Category Archives: Spring Quarter

April’s Garden Events

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April 2nd, UC Santa Cruz Arboretum: The Ray Collett Rare & Extraordinary Plants Lecture Series, 7:00 p.m. Fee. UCSC Arboretum, High Street/Empire Grade, Santa Cruz.

Plantsman Rodger Elliott will recount the development of the extraordinary gardens of Australia’s Royal Botanic Gardens Chadbourne. A strong advocate of Australian native plants, Elliot assisted the Arboretum greatly during its early years.

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April 5th, Monterey Bay Dahlia Society: 2014 Annual Dahlia Tuber & Plant Sale, 9:00–11:00. Upper Level, Deer Park Shopping Center, Aptos.

Amateur, advanced amateur and professional growers will offer easy-to-grow dahlias in countless delightful colors and forms. MDBS members will offer advice and cultivation tips.

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April 5, Monterey Bay Master Gardeners, Smart Gardening Fair, 9:00–3:00. Highway 1 at Rio Road, Carmel.

A marketplace of  “all things gardening,” the fair focuses on sustainable practices. Local businesses and community groups offer gardening goods, services, knowledge and passions.

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April 12th, UC Santa Cruz Arboretum: Plant Sale, Members, 10:00–12:00, Everyone, 12:00–4:00. Arboretum’s Eucalyptus Grove, High Street/Empire Grove, Santa Cruz.

Bring home some of the Arboretum’s dazzling colors and most drought-tolerant plants from California, Australia and South Africa. Come to the sale for ideas and advice to replace plants lost during our earlier freeze or replace a lawn with low-maintenance landscaping.

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April 12th, California Native Plant Society, Santa Cruz County Chapter: Plant Sale. Members, 10:00–12:00, Everyone, 12:00–4:00. Location: Arboretum’s Eucalyptus Grove, High Street/Empire Grove, Santa Cruz. (Yes, the CNPS and Arboretum sales collaborate.)

This event is the year’s best opportunity to find California native plants for your garden. CNPS volunteers have propagated these plants lovingly to encourage gardeners to cultivate plants that thrive in this specific environment.

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April 12th–April 20th, California Native Plant Society: Celebration of Fourth Annual California Native Plant Week, 2014. For a statewide activity list, visit the CNPS website.

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April 18th–20th, California Native Plant Society, Monterey Bay Chapter:  Wildflower Show. Fee. Pacific Grove Museum, 165 Forest Avenue, Pacific Grove.

This annual display of hundreds of the Monterey Bay area’s native wildflowers broadens our appreciation for Nature’s bounty of beautiful and highly varied plant life.

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April 19th–20th,, Monterey Bay Area Cactus and Succulent Society: Spring Show & Sale, 9:00–5:00. Community Hall, 10 San Jose Street, San Juan Batista.

An opportunity to see exceptional specimens and purchase fascinating plants for your garden.

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Enjoy your garden!

Spring is Here

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This year’s puzzling weather has produced a few days cold enough to promote dormancy in plants that don’t need a real winter chill, and nowhere near enough rain. We still hope late rains will replenish aquifers and reservoirs, but there’s little promise in the forecasts.

The arrival of spring does not cause abrupt change in our gardens, but it does bring warm weather that takes plants out of dormancy and stimulates new growth. Plants need moisture at this time but water restrictions demand reduction of our water usage. The middle ground for gardeners involves watering plants efficiently and only when they show need by wilting a little. This means drip irrigation if you have it, or moving a hose or watering can from plant to plant. Store your wasteful wide-area sprinkler!

If you have been preparing for drought conditions, you have emphasized summer–dry plants, a category that includes California native plants and other Mediterranean climate plants.

This is not the best year to add summer-dry plants, however: newly installed herbaceous or woody plants need regular watering for two years to establish roots.

A more appropriate strategic response to this drought is to add succulent plants, which have developed ways to minimize transpiration and maximize water retention in their leaves, stems or roots.

