A Holiday Color Scheme

Client’s routinely ask me for things I would never think of. That is just one of a hundred reasons why I like having clients. People know what they like, and they will tell you, if you ask the right questions.  This client is hosting a holiday event tomorrow. She called me well in advance to [...]

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Why isn’t gardening included in exercise tech? by Elizabeth Licata

My husband and I were early adopters of Apple watches when they were first introduced in 2015. I now have a series 3, which can act independently of the iPhone, (solving what had always been a drawback). One of the basic ways I use the watch is as an activity tracker, which it does very well, including the stylish graphics you would expect from Apple. But—like other activity trackers—the watch does not acknowledge gardening as a physical activity. If you look under “other,” you can choose a wide variety of activities that are well off the mainstream, including cricket, archery, and water polo. No gardening, though it will, of course, track general exercise measurements while you’re working outside. Other devices have been known to categorize heavy gardening as “sport,” and “outdoor bike.”

Nobody reading this blog needs to be told what kind of physical work gardening is. And there are peer-reviewed university studies that have measured the bulk of gardening activity as equal to brisk walking, i.e., moderate–strenuous, which is exactly the type of activity recommended most.

Gardening is exercise! It would be easy enough to add it to the lists on devices, maybe even as modestly as two categories, taken from one of the studies. One could be digging/hand mowing and the other could be planting/trimming. Or something like that. I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that more people in the US—and yes, maybe even in the UK—engage in those activities than in cricket.

And a rave

Did you notice that the Google Doodle acknowledged the 174^th anniversary of Gertrude Jekyll’s birth yesterday? When I think of the typical English garden, I think of the work by Jekyll (with Edwin Lutyens) that I saw at Hestercombe (above) in 2004. I would love to revisit it. Actually, 2004 is looking pretty good overall.

Why isn’t gardening included in exercise tech? originally appeared on Garden Rant on November 30, 2017.

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Perennial Royalty: It’s Inbred by Allen Bush

Jack Schultz, News-Herald photo.

There are few families in American horticulture with four generations of successful nursery crops. There are even fewer nursery legends with a story so well remembered as that of Jack Schultz, the 88-year-old Schultz family patriarch and founder of Springbrook Gardens, wholesale perennials growers, in Mentor, Ohio.

Jack’s dad, Elmer, started Wayside Gardens in 1916 as a road stand.  Sales were good.  J.J. Grullemans became a partner in 1920. Grullemans focused on sales while Elmer Schultz preferred production. In the beginning the business was principally wholesale. The partners shuttled back and forth between production fields in Perry and Mentor, Ohio.

Jack started pulling weeds for Wayside Gardens as an 11-year-old in 1939. He liked the work. By the age of 13 he was running a crew of 20 kids. Jack said, “ Dad told me I could get more work out of them than any man could.”

In the early days, an estimated 60% of the Wayside wholesale production was shrubs. Schultz and Grullemans had a large contract with C.W. Stewart of New York for “20,000 of this AND 20,000 of that.” They grew 500-600 varieties of woody plants and perennials.

Wayside Gardens stayed afloat during the Depression.  “They went into the red one year,” Jack said. And that required cutting wood and doing anything to keep the crew working.

Elmer Schultz sold his share of Wayside Gardens to J.J. Grullemans in 1945 for $100,000. Son Jack stayed on. He loved nursery life. One day he was working with a crew, and his dad came along and said, “What are you working so hard for?”

Jack said. “Holy Christ, you never told me that before. It’s my job.”  His dad wanted him to quit, but Jack was happy with the work. “I was making 75 cents an hour.” When his dad sold his Wayside shares, Jack said, “I went to Grullemans and said, ‘I want a buck an hour.’ And they gave it to me real quick.”

Elmer, determined to get his son out of the nursery business, packed Jack off to the Greenbrier Military School in Lewisburg, West Virginia in 1945. Jack was 16.  While he was away his dad started growing plants around the house in Mentor, which became the start for Springbrook Gardens. “I only went to Greenbrier one year. I couldn’t stand it. I liked the military; I hated school,” Jack said.

Jack came home. He and his dad incorporated Springbrook Gardens in 1946. The property in Mentor grew to 20 acres and eventually to 53 acres. The land was bountiful. Elmer Schultz drilled Delphinium hybrid seed into the fertile soil. “We cut 10,000 flowering stems off that patch!” Jack said proudly. And mysteriously, “I could never do it again,” Jack added. “I don’t know why.”

