New Regional Garden Forums are Live

OK - the new regional garden forums are live. Feel free to wander over, check it out and help somebody out (or be helped out)

Personally, I think the Net is way too cool - that it allows us to do this kind of thing. To talk to somebody in the Yukon or other region - to discover gardening tips and ideas that help us all garden. Heck, I’ve already learned something interesting about rose rootstocks and the forum is very new.

And just for the record. This is a free forum - will be free - period. I’m covering the cost of this - it’s my way of giving back to the gardening community and all the folks who’ve helped me out over the years.

photo credit: splorp

Names of spring flowers

Who could wax poetic about the names of spring flowers? I mean think about it for a minute.

We’ve got Narcissus - named after a guy who couldn’t stop looking at himself in the mirror and which are one of the most poisonous of spring bulbs.

We’ve got Brunnera, named after Samuel Brunner, a Swiss Botanist in 1851.

Or how about Crocus which might come from the Greek word for egg yolk. Read more

Coralbells / Heuchera Article

I just posted an article on new Heuchera aka Coralbells that I’m going to be planting this year. It may be of interest in that I also discuss some of the plant combinations I’m making in the new shade garden with Heuchera.

If you’re interested in this leafy wonder, click here.

Three Plants I’m Lusting After

There are three plants I’m lusting after this spring and here’s my radio broadcast on them.

Gardening As Religion

I got this question the other day. I think it deserves a better answer than the obvious one so…

I’m friends (not close) with a bio-dynamic gardener and I am a traditional gardener - can someone tell me why I’m dead wrong on everything I do when it comes to my choices in organic gardening compared to their methods? I can do nothing right? Isn’t bio-dynamics bordering on a religion of sorts?

Well, there are several obvious places to start with this one. Read more

Volunteers Wanted

Hi gang - some of you might know I’ve been working behind the scenes to set up some forums for my readers. While we’re still figuring out stuff, I think it’s time to open the doors a crack and let some of you have a peek at what we’re doing.

So why don’t you visit the forums at http://forum.douggreensgarden.com and do me a favor. Just one (maybe two) small things.

Add your favorite garden center in your region. Maybe add your favourite public garden in your region. Or both. Or two of each.

If you want to add other comments etc. in other areas, feel free. What I’m really trying to do is figure out how the software is going to respond and give us a chance to test the servers with a small load of info coming in before we open it right up.

Thanks for lending a few helping hands.

photo credit: *w*

2 Steps to Organic Living

If you’ve been paying attention to gardening magazines, organic gardening has finally become very, very popular. Now that global warming is clearly here, we’re all being asked to do our parts in small ways to make a difference. Regular readers will know I rarely write about any other techniques but let me highlight the things you’re going to do this summer so you can make a difference in both the health of your own garden, your body and your community. Read more

Daffodil Classes

I just posted a brand new video about Daffodil classes right here. This video explains the different flower forms and shows you pictures of each form. So if you ever wanted to know what kind of daffodil you were looking at, (so you could find it to plant yourself of course) here’s the starting point.

Wealth is…

Wealth is what you have left after you’ve lost all your money.

Cosmo Titles

I went shopping this past weekend and this is a bit of an event because Mayo and I agree that she shops better without me (she likes this stuff) and that I just don’t like doing it. Period.

(Oh-oh. As an aside, I told Mayo I was writing this column and she set me straight. “You don’t go shopping. You go buying. I go shopping.” So having been set straight, I continue…)

But one thing was amusing as we waited in what must have been a car-wreck of a lineup. Read more

There are a lot of things I don’t understand

There are a lot of things in my garden that I just don’t understand. And the more I garden, it sometimes feels that this list grows rather than shrinks. The more I learn about gardening, the more there is to learn. It’s a never ending process. And while I wouldn’t have it any other way, it can be a bit frustrating at times.

For example, Read more

The Capital Home Show

I got this note from the organizers of this garden show. Here’s something if you’re in the area.

I work with the Capital Home and Garden Show, February 21-24, and was hoping you would consider mentioning this great opportunity to the readers of your blog.

The popular annual consumer show features more than 750 exhibits showcasing all types of products and services for your home and garden, as well as attractive garden landscape displays, celebrity appearances, entertaining workshops and much more. Some celebrities include: Green designer Joshua Foss, a participant on HGTV’s Design Star; Don Engebretson, The Renegade Gardener; Shane Tallant, a host of HGTV’s Designed to Sell; Dr. Gadget, the #1 consumer product promoter; and Steven Katkowsky, author of “Danger, Construction Zone, Your Tour Guide to a Successful Remodeling Project.”