When added to a garden or moved within a garden, succulent plants come with their own supply of moisture, and need only minimal watering to settle their roots. They are quite resilient, but of course will need some water in time.

Succulents are far from compromises from an aesthetic perspective: they offer a range of blossom colors and foliage textures as well as low maintenance and drought tolerance. They have in fact become desirable specimens in garden beds or containers, even before our current weather concerns.

Happily, a major sale of succulent plants is less than one month away. The Monterey Bay Area Cactus and Succulent Society will hold its annual, free-admission Spring Show & Sale from 9:00 to 5:00 on April 19th and 20th in the San Juan Batista Community Hall, 10 San Jose Street, not far from the Old San Juan Batista Mission.

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The Society’s show will include members’ selected cacti and succulents, demonstrating plants that are very well grown and shown, and that display an amazing range of shapes, sizes and colors. The sale includes a great selection of mostly small plants grown by members or commercial growers, with reasonable prices. Society members also will be available to offer advice and answer questions.

Respond to this drought creatively: use this occasion to start or expand your collection of succulent plants.

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If you are a beginning gardener of succulent plants, a helpful book is Debra Lee Baldwin’s newest book, Succulents Simplified. Her earlier books, Designing with Succulents and Succulent Container Gardens, are a more advanced, but still accessible for casual gardeners.

succulent books

Visit Debra Lee Baldwin’s website for inspiring photos and practical information.

The Future of Hybridizing

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The future of hybridizing has already begun; we soon will see the transformation of Nature’s ancient methods, and the rapid introduction of amazing new cultivars.

The basic method for creating new varieties of ornamental and edible plants has been practiced by bees and other pollinators for a very, very long time. This approach, called crossbreeding, involves sexual propagation: fertilizing one plant with the pollen of another plant produces seeds that carry the traits of the two plants. When the seeds germinate, the next generation of plants shows combinations of the traits of their two parents.

Plant hybridization has advanced greatly since 1900, when modern genetics began on the basis of Gregor Mendel’s work, but still follows the natural process. Rather than combining plants randomly, like bees, human hybridizers try to combine the traits of two plants to produce hybrid plants that are better than either parent. With ornamental plants, for example, a hybrid’s blossoms might be larger, more attractively colored, more numerous, etc.

This process requires time for seeds to germinate, develop into new plants and reproduce to produce a marketable number of hybrids. Often the majority—or all— of the seedlings do not equal the hybridizer’s vision, and are discarded, so that the process begins again.

Genetic researchers recently have developed ways to hybridize plants faster and with greater control than has been possible with the bees’ method. The new approach uses “genetic marking,” a technique to identify the gene or gene combination that results in a desirable trait in the plant.

The modern hybridizer then crossbreeds plants with desirable traits, grows the resulting seeds, and analyzes the genes in the hybrid to determine if it exhibits the desired trait(s).

A second, related development is the seed chipper, a device that determines if seeds will produce plants with desired traits. This process of “breeding without breeding” greatly speeds conventional hybridization.

Monsanto Company is pioneering the new methods for accelerating and controlling hybridization. These new methods do not involve transferring the genes from one species into another species so they differ from Monsanto’s highly controversial work in genetic engineering.

The new methods have been applied to vegetables: tomatoes, lettuce, peppers, broccoli and onions. Some “super produce” has already appeared in selected markets.

Given the progress of technology, we will see “super ornamentals” in the near future. Today, we can only speculate about how they will look and how they will grow.

New methods, new plants, and new questions!

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Basic “how-to” descriptions of the traditional methods for hybridizing plants are readily available. Search the Internet for “hybridizing plants” or a similar phrase. The methods are really the same for all kinds of plants, but find information for specific plants by searching for “hybridizing roses,” inserting the plant name of interest.