The one—and only—bumper crop of Delphinium cut flowers in 1947 was wonderful in another important sense. Jack Schultz met his bride-to-be while he was peddling the flowers to local florists. Castello’s Florist became a favorite stop. “There she was. She came out of the office, wearing a plaid shirt that was tied in front of her. A picture of beauty,” Jack recalls. Mary Jane Castello was 19; Jack Schultz was 19. He was smitten. “That’s my wife,” he said. They courted for three years and were married in 1950.

Jim Wosley (L) and Jack Schultz (R) at Springbrook Gardens 1946.

Springbrook Gardens, including the 3rd generation of Schultz boys—John, Jim and Dave— began to grow their family business in the 1970s. The family stayed connected with Wayside Gardens. They contract grew for Wayside and also picked up Spring Hill and White Flower Farm. “We were doing a million poppies for Spring Hill every year,” Jack said.  “When we were shipping poppies it was 80 or 90 hours of work a week,” Dave said.

“We also signed a contract with Wayside for somewhere between $60,000-75,000 a year,” his dad added. “That was a lot of money back then.”

Wayside Gardens eventually became the largest retail, mail-order nursery in the country.  By 1960, the catalog stretched to 252 pages.  Wayside Gardens was sold to George W. Park Seed Company in Greenwood, South Carolina, in 1975.  The original flagship Wayside Gardens in Ohio had nurtured young nurserymen who later started their own nurseries— Bluestone Perennials, Bentley Nursery, Antioch Farm and Beardslee Nursery.  Over the years between the 1980s into the late 1990s, notable horticulturalists including John Elsley, Viki Ferreniea, Bill Funkhouser and Chris Hansen contributed their expertise to Geo. W. Park-owned Wayside Gardens in Greenwood, South Carolina.

Schultz family vacations were sometimes spent traveling to Litchfield, Connecticut, to see Bill Harris, the founder of White Flower Farm. Harris wrote the company catalog under the pseudonym Amos Petingill. Harris was an eccentric, but he liked Jack Schultz. Harris invited the Schultz family to stay at his home at White Flower Farm. “Nobody believed I was going to stay in his house. He was a crazy nut,” Jack said.

Harris told the kids that there wasn’t anything wrong with pot. “Mr. Harris, please,” the protective dad said.

The family turned in for the evening and was shortly awakened when they heard a whistle blowing outside.  “This is what they do in New York if you’re in trouble,” Jack explained. He looked out the window and saw Harris dressed in a nightgown and cap, holding a butcher’s knife. The next morning they learned he was sharpening a knife to make breakfast. “I thought he was coming to kill us,” Dave said.

The Springbrook business grew steadily. The original nursery rows were 30” wide. Son Dave remembers when they’d mark rows with a string and plant 200’-500’ rows—by hand. “And then I’d move the string,” Dave said. Row after row. Eventually, the rows were tightened to 20” spacing and finally to beds with 10” spacing between the rows. Son Jim developed a tractor-drawn, five-row planter. Bare root crops were dug with a bed digger.

In the 1980s, Jack installed a geothermal heat pump in the greenhouse. “We were the first ones,” Jack said. The annual cost for propane had been running around $18,000-20,000 per year. “And we didn’t heat very warm.” The new geothermal unit brought the heating bill down to $3,000. Springbrook recovered the cost of the geothermal investment in “one year and three months,” Jack Schultz remembers.

It was quality that mattered most. Dave remembers they would be packing an order for 25 bare-root perennials of one variety and he’d get a radio call, “’Bring me one more.’ Everything had to be done right.”

Dave Schultz left the family business in 1998 to run Kurt Bluemel’s Florida growing operation. Disney World’s Animal Kingdom needed ornamental grasses—lots of them. Millions of grasses were planted. Then the hippos and elephants were turned into their new African savannah and quickly started grazing on the new plantings. No problem. There were plenty more ornamental grasses where they came from—Floraland Farms.

Floraland Nursery, St. Cloud, Florida.

Dave Schultz bought Floraland Farms in 2016. Disney remains a big customer. The Schultzes grow 100 different plants. Ornamental grasses top the nursery’s inventory items. They don’t do any flashy sales gimmicks. (Neither did Springbrook.) We’re going to always keep up quality. We’ll let the plants do the talking,” Dave said.

“I give Dave all the credit in the world for coming down here and running Bluemel’s Florida operation and eventually buying Floraland,” Jack said.

Hurricane Irma damage.

The Springbrook Gardens property was sold in 2014. The farm had become encircled by development. The City of Mentor bought the place with plans to turn it into a park.

That’s a very happy ending for one chapter of the Schultz nursery story, but it isn’t the end. Another generation has come along. Dave son’s Jason has been working at Floraland for ten years.

Jason, Jack and Dave Schultz 2017.