LOCATION:

Dulles Expo Center (North & South Halls), 4368 Chantilly Shopping Center, Chantilly, VA

(703) 378-0910 (www.DullesExpo.com). Free onsite parking is available with courtesy shuttle buses running from the parking lots and between the two exhibit halls.

ADMISSION:

$10 adults, $3 children (6-12), free kids 5 & under. Visit CapitalHomeShow.com for your best ticket deals

Thank you for your consideration,

There’s always somethin’

Turns out that this new blog format is a little wonky on Safari and some minor browsing software like feed readers. The main culprit is the picture of me in the subject header. I shrank it waaaay down to make it somewhat better and now at least, those browsing with Safari can read the articles even if I look a little fuzzy (which is how the world looks to me on the morning after the night before)

If you’re having problems with this - let me suggest Firefox on Mac. It seems to work well on my Mac. (Yes, I’ve switched to Mac.)

Firefox.

Brussels sprouts, my Brother and I

I’ve always said (well, sometimes said) that brussels sprouts were the reason I got so much bigger than my younger brother David. You see. He ate them and I don’t.

It turns out - like a lot of things - the older brother was right and the much shorter younger brother was wrong.

Research has shown that brussels sprouts secrete a chemical that makes the aphids that feed on them smaller than aphids feeding on nearby plants. Read more

Plant’s Point of View: Michael Pollan

Here’s one of the great writers - we garden writers like to claim him as our own - of our modern thinking on the food scene. Michael Pollan has written books about what happens when you look at the world from a plant’s point of view - I invite you to do this kind of thing in your own garden.

Check out this video and see if it doesn’t make you look at the world in a slightly different way.

Blue Flowers

Blue is the colour of my ….

Well, maybe I shouldn’t be singing old ballads but if I were, I’d be singing about blue flowers this week.

But don’t get excited.

Blue Rose

It seems the Japanese plant company Suntory (biotech, whiskey distilling, seeds) have inserted the blue genes of a pansy into a rose to give us a true blue rose.

But.

You can’t get it.

It’s being released in Japan to cut flower growers and “maybe” to some cut flower growers in the U.S. Maybe.

So maybe you can get it as a *very* expensive cut flower next yeasr (no idea but the rarity of this is going to send the price well into the premium cut flower standards) but you can’t get it for your garden.

And just when you thought I was teasing you about blue roses.

Blue Impatiens

I read that there’s a blue impatiens (pictured above). Thompson and Morgan have introduced a blue impatiens from China. The original seed was collected but the flowers are sparse and the plant leggy. They have been working to make it more compact and floriferous and are about to release a new variety.

In the U.K.

Not in North America.

Yet.

You can apparently obtain the species seed in the U.S. so you can have ugly blue flowering impatiens plants but not the good ones.

But have patience. You have to believe that this is only the first wave of breeding and the really good ones either are or will be in the pipeline for distribution.

Every gardener I know wants to sing the blues in their garden.

Perennial Plant of the Year Online Book

This is an online version of the free ebook download about Perennial Plants of the Year.

Have fun!

To read the ebook, click on the bottom tabs. It will also allow you to upload the ebook to different social network sites by using the buttons on the bottom right of the image.

As an aside - if you click on the image itself or the bottom links to open up the image to full size readable format, it comes in a new window - a popup. This is happening on the Issu site that is hosting this application. (in other words, I’m not sending you a popup box) but you may have to accept the popup if you want to see the larger image (I know some of you block popups - as do I)

I just thought it was kind of a fun way to do some Internet reading.

Let me know what you think…

Garden News and Doug’s Take On It

So here I sit trying to make some sense of the world. You read this stuff and see if you can make sense of it.

Rabbit Genes

For example, researchers have inserted rabbit genes into the genes of Poplar trees (maybe we’ll get leaves shaped like bunny ears) in order to create a pollution sucking tree. And it worked. Apparently the trees absorb significant amounts of an industrial degreasing chemical called trichloroethylene when it is put in their feed-water. The thinking is you can genetically engineer trees to suck up a wider variety of pollutants. Insert the genes of a rabbit for degreaser, the genes of a cow for tannins used in leather making, the genes of a politician for excess hot air.

I’m not kidding on the last one, it could be done. Japanese researchers combined human dna with rice crops so the rice would degrade herbicides quicker. Yeah, teach our genes how to kill herbicides so we don’t have to stop using them.

