Category Archives: Essays 2015

Goals for the New Year

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Resolutions too often involve stopping something we enjoy doing, and easily abandoned. Let us instead try positive goals for gardening in 2015.

Good goals for gardeners might involve contributing to the community, sustaining the environment and adopting best practices in our gardens. We might not want to take on all those lofty goals at once, so here is a short list of options.

Volunteer at the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum

The best opportunity to test the waters is to attend the Arboretum’s annual series of free Volunteer Orientation and Training classes, which are held on seven Tuesday mornings, beginning January 13th.

I confess to a personal interest in this suggestion, but the Arboretum stands on its own as a unique resource for the Monterey Bay area and California. The orientation offers a fascinating experience to move behind-the-scenes into the Arboretum’s operation, and, if you decide to volunteer, a rewarding place to help out—in many different ways—during your available hours.

During the orientation sessions, Arboretum staff and volunteers present slide shows and walking tours through the various gardens and collections. The classes also introduce participants to horticulture, gardening, plant conservation, propagation and basic botany.

For information, visit <arboretum.ucsc.edu/> and click on “Read more…”

Succeed with Fruit Trees

The Monterey Bay area is a fine place to grow a wide range of fruit trees, and you can enjoy Nature’s bounty IF you follow basic principles.

A good place to pick up those principles is the Free Fruit Tree Q&A Sessions conducted by Orin Martin, manager of UC Santa Cruz’s Alan Chadwick Garden, and Matthew Sutton, founder and owner of Orchard Keepers (www.orchardkeepers.com). Sessions will be held from 10:00 to 12:00 noon, January 10th at The Garden Company, 2218 Mission Street, Santa Cruz, and January 17th at the San Lorenzo Garden Center, 235 River Street, Santa Cruz.

These sessions will kick off the 2015 series of fruit tree workshops offered by the Friends of the UC Santa Cruz Farm & Garden. For information and to register the workshops, call (831) 459-3240, email casfs@ucsc.edu, or see the Brown Paper Tickets site at http://tinyurl.com/workshops2015.

Graft a Fruit Tree

The Monterey Bay Chapter of the California Rare Fruit Growers will host is annual free exchange of fruit tree scions from 12:00 to 3:00, Sunday, January 11th, at Cabrillo College’s Horticulture Building #5005, Aptos. Several hundred varieties of common, rare and experimental scions (cuttings) from all over the world will be available. There also will be grafting demonstrations, and experts and hobbyists to answer your questions.

Adding different varieties to your fruit trees is an interesting, productive, quick and very inexpensive way to learn about fruit trees and create new edibles in your garden.

For more information, send email to Monterey_bay@crfg.org, or call 831-332-4699.

There are many other creative and productive goals for gardeners. Use this occasion to target your gardening visions during the coming year.

Flat Fruit Trees

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One of the oldest advanced techniques of gardening—and one of my favorites—is espaliering, which involves shaping woody plants into two-dimensional shapes. Now, in bare root season, it’s timely to consider this tree training technique.

Espaliering has been traced back to the walled gardens of Persia, as long ago as 4,000 B.C. It was practiced during the Roman Empire and developed further during the Middle Ages.

There are good reasons for training trees or shrubs into relatively flat shapes. The primary reason in many situations is to garden productively within a limited space. Adding one fruit tree might be possible in a smaller garden, but even trees growing on dwarf rootstock can require a ten by ten area, plus some walking-around space, for cultivation. A gardener could use this tree training technique to grow several different trees in the same 1oo square feet.

Espaliers - Les Quatre Vents

These espaliered apple trees were growing at Les Quatre Vents, a notable private garden near Quebec, Canada. I took this photo in August, 2013

Espaliering is especially useful in narrow spaces along a driveway or sidewalk, or between the house and the property boundary. With an appropriate training plan, the gardener can maintain a row of fruit trees at a height of three or four feet, in a low profile that is both accessible and attractive.

Espaliered Apple Tree

Reader Bob Lippe of Seaside photographed this apple tree near a chateau in the Loire Valley, in France. The tree was being maintained at a height of only two feet.

If you have a space for which you might like to grow an espalier, check first to determine whether sun exposure is sufficient for the plant(s) you would like to install in the space. The most popular plants for espaliers are fruit trees, particularly apples, apricots, cherries and pears. In addition to fruit trees, other plants also can be grown in flat panels, including berries and climbing plants.

All the popular fruit trees—and most fruiting or flowering bushes or vines—require six or more hours of direct sunlight each day. Specific fruit tree varieties will perform better than others in the Monterey Bay area, so it would be prudent to do a bit of research before buying a tree for this purpose, or any other garden use.