Hurricane Irma paid an unwelcome visit this past September. Trees were downed and buildings badly damaged. Plants were tossed around.

The nursery still waits on FEMA financing approval to rebuild barns, but the plants and nursery have survived.

The Schultzes don’t quit. “It’s inbred,” Dave said.

Perennial Royalty: It’s Inbred originally appeared on Garden Rant on November 29, 2017.

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Amo, Amas, Amat in the Garden by Bob Hill

Zanthoxylum clava-herculis

The further I get into this horticulture life the more I realize how little I know, especially of its outer edges; all that Latin derivation and categorization stuff.

That used to bother me. People forever mistake me for an expert. I’m about over it. I’m in my Old Guy Mode. Sure, it’s important that somebody somewhere in a dim, dark library put the Zanthoxylum clava-herculis in its proper referential and botanical place. I am not a willful idiot about such. I will use all nine syllables as absolutely needed.

So, let’s hear it for Carl Linnaeus, the very-interesting binomial nomenclature inventor, if not Miss Rader, my petrified high school Latin teacher, who would cringe and shake her head “No” as the jock in the back of her class tossed paper airplanes out an open window.

At my current age, however, I’d just rather someone else work out the Latin derivation. My fun now is in randomly coming across Zanthoxylum clava-herculis on page 1310 of Mike Dirr’s Manual of Woody Landscape Plants and moving on from there to learn the more interesting stuff about it. Like the tree’s somewhat less foreign names are “Hercules’ Club,” “Prickly Ash,” or “Pepperwood.”

Beyond that, the early pioneers and Native American locals called it the “Toothache Tree” or “Tingle-Tongue Tree” because chewing on its leaves, twigs or needle-pin thorns caused the mouth, tongue and gums to go numb when the nearest dentist was back in Philadelphia.

Or that the Toothache Tree’s American relatives grow wild across warmer sections of our country, and its Asian cousins have bright red berries that when dried and roasted are used in Sichuan seasoning.

I had no idea. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one.

‘Black and Blue’ Salvia

Much the same rigorous botanical exploration took place after happily digging up my ‘Black and Blue’ salvia (Okay Salvia guaranitica) to save for next year.

The South American native is one of my favorite plants. Its cobalt-blue flowers lead the way to my walk to the mailbox all summer, its anise-like fragrance is stunning and, thumbing its nose at its zone 8-10 horticulture designation, it will often come back on its own in my zone 6-7 garden in that fabled sheltered site. But I don’t always want to risk that renewal – and I love the digging-up part.

And, yeah, the “salvia” part comes from a healing salve, and ‘guaranitica,’ as it turns out, comes from Guara Brazil – population 20,210. But my learning curve peaked upward with the revelation that its nickname is “Hummingbird Sage.”

You’d think a garden expert would have known that.

But my best, up-from-ignorance moment this year came after walking out of the house following our first hard frost and seeing a deep circle of yellow ginkgo leaves on the ground – all having fallen in one evening from the now naked limbs above my head.

I had once borne witness to this. Indeed, one of my favorite all-time garden remembrances is standing beneath our ginkgo tree one frozen autumn morning as those golden leaves rained down on my head and softly bathed our ceramic garden art, stone owl and handsome blue mailman; my arms outstretched to mimic those naked limbs.

Fallen Gingko biloba leaves

As we all know, of course, the Ginkgo biloba checks in at about 270 million continuous years on earth, and its female fruit smells like a pile of dead skunks. And yes, “Ginkgo” comes from the Chinese yin-hing  for “silver apricot” and ‘biloba’  from that two-lobed leaf.

But what’s with that over-night leaf drop – the fabled “Ginkgo Rain.”

Rigorous research took me to the truth. The stems of leaves on deciduous trees are known as petioles – from the Latin peciolus or “Little Foot.”

Because Mother Nature is a lot smarter than any of her children, these petioles, on most trees, slowly create a protective layer of cells that work like a scar to keep out disease as the leaves randomly fall to the ground.

Once there, they are collected by eager, hopeful parents and resentful children armed with plastic, non-biodegradable rakes, and stuffed in paper bags for environmentally-pure disposal in a landfill of some sort or another.

Truly hopeful parents might even try composting, which is a step or two up from burning them, but I sure miss that smoky, drifting, autumnal fragrance. Maybe each American town should be allowed a one-hour leaf-burn a year just so the kids will know.

Ginkgo trees, with the collective wisdom of 270 million years, form that protective layer of scar tissue all at once. Then, come the first hard frost, they all tumble down at once.

On the good years, right into my waiting arms.

Mirabile dictu.

Photo credits: Salvia by Aaron Carlson. Zanthoxylum clava-herculis  via Wikipedia. Gingko by the author.