Scotts Polluting Yet Again

Now I didn’t report on this in December but it turns out that The Scotts Company (the largest garden chemical producer) was fined a mere $500,000 dollars for releasing and making mistakes with a genetically modified weed grass. They’re working on creeping bentgrass to make it more resistant to glyphosate so golf courses can use this material on their greens. This grass is one of the largest weeds in regular lawns and pernicious in agricultural crops so you can imagine how excited we all should be to learn that Scotts is breeding the darn stuff to be tougher. Apparently they moved seed around and didn’t really get around to killing off the research plots properly. Not only did Scotts have to pay a paltry fine but they had to act as foxes in the henhouse by running seminars telling other bio-tech firms how to properly run research trials.

Petrified Trees - 6 million years old

On the never-compost-this front, I note that Hungarian scientists have discovered 16 tree trunks that are reputed to be some 6-8 million years old. While the wood forests around them turned to coal, these trunks of Cypress (found at the very bottom of the coal mine) were surrounded by sand (possibly from a sand storm) and were preserved as wood. The stumps are some ten feet in diameter and nineteen feet tall. The problem of course is now that the protective layer has been removed, these ancient chunks of wood might just turn to dust if touched or moved the wrong way. Kind of like what happens in scary movies when the bad guy gets his.

Colored Potatoes

And then this breaking news from the USDA points out that coloured potatoes may be better for us than regularly potatoes. Not that eating potatoes of any kind is good given the carb levels but coloured ones, beside being pretty, may have extra anti-oxidants in the plant dyes that are good for us. The breeders are working to increase these beneficial components and making prettier potatoes as a result. Will that be purple or pink fries with that ma’am?

Bury Me Not on the Lonesome Prairie

The Polk City Cemetery in Wisconsin has worked for many years to make a prairie section in their cemetery grounds. This area is too dry for regular garden plants or lawns so these specialized plants were installed and a great many volunteers worked to create it. Seems this late fall the cemetery staff decided they needed more places to bury the dead so they bush-hogged the place. It’s going to be a very exclusive burial grounds; people are just dying to get in there.

Bio-Accumulation

And speaking of burials, it seems that when we bury minerals like nickel by pollution, plants will mine it back for us. Researchers at the U.S. Agricultural Research Services in Texas have been identifying and breeding plants to be more efficient at “hyperaccumulating” soil minerals. Turns out the best plants are grass-like and once harvested and burned (for energy we trust) the resulting ash is high in nickel and worth about $3000/acre. So instead of mining for the darn stuff and creating huge holes in the ground, we can simply grow plants and do it. It won’t happen in Scotland though as I’m told by the usual reliable source that most Scots still have the first nickel they ever made.

Big Ain’t Better

And here’s a bit of news for that competitive vegetable grower in your family. According to research done at the University of Texas, as food/vegetables are bred for size the nutritional value disappears You get more in the basket but less in the body. So while farmers and market gardeners try to grow the biggest varieties they can so you’ll be impressed, and they’ll make more money, the consumer is actually getting less nutrition for their buck. Bigger tomatoes have lower concentrations of lycopene, the natural anti-cancer chemicals that make tomatoes red; not only that but there’s less Vitamin C and beta carotene. Milk from higher producing cows tends to have lower concentrations of fat and protein while potatoes and sweet corn show declines in iron, zinc and calcium that reach the double digits. Bottom line, bigger food now is less nutritional than the smaller varieties of 20 years ago.

Botanists Learn to Duck

And finally from the files, I see that botanists down in Arizona are giving up their research jobs on native plants. It seems that they’re allergic to having guns pointed at their heads by smugglers coming in from Mexico. It seems this wild country is a major pipeline for drug smuggling and it simply isn’t safe any more to wander about that back country looking at plants. The park service makes folks sign a waver before letting them wander off. Different kinds of growers look for different kinds of weed I guess.

And that’s all for today folks. Back to our regularly scheduled gardening information when I recover from winter.

Columbine revisited

If I told you that you could grow a plant named both after an eagle as well as a dove, would you be interested?

Origin of Name

I would hope so because it is an easily grown perennial that will self-sow and delight you for years by popping up here and there throughout the garden. Aquilegia is the name of this delightful plant – aquilegia comes from the Latin word aquila meaning ‘eagle’ and if you look at the individual petals, you can see the resemblance to an eagle. Well, OK, you have to use your imagination but I can see one. Columbine is the other name for this plant and this comes to us because the upside-down flowers resemble a circle of drinking doves. Columba is Latin for ‘dove”. I’ve also heard Aquilegia called Culverwort but that’s easily explained because the Saxon word for ‘pigeon’ is culfre and ‘plant’ is wort. But, no matter what bird is drinking or sitting around in a circle, this is a great garden plant.

