Some hope for spring...

Well, today I saw this depressing news that the rest of February is supposed to still be significantly colder than normal here in Michigan. So I made this to try and make me feel better.

It isn't much, but it is better than nothing...

Podcast episode one!

The first episode of my new podcast is up and live! Hope you enjoy it.

A new project... a podcast!

Well, I've decided to launch a new project -- a podcast! The website is http://www.growalltheplants.com/, so head on over to check it out. Right now I've got a teaser/trailer for the first season, the first full episode goes live Feb. 15. I've got some great guests, and am having a VERY good time with it. Hope you'll check it out and tell your friends!

Announcing... another book!

So... this came in the mail the other day. A contract with Timber Press to write another book! I'm crazy excited... feels crazy that I'll get to use the phrase "my second book" in my everyday conversation!
The working title is Rock Garden Nation, and it is going to be about (big surprise here) rock gardening! It is going to be LOTS of fun to write and I'm very excited. If everything goes as planned, it should be out in 2015!

Denver Botanic Garden does not disappoint

A couple weeks ago I got to go out to Denver to speak at a rock garden society meeting... I wasn't sure what to expect. I've never really been to that part of the country before. I had an AMAZING time, met some wonderful people and saw some really lovely gardens.

Today, let me share some of Denver Botanic Garden... it was absolutely stunning.

Mike Kintgen, senior horticulturalist at DBG, and my tour guide for most of my visit (and a freaking plant genius), here giving a sense of scale to a spectacular specimen of Yucca faxoniana. Wish I could grow that thing... Denver is zone 5, same as me in Michigan, but the much drier climate they can do lots of yuccas and agaves and such that just rot for me.

Cylindropuntia echinocarpa... Those white spines make it look backlit even when it isn't. Almost makes me rethink having cactus in the garden. Almost. I can deal with spines. It is the glochids I'm not willing to put up with.

Again... those brilliant fruit on the opuntia almost making me love cacti...

I loved this simple, meadowy hillside. Soft, romantic, almost glowing. The yellow is from rabbitbrush (Chrysothamnus, is the genus, I believe)... A plant that I'd never heard of before, but was everywhere around Denver. 

The Japanese garden is STUNNING. And I love that they use native Ponderosa pines instead of a more traditional Japanese species of pine -- it is a wonderful native, more locally adapted species, and looks absolutely spectacular grown in a traditional Japanese style.

A English-style double border... but with a completely different plant palette. A wonderful local take on a traditional garden style.

The rock garden. There is no way to do this justice... Denver is a rock gardening climate, for sure... A glorious collection of plants really well grown. I need to come back and see it in spring when everything is flowering.

The new crevice garden in the rock garden area... I took dozens of photos of little green buns in this bed that don't look particularly exciting now, but just seeing species I'd only heard of grown so beautifully was exciting. The clumps of Petunia patagonica, the hardy petunia (probably now a calibrachoa, actually) from the extreme southern end of South America were stunning. As was the Fabiana nana and Onosma albo-rosea and all the acatholimons and... well, you get the idea.

THIS was my biggest plant crush of the trip. Mahonia fremontii. Isn't it glorious? Big, beautiful shrub, and that BLUE foliage! 

Mahonia freemontii close up. Be still my beating heart. By the end of my visit, Mike was pointing out these whenever we saw them with a chuckle saying, "There's your favorite plant." Which was my signal to run up to the latest specimen and take yet more photos. Happily I came home with both a plant of this AND seeds in my luggage.

A tetraneuris in the rock garden.

I came away in love... what a magical place!

The glorious garden of Elissa Steeves

This post is long over-due, but hopefully worth waiting for.

Back in August, I got a chance to go to Blacksburg Viriginia to speak at the Down and Dirty Gardening Symposium hosted by Virginia Tech. It was a terrific conference, put together by the marvelous Dr. Holly Scroggins, who you hopefully know from the excellent Garden Professors Blog. The symposium was beyond excellent, the talks (aside from my own) were informative and fun, but the real highlight was getting to see the spectacular garden of Elissa Steeves. It was a garden I'd want to have someday. Gorgeous design, a wonderful mix of solemn beauty lightened with exuberant silliness, and a really spectacular selection of plant ranging from the familiar to off-the-charts rare.