Amo, Amas, Amat in the Garden originally appeared on Garden Rant on November 27, 2017.

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The Details

Better than twenty years ago, before a cell phone had been invented or a world wide web established, I would drive Rob to the airport for a buying trip to Europe. In those days we could have a cocktail in the lounge, and I could accompany him all the way to the boarding chute for [...]

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Bulb-Planting Rules I Break by Susan Harris

Who doesn’t love spring-blooming bulbs? I love all of them (well, except for hyacinths) and used to plant a large assortment every fall. Above are shots from my former garden, where I planted tulips, yanked them out after the blooms faded and had the fun of trying new ones in the same spot the next year.

But no more. Now I ONLY plant bulbs that come back year after year and aren’t eaten by squirrels or deer. (Hooray for daffodils!)

And I’ve entirely changed how I arrange them and plant them. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but when I was a gardening newbie I planted a couple hundred full-sized daffodils (my fave was Ice Follies), one bulb per hole and spaced evenly throughout the garden. It looked ridiculous. So over the years I gradually rearranged them into clumps, masses and sweeps – which we all know look better than one-offs.

Planting bulbs too close together

And I gradually switched to planting bunches of 5-10 bulbs in each hole because I like the look and it’s SO much easier than digging holes for each bulb. This old photo shows the right way to do it. Nowadays I dig smaller holes and plant the bulbs closer together – too close, far closer than the recommended 2-bulb-width apart. Yet, they bloom.

Planting bulbs too shallow

Planting bulbs 3 times the depth of their height is fine for tiny bulbs but when it comes to large daffodils, forget about it. I don’t think I’ve ever planted them as deep as 6″.  Too much work! And yet, those shallow-planted daffodils bloom.

Feeding bulbs

Never done it. Yet they bloom.

Deadheading bulbs

Ditto.

Tying up the daffodil leaves

Yes, I even do this, the tidying chore we’re told will reduce future flowering, though we’re never told by how much. Those Ice Follies I planted decades ago continued to bloom like crazy year after year, despite having their leaves tied up. Sure, they may have bloomed a bit more if I’d followed the rules, but I’d rather get them off the emerging perennials.

Rules I follow, more or less

Helpful advice for some situations is to keep records of what bulbs have been planted and where, which I did recently in the really badly drawing above. As long as I can read it, right?

Or, in beds with bulbs with existing bulbs but where I want to plant more the next fall, it’s easier to just take photos of the current spring’s blooms in context. It’s not precise, but close enough.

And I more or less follow the recommendations about planting in late fall, at least by the end of December (here in Zone 7). I know some rule-breakers brag about planting bulbs as late as February to no ill effect, but that much rule-breaking is too much for even me.

Bulb-Planting Rules I Break originally appeared on Garden Rant on November 24, 2017.

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Goodbye, and thanks for your service by Elizabeth Licata

In (somewhat) better days

Trees are suffering. First, there are the pests; among the most current are the emerald ash borer, the mountain pine beetle, and the wooly aldegid. Then there are the ravages of fires, hurricanes, and other natural disasters; it was awful to see the defoliation in the Caribbean earlier this year (though growing conditions there should promote faster replacement than we’d see in Buffalo). And then there are the always-ongoing threats of bad planting and bad maintenance.

One of only two trees on our actual property—we are surrounded by trees we don’t own—was just cut down last week, the last in a series of must-do pre-winter tasks. A big sugar maple, it had been weakening over the past five years, and now posed a serious threat to neighboring structures. We think it’s many decades old, but aren’t sure of the exact age. During garden tours, visitors have always been surprised to be seeing such a large tree in an urban courtyard garden; it grew directly against an even older Victorian carriage house.

Tree replacement has been a big thing in Buffalo since a 2006 freak October snowstorm that many called Arborgeddon, and now my friends are losing their ash trees. But I don’t think I’ll replace this one—it was not a very generous spot for a mature tree ever, and I have enough structure from the largish stump that remains, not to mention the wall behind it. I’m sure I can figure something out and make this work. In any case, after having seen what it took to get the thing down, I’d never want to have to risk making anyone go through that again. Fences were sawn apart and heavy machinery made a mud pit out of a nicely planted shade bed. The possibility of people losing power and cable service was raised.

A really old sycamore nearby (winter shot)

As much as I love an urban canopy, trees in densely built areas like mine are never problem-free. Still, they persist. A 320-year-old American sycamore is surviving just a few blocks away. It’s currently battling a bout of anthracnose, but it survived the burning of Buffalo in 1812, so I have high hopes.

Goodbye, and thanks for your service originally appeared on Garden Rant on November 21, 2017.

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