Indholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2022 i Horticulture

GARDENING LIFE ONE OF THE WONDERS of gardening is the reliable generosity of the earth, sun and plants themselves, which offer up fruits, leaves, berries, seeds and roots for our delight and sustenance year after year. In return, all we need to do is keep the soil healthy, feed and water the plants and provide physical support for vines that require it. Growing food (and flowers too) ties us intimately to the seasons and cycles of the natural world of which we are part. It roots us to a place, and the longer we garden in the same location, the deeper our taproot of intimacy with that place grows. Foraging further strengthens that intimacy with place. “Whether you forage every day or once a month or only one time, the…

Full disclosure: This article is about a garden the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden made as part of a community project in conjunction with the Cincinnati Reds and its partners. I’ll try to be objective. Even if I’m not, I think you’ll understand what horticulture did for a community, and what such efforts can do for horticulture. Since 2009, the Reds Community Fund, a nonprofit affiliate of the baseball organization, has worked with other prominent local businesses and nonprofits on a service project called Community Makeover. In this annual event, one community in Greater Cincinnati is provided help improving its ballfields, recreational centers, parks, schools and such. Led by the Fund’s Executive Director, Charley Frank, the planning takes place over the winter, and on a late-July day several hundred volunteers…

DEEP ROOTS IT WAS A SATURDAY MORNING about five years ago, and I was driving to Home Depot to buy a new toilet seat. I was feeling pretty blue. I was feeling tired, old and fat, but mostly fat, because I had just broken a toilet seat. And I was thinking how much harder things were getting—things like remembering, and picking stuff up. I was at the point of despair when I bellowed, “No! I’m not giving up!” And I began to lift myself out of my funk. I wasn’t that old. I could turn things around. Get in better shape. Improve. So I was feeling optimistic and excited to begin my new, healthy lifestyle when I got stopped by a traffic light. As I sat there, innocently waiting for…

Evergreen shrubs and trees provide structure, screening and four-season interest for our foundation borders—a backbone, so to speak. But what happens when said backbone gets bent out of shape? Increasingly, deer just love a buffet of evergreen favorites like camellia, yews, azalea and rhododendrons. Other go-to’s like privet, leatherleaf mahonia and nandina have become invasive in some locations. Our native hemlocks and redbays and the non-native garden-staple boxwoods are threatened with widespread pests and disease, further limiting their use. Where does all this leave us as we’re planning gardens? In the face of such stressors—along with a changing climate—it’s important to expand our repertoire and consider alternatives already here. A good handful of native evergreen shrubs from northern and southeastern North America, some of them old favorites and some lesser…

Heidi Heiland has made a career—indeed a life—out of gardening. She says it’s something she fell into as a teenager, but perhaps it was meant to be. Her great-grandmother gardened on an East Coast property designed by Ellen Biddle Shipman, one of the first prominent female landscape designers. Growing up in Minnesota, Heidi found herself drawn to the craft. As a 16-year-old working as a “water girl” for a townhome developer in the late 1970s, she noticed all the gardens relied on the same three annuals: red salvia, yellow marigolds and white sweet alys-sum. There has to be more than this, young Heidi thought. So at age 17 she began her own gardening business, Heidi’s Lifestyle Gardens, to offer more creative planting to the community. Heidi did not study horticulture…

GROWING GREENER I’VE ALWAYS PREFERRED starting my garden plants from seed, and a recent conversation with Anna Fialkoff on my Growing Greener podcast has opened up new horizons in that respect. Anna is the Ecological Programs Manager of the Wild Seed Project in North Yarmouth, Maine. She described to me her organization’s program to make it easy for gardeners to sow native plants for their gardens. This is important because so many of the native plants we find at local garden centers are propagated vegetatively. That is, they have been raised from cuttings or divisions of a parent plant, or even from tiny pieces of tissue cultivated in a laboratory setting. The advantage of plants raised this way, from the seller’ perspective, are many. When vegetatively propagated, each plant is…

The evergreen shrubs profiled in this article are largely adaptable across a range of conditions. For reference, here are the species’ native distributions and habitats. Eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana) Woods’ edges and openings, prairies, pastures, meadows and savannas from Nova Scotia west to the Dakotas and south to central Texas and northern Florida Creeping juniper (Juniperus horizontalis) Dry openings, hillsides and washes from Nova Scotia west to central British Columbia and south to Colorado and southeast Arkansas American holly (Ilex opaca) Woods and shaded streambanks from Virginia west to Missouri and south to eastern Texas and northern Florida, plus populations along the Massachusettsto-Maryland coast Coast doghobble (Leucothoe axillaris) Coastal plain from southeast Virginia south to the Florida panhandle and west to Louisiana Drooping leucothoe (Leucothoe fontanesiana) Moist mountain woods…

EARTH MATTERS WITHOUT BUMBLEBEES, a flowering plant that can self-pollinate lost substantial genetic variation within only nine generations, an experimental study recently found. In the study, a group of “selfing” monkeyflower plants lost 13 to 24 percent of their genetic variation compared to a group that was propagated by bumblebees. This loss could rob the plants of their ability to adapt to environmental challenges. With bee populations on the decline in nature, the findings point to serious issues for wild plants and crops that rely on these pollinators. “We found that in a very short amount of time, there were major consequences on the genomes of the plants when they had to adopt selfing,” said Jeremiah Busch, a Washington State University evolutionary biologist and lead author on the study (co-authored…