Grows Best

It grows best in the full sun in my garden although it will tolerate some light noonday shade. I’ve also found that it grows best on a well drained soil; it dies out if given clay or wet soils. Think of it as a woodland edger or meadow plant; it requires adequate moisture to continue flowering but good drainage so that the roots don’t sit in moisture. The height of different species varies between 3 to 36 inches so there’s a drinking dove to fit any space in your garden. We’ve had a full range of colors of this plant – from blues, pinks, whites and yellows as well of shades and combinations of almost all of them.

Bloomtime

Depending on your viewpoint, the flowers are either one of the earliest summer bloomers or latest spring bloomers. They start easily from seed and after a few years, you’ll find them popping up all over the garden. The major problem with aquilegia is the leaf miner. Simply squeezing the ends of the tunnels eliminates the miner and its unsightly tunnels.

Plants to Look Out For

A. alpina is a delightful plant with deep sky-blue flowers on 12 inch plants and it is wonderful for the front of the border or rock garden.

However, A. bertolonii is my favorite columbine. This 6 to 8 inch tall plant is wonderful for the rock garden and its blue and cream flowers are the earliest to bloom in my garden. You’ll likely find this one from seed catalogues rather than in garden centers.

A. caerulea is the Rocky Mountain Columbine and it grows 18 to 24 inches in my garden and has blue and white flowers. An attractive plant, I’m told it is one of the parents of many of the hybrid forms on the market today.

A. canadensis is a smaller plant. It thrives naturally at the front of my farm and stands about 18 inches tall in full sun and part shade spots. The flowers (red and yellow) are smaller than the garden center hybrids but equally charming. It is easy to naturalize and grow (I didn’t do anything – they just arrived one year to colonize the area). The textbooks say they prefer moist shady areas but mine are growing on poor, rocky, thin soils in full sunlight.

A. flabellata is one of the parents of modern columbine breeding. One of the nicest forms is the pure white form ‘nana’. It is only 12 inches tall with glistening white flowers reaching to 18 inches.

The columbine known in Europe as Granny’s Bonnet is really A. vulgaris and it grows 18 to 24 inches tall. This plant is the parent the Vervaeneana group that have variegated or gold flecks in the leaves. Many doubles have also been bred from A. vulgaris genetics. The old stand-by ‘Nora Barlow’ with pink and green colored flowers, is quite stable and has bred true year after seeding year in my garden.

Growing up to 3 feet tall, A. chrysantha and its delightful yellow flowers are one of my favorites. The flowers are large with long spurs so it stands out in the garden. This is the plant that brought the yellow gene to the columbine breeding program. Unfortunately, it has also been one of the shortest- lived columbines in my garden, seldom living longer than two to three years.

In hybrids, ‘Biedermeier’ is offered by many seed companies. The blue and white Biedermeier is acceptable – other colors are muddy and not worth growing.

The excellent ‘Dragonfly’ hybrid is a color mix and grows to 24 inches tall.

‘McKanna Hybrids’ are 18 to 24 inch tall hybrids quite commonly found in commercial nurseries. They’ve had good color ranges in my garden.

The ‘Music’ series is one of the better hybrids at 18 inches because the colors are more intense than other varieties.

Sexy Plant Alert

I have to tell you that Aquilegia are also promiscuous. They interbreed quite quickly and easily so it is quite difficult to maintain a pure line of species plants. After a few years, the hybrids will self sow and produce offspring quite different in appearance from the parents. The gardener has a choice at that time; to select the blooming plants they like and allow these to go to seed or to pull the offending plants and re-purchase the hybrid. I note that some of the colors of the hybrid offspring will be quite terrible and I recommend digging out the ones you don’t like. A few years selecting the most desirable colors will produce a relatively stable population.

So, call them pigeons or eagles but just make sure they are in your garden next spring. They’ll take you away on flights of fancy.

New Beetle Named

In recent science news, it has been announced by Arizona State U entomologist Dr. Quentin Wheeler that his team has identified a brand new “whirligig beetle” that has been named “Orectochilus orbisonarum” after the late legendary musician Roy Orbison.

This ain’t no “Pretty Woman” by any means but now he’s immortalized in bug-land.

I’m never going to see this beetle - it’s a native to India.

But maybe if I listen to enough Travelling Wilbury music, I’ll get moving over there. Ah - Roy, George, Bob, Jeff and Tom - you deserve much more than a beetle.

A bunch of butterflies would be more appropriate.