Plant Talk

Renowned Japanese Pruning Artist Giving a Benefit Demonstration on Whidbey

In what may be the gardening event of the season, a master Japanese pruner is giving a demonstration in a beautiful island pond garden.

You're invited to help support the Northwest Language Academy whlle spending the morning learning how to expertly prune trees.

Here's the details:  Japanese Horticulture Workshop with Masa Mizuno on May 11, 2013, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., with an authentic Japanese lunch to follow, all in the waterfront garden of Norm and Danielle Bodine, on the south end of the island. The event includes not just a pruning demonstration by Masa Mizuno, but also a question and answer session, and tours of the Bodine gardens and pond.

As Director of the celebrated Portland Japanese Gardens, Osaka native Masa Mizuno has installed public and private Japanese gardens around the world. With his assistant Mark Akai, Mizuno-san has designed and maintained several remarkable Japanese Pond Gardens on Whidbey Island. This will be a unique opportunity to view one of these, in its maturity, and to meet and talk with these masters of Japanese Gardening.

The price of $75 includes workshop, luncheon and instructional DVD. All proceeds benefit the NWLA scholarship fund.

To reserve your place, call the Northwest Language Academy at 360-321-2101 or email mailto:info@nwlanguageacademy.com

This Saturday Learn Pruning From a Master in a Japanese-Inspired Garden on Whidbey Island

For a one-of-a-kind horticultural event in an inspiring setting, consider spending this coming Saturday on Whidbey Island to learn about pruning from a master.

Osaka native Masa Mizuno has designed and installed public and private Japanese gardens around the world; he's best known in the Northwest as the former landscape director of the Japanese Garden in Portland. On Saturday, April 30th, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., he'll demonstrate Japanese pruning techniques, answer questions, and lead a tour of the Bodine Japanese Gardens in Clinton at the south end of Whidbey Island. All this garden activity will be capped off by an authentic Japanese luncheon in this beautiful waterfront house and garden....cost is $75.00 to benefit the Northwest Language Academy's scholarship fund.

Mizuno has worked on the Bodine garden for years, and this is a chance to see his work at a residential scale. Stroll the paths past mature trees and mossy boulders, cross bridges over ponds and a stream while admiring the view of salt water and mountains from this private garden high on a bluff above the sea. And the Bodine's are wonderful and enthusiastic hosts... how many horticultural events are this unique, let alone delicious?

Reserve your place ... Call 360-321-2101, or email info@nwlanguageacademy.com. And while you're on Whidbey Island, check out the fabulous Cultus Bay Nursery which is close to the Bodine garden, the Bayview Farmer's Market opening April 30 for the season, neighboring Bayview Farm and Garden with its exciting new greenhouses, and Chocolate Flower Farm for a fun selection of dark-toned plants.

The Bodine Japanese Gardens at the height of spring - look how elegantly pruned that cherry tree is....

 

Rose Relief - A Convergence of Experts Teach Care and Cutting

"God gave us memory so  that we might have roses  in December," wrote J.M Barrie, author of Peter Pan. Such sentimental words sum up how passionate gardeners are about roses, despite what a headache they can be. Now is the time for planting and pruning roses. I have absolutely no words of wisdom; I've succumbed to their charms in the past, but now I  grow only the pewter-foliaged species Rosa glauca and the bullet-proof R.'Westerland'. I long for a blowsy 'Sally Holmes' and a multi-colored, butterfly-like R. mutabilis, and a few of the new David Austin English roses, like the gorgeous new 'Port Sunlight' at left. ...Just the thought of such fragrant, ruffled roses is insidious...

But help is at hand. The president of the American Rose Society is coming to Molbaks to tell us how to grow roses in our climate. On February 20, from 1-2 p.m., Jeff Wyckoff will give a free talk on "Growing Great Roses in the NW". Both days of the weekend (Feb. 19 & Feb 20, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.)  fanciers from the Seattle Rose Society will be available to answer questions. Bet you won't leave without one of the 120 rose varieties Molbaks has on sale this spring..for more info see www.molbaks.com/events.

Pruning is vital for rose health and looks, and on Saturday March 5, noon to 3 p.m., the Seattle Rose Society is offering demos at the Woodland Park Zoo Rose Garden where there's no shortage of roses to practice on. Come learn where to cut and how much to cut, and hear about how the zoo's roses are cared for naturally (no small feat in a display and test garden). For more information, call the zoo's senior rose gardener at 206-548-2635, or www.zoo.org. Admission is free, the demonstration is free, they're even serving light refreshments in this beautiful setting...well, it won't look quite like this in winter, but you get the idea...

 

Pruning Columns Controversy - Is Topiary Folk Art or Plant Torture?

The pruning kerfluffle started with a "Plant Life" column I wrote for Pacific Northwest magazine about the concentration of fantastical topiary on Beacon Hill. Joel Lee, art-maven, non-gardener, and blogger at BeHi Bonsai, sees the topiary as cool, neighborhood-centric and a fresh expression of folk art.

Much as I enjoyed the fun Beacon Hill urban safari Joel took me on, and as impressed as I am by his enthusiasm for shrubs sheared into weird shapes, last Sunday I felt the need to run a rebuttal column, quoting Cass Turnbull of PlantAmnesty about her despair over all the shrub shearing going on in Seattle these days.

Joel's response to Cass's words? He threw down the challenge of a slightly incendiery blog post, as well as designing the T-shirt logo above. I love working with such creative people!

So check out PlantAmnesty's shear