Enough talk. Onto pictures.

Best. Agaves. Ever.

Spray painted allium seed heads and I WANT THAT FOUNTAIN!

Backlit bamboo in a container

Hardy begonia, B. grandis, catching the rays of a lowering sun

These brilliantly colored chairs were tucked away in a dark, shaded nook, all the better to show off their brilliant, exuberant colors.

A traditional fairy garden...

...and a very UNtraditional fairy garden.

The glorious Impatiens namchabarwensis. Yes, I got seeds.

I love the way she matches furniture paint colors to plants.

I feel like I should know what this is, but I'm drawing a blank. Lovely backlit, in any case.

Again, furniture colors that MAKE a garden room.

Sempervivums in a boot... taken to a marvelous extreme.

Slightly nontraditional containers. She told me she gets them from a place that sells seconds of plastic bones for anatomy classes. I kind of want to get some too.

Call me Joseph Appleseed

WARNING: I just read through this post before putting it up, and though it starts out calm and reasonable, I get increasingly over-excited as it goes on. So brace yourself.

My good friend, Rachel (http://cityscapesandgardengates.blogspot.com/) and I have known each other for 7 years now. And for nearly that long, we've been plotting to go to Geneva NY to visit the grape and apple germplasm center there. I would post a link to the page all about them, but it is a USDA funded project, and so defunded with the current government shutdown. But here is what you need to know: It is housed at Cornell's Agricultural experiment station, and their mission is to collect and preserve as much genetic diversity of apples and grapes as possible. In other words, visiting there is going to see an giant collection of all the possible awesome that apples can do. Aside from being so cool you can hardly stand it, it and the rest of the USDA germplasm system is incredibly important, preserving genetic diversity and making it available to breeders and researchers to create new varieties with better disease resistance or winter hardiness or just generally more awesomeness.

But the BEST thing about the germplasm center there? KAZAKHSTAN!

Um yeah. Let me explain. Apples come from Kazakhstan. Modern cultivated apples are descended from wild apples in Kazakhstan, possibly with a little hybridization with other species thrown in. Okay, so yeah, that is where the wild ancestors of apples live. What's the big deal? Apple FORESTS. Seriously, whole forests of wild apples. http://exhibits.mannlib.cornell.edu/apples/expeditions.htm

To be honest, I don't know logically why that excites me so much, but that concept just blows my mind and makes me very happy. Someday I'll get to Kazakhstan and dance euphorically through the apple forests, but in the mean time: Other people have gone there and collected seed, and planted HUNDREDS of them. In Geneva, NY.

That's right folks. A little slice of a wild Kazakh apple forest growing happily in upstate New York. And I got to walk around in it. And taste the apples. And TAKE SOME HOME!

Be still my beating heart. So crazy excited.

There weren't just Kazakh apples, there was a whole host of them, row upon row upon row of trees wth big fruits and little fruits and pretty ones and ugly ones and delicious ones and ones that tasted so gross you had to give it to someone else to taste too just so you could watch them be grossed out by it.

And I got to TAKE SOME HOME! Aren't they beautiful and amazing?

After I got them home, I spent a few hours extracting the seeds...

Apple forests sitting waiting to grow...

Of course, apples don't come true from seed, each of these seeds will produce something different from the parent tree I picked the fruit off of... which, you know, makes me crazy excited too. (I think I may be overusing the phrase "crazy excited...") The whole plant breeder thing in me... I've got a mix of seeds from all sorts of different apple trees, pollinated by who knows what gorgeous and interesting diversity of an entire germplasm collection... oh what marvels may grow from these seeds!

So, yeah... I'm going to plant all these seeds and grow my own little slice of Kazakhstan.

And if you ever get a chance to visit the germplasm center, DO IT. So much amazing. And that was just the apples! They have grapes too. (Oh. My. God. Grapes!!!)