Local garden centers usually offer only varieties that are appropriate for the immediate area. One could also seek the advice o the local chapter of the California Rare Fruit Growers < http://www.crfg.org/>.

In addition to making good use of limited space, espaliering has at least two additional benefits. One is to increase a fruit tree’s productivity. Training a tree to a two-dimensional form emphasizes horizontal branching, which maximizes the development of fruiting spurs. In addition, the flat form exposes more of the branches to sunlight and air, which promotes fruiting.

The second additional benefit is the opportunity for creative expression. Over the years, gardeners have developed many patterns for shaping the branches of trees and shrubs: fans, candelabras, and multi-tiered shapes are simplest to manage and most popular.

A special form of espalier, the cordon, is a single-trunked tree that develops spur clusters along its length. In this approach, branching is avoided and the trunk is trained to forty=-five degrees to the horizontal. A variation, the step-over design, brings the trunk to the horizontal, forming a low border.

For advice on growing fruit trees, attend a fruit tree workshop, such as those offered by the Friends of the UC Santa Cruz Farm & Garden: call (831) 459-3240, email casfs@ucsc.edu, or visit the Brown Paper Tickets website at http://tinyurl.com/workshops2015.

For specific information on espaliering, visit a bookstore, public library or Amazon.com for Allen Gilbert’s “Espalier: Beautiful Productive Garden Walls and Fences” (Hyland House, 2009). Any of several other more general books on pruning also would be helpful.

Visit your local garden center now for an early selection of bare root fruit trees.

Hellebores for Winter Color

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One of my favorite plants for this time of the year is the hellebore, which decorates the garden with fascinating blossoms just when the spring bloomers are dormant.

The hellebore thrives and blossoms in partial shade, making it a welcome complement to ferns and other plants that we value only for their foliage.

The genus Helleborus includes about twenty species, the great majority of which are native to the Balkan Peninsula (Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia) or the Mediterranean region. The generic name comes from Greek words for “to injure” and “food,” indicating that ll parts of the plant are poisonous to humans. It also has medicinal uses.

Hellebores typically have dark, shiny evergreen leaves with finely serrated edges. The blossoms have been compared to roses, and some popular names for the plant include “rose,” but the hellebore is not related to the rose.

The most highly regarded and poplar species are Corsican Hellebore (H. argutifolius), Stinking Hellebore (H. foetidus), Christmas Rose (H. niger), Livid Lenten Rose (H. lividus), and the original Lenten Rose (H. orientalis).

A large and growing number of hybrids offer many pleasing blossom colors, color combinations and forms. The hybrid forms in the H. x sternii ‘Blackthorn Group’, which combines H. argutifolius and H. lividus, are particularly valued.

Local nurseries often offer at least a few different hellebores at this time of the year, when they are in bloom. Gardeners looking for particular blossom colors are well advised to buy plants in bloom, as some hybrids will produce unexpected colors.

Hellebores typically have downward-facing blossoms, which encourage some gardeners to plant hellebores in an elevated situation, so the viewer can peer into the blossom. In response to gardeners desire to see the blossom’s interior, hybridizers have developed cultivars with more upward-facing blossoms. Ernie and Marietta O’Bryne, of Northwest Garden Nursery, have developed highly regarded hybrid hellebores, including the Winter Jewels series. Their work was featured in the November/December issue of The American Gardener.

A good retail source of these hybrid hellebores is Plant Delights Nursery, in North Carolina. Browse to www.plantdelights.com and search for “Helleborus.” Other mail order sources for these plants include Gossler Farms Nursery and Joy Creek Nursery, both in Oregon.

Most hellebores grow to about fifteen inches high and wide. A few are in the nine-to-twelve inch high category. My garden includes a large swath of the Corsican Hellebore, the largest species, growing to four feet tall and wide. It is just coming into bloom now, with greenish blossoms.

Corsican Hellebore buds

Corsican Hellebore (click to enlarge)

The Corsican Hellebore is one of just four caulescent species of Helleborus, meaning plants that have leaves on flowering stems. The acaulescent species develop basal leaves, and flower stalks without leaves.

In the late winter or early spring, the Corsican Hellebore’s long-lasting flowers fade and the stems lean to the ground to drop their seeds away from the base of the plant. (I get a lot of seedlings each year!) The gardener’s task at that time is to cut the flowering stems to the ground, to make room for the new growth, which has already begun.

I have been adding additional hellebore cultivars to my garden, and enjoying the smaller varieties and the range of blossom colors they provide.

If you have a partially shaded area in your garden, perhaps under a large tree, and would appreciate seeing interesting blossoms during the late fall and early winter, try a few hellebores.