The Mysterious Garden Muse

Photo: Hosta 'Tea and Crumpets' www.songsparrow.com First published in The Landscape Contractor magazine “Little and Large: Extreme Hostas,” By Becke Davis For years, hostas have been one of the top selling perennials in the United States, competing with daylilies for easy care and familiarity. If you drive around suburban neighborhoods, though, you would mainly see fairly ordinary looking, green and cream variegated, wavy leaved hostas. Even though hostas perform best in shade, you don’t have to look far to see hostas surrounding rural mailboxes, dried out and burned brown. Planting hostas in the right place is easy enough – most prefer shade, although deep shade is not the best option. Some studies show that more important even than shade is soil that is consistently moist. Hostas in moist soil are better able to withstand the hot sun. Gold hostas are supposed to be more tolerant of sun than blue or green hostas, but no hostas should be the first choice for a site that gets h...

First Published in The Landscape Contractor magazine “What You Don’t Know About Walnuts Can Hurt Your Plants” By Becke Davis How many times have you planted perfectly healthy trees or shrubs into an existing landscape, only to have them die for no apparent reason? When that happens, do you call in a specialist from the County Extension Service you diagnose the cause of death? Do you have an arborist check out the remains of the plant? Or do you just bite the bullet and resign yourself to the inevitable loss of a few trees and shrubs? Nine times out of ten, you’d be safe to do that, but the 10th time you could be letting yourself in for a repeat performance. There are a number of reasons why a relatively new plant can die -- planting too deeply (although that usually causes a slower death), herbicide contamination, insufficient watering, root burn from over-fertilization, rootballs sitting in water that won’t drain, and so on. When you are running down a checklist of possible reasons fo...

First published in The Landscape Contractor magazine “Is Blue the Color of Money?” By Becke Davis Blue roses. Black tulips. The difficulty -- even impossibility -- of producing particular flower colors has not stopped botanists and plant propagators from making the attempt. This century has seen many horticultural advances, from increased disease-resistance to improved cold hardiness, from pest-resistance to drought tolerance -- and that is only the beginning. Flowers are being bred to bloom longer, bloom repeatedly, and even to shed their spent flowers. Hybridizers seek the ideal form, the most sublime foliage, the most artful flowers and the most memorable fragrances. The holy grail, though, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that always seems out of reach, is exactly that -- the colors of the rainbow that are the most elusive are considered by many to be the ultimate unreachable prize. Blue is one of the least common colors in the garden, and therefore one of the most sou...