
September Plants
September 18
Mulch, Nature's Winter Blanket
September 25
Welcome to Hardiness Zone 5
October 2
The
Changing Fall Landscape
October 9
A Few Fall Landscape Reminders
October 16
Winter...
The Longest Landscape Season
October 23
2007 Articles
2006 Articles |
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That said, the great surprise
to me in writing these columns for ten years is that
there never seems to be an end to new topics and
ideas to explore. My only frustration has been
that too often a busy schedule doesn’t offer enough
time to explore those ideas as thoroughly as I would
like. At this point I plan to return to the
keyboard in early March, with the 11th
season of columns. I’ll assume that the collective
groan I just heard has something to do with
Halloween.
When this column returns in the
spring it is my plan to focus most of the year’s
column’s on what is now a pretty long list of great
“new” landscape plants for Wyobraska. Over the past
10 to 20 years, several important trends have
developed which have had the effect of bringing many
new landscape and garden plant options to Wyobraska
landscapes and gardens. Those trends include a
rapidly growing national nursery industry, the
growing interest in the development of
environmentally sustainable landscapes, the
increased interest in the use of native plants in
landscapes, and the establishment of numerous niche
nurseries around the country specializing in
identifying, developing, and producing all sorts of
unique landscape plants.
Add in the prospect of the region already being in a
slightly warmer USDA hardiness zone, and the list of
prospective new landscape plants becomes almost
overwhelming. In almost 30 years of working in the
landscaping and garden center business, I can’t
recall any other time at which there were so many
new plant prospects available to Wyobraska
homeowners.
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One can often find information
on the internet about these prospective landscape
plants, but I have learned that there is no
substitute for actually putting the plants in the
ground and watching them grow right here in
Wyobraska. Once in the ground, it can take several
years to fully evaluate a new landscape plant.
It normally takes three or so
years to fully evaluate a prospective landscape
plant’s cold hardiness, because not all winters are
cold enough to test cold hardiness. And the
region’s landscape soils vary widely, so soil
adaptability can vary—with the winning plants
performing well even in the region’s poorest soils.
But that means that each plant must be tried in
several different sites around the region.
It often takes 2-3 years to see
how a plant performs visually in Wyobraska landscape
settings throughout the landscape year—when it leafs
out in the spring, when it flowers, fall foliage
color, winter appearance, etc. I know of a few
landscape plants that grow well in Wyobraska, but
which have very little visual interest to offer in a
landscape at any time of year.
Finally, there’s nothing like
seeing a plant at somewhat close to it’s mature size
to be able to know how to use it properly in
landscape settings. Perennials, ornamental grasses,
and small shrubs generally reach their mature size
in 1-2 years, but it often requires 3-5 years for
medium to larger shrubs to reach a size at which
their proper use in a landscape can be assessed.
In the absence of an organized
effort to trial and evaluate all of the prospective
plants now available, it will take years to even
partially complete the task on an anecdotal basis.
I would estimate that over half of these
prospective “new” plants are already out in
Wyobraska landscapes in small numbers, so many of
the trials are already underway. Email, digital
pictures, and computer database software offer the
promise of better collecting and organizing the real
world landscape performance of promising landscape
and garden plants. Establishing a data base to
collect and organize the anecdotal landscape plant
experience of amateur and accidental Wyobraska
gardeners alike is on my winter ”to do” list.
See you right here next spring.
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