For example, the article, “Try Your Hand at Hybridizing Irises,” appeared in Fine Gardening magazine, and was published originally in William Shear’s book The Gardener’s Iris Book (Taunton Press, 2002).

For more information on the new technology for hybridizing, see Ben Paynter’s article, “Monsanto Is Going Organic in a Quest for the Perfect Veggie,” in Wired Magazine, or “Monsanto’s Technology Platform in Wheat,” on the website of Monsanto Company. More detailed information on this technology is available on the Internet. Search Wikipedia or the Internet generally for “marker-assisted selection” or “molecular breeding.”

Selecting a Landscape Tree

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“The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second-best time is now.”

This is one of many hoary bits of wisdom about gardening. Instead of reviewing more such bits, let’s consider how to select a landscape tree during this year’s dormant period.

The New Sunset Western Garden Book (2012)—always a useful reference—lists four categories of garden trees that not yield edible fruits: patio, shade, flowering and fall foliage.

Patio trees are primarily ornamental, and relatively small and free of troublesome behavior.  Shade trees are larger than patio trees, and typically deciduous. Flowering trees and fall foliage trees also provide shade, but they are selected primarily for their ornamental value.

Landscape trees, depending on size, could be dug as bare root specimens, grown in a plastic container wooden box, or dug and “balled & burlapped.” The larger specimens can be expensive and very heavy to manage, but desirable for achieving an immediate effect in the garden.

Once the gardener has decided on the landscape purpose of the tree and its size at the time of purchase, there are three major criteria for selecting a specific tree.

First, know the tree’s mature size and ensure that it will not outgrow the location you have in mind. The most common error in selecting and planting a tree is to locate it where it eventually will grow to become unwelcome. It might crowd a pathway or driveway, or even the residence. Its might harm other plants by blocking the sunlight with its leaves or absorbing the available moisture with its roots. Choose a tree that will be a good neighbor.

Second, for containerized trees, confirm that the roots have had ample room to grow normally. A tree’s roots should fill no more than 50% of the container; otherwise, the tree could become root-bound, with a long-term threat to its life. I once had a tree service install a large Santa Cruz Cypress (Cupressus abramsiana), an endangered species, only to have it topple months later during a mild windstorm. I discovered that it was severely root-bound, so that its roots could not anchor the tree effectively. Before buying a tree, examine its root structure by pulling the tree from its container.

Thirdly, ensure that the tree’s future location has at least six hours per day of exposure to sunlight, which almost all trees require for health and normal growth. I planted two identical Chilean Myrtle (Luma apiculata) trees, one in full sun, and one too close to an American Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis). Today, the tree growing in the sun is about three times the height of the other tree.

Choose your new landscape tree with care!

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The April 2014 issue of Fine Gardening magazine (already on the newsstands and in libraries!) includes an excellent article on this topic. “How to Buy a Tree” by Ed Gregan presents a most thorough discussion of problems that might be encountered with a nursery tree.

I hasten to add that reputable nurseries and garden centers won’t offer trees with significant shortcomings. The owners and managers of well-run retail garden outlets are good people who respect plants and gardening.

Still, it’s possible for a problem to slip through and you could take home a tree that won’t thrive as you, the original grower and the tree itself would prefer. The most common problem is a tree that has become root-bound, after sitting in the garden center or nursery too long. This condition obviously could develop while the manager was not looking!

Ed Gregan’s article is not available online (except for Fine Gardening subscribers), so I can only list his bullet points (below), but you’ll need to read the article for the full story.

  1. Ensure grant points are smaller than a dime
  2. Walk away if there are wounds
  3. Pull off the pot to assess the roots
  4. Strive for a single straight leader
  5. Check under the trunk protector
  6. Look for signs of trouble
  7. Watch out for “coat hangers”
  8. Avoid poor crotches
  9. Avoid even numbers for multistems
  10. If the flare is too high or too low, the tree is a no
  11. Give the ball a thorough inspection
  12. Check for even spacing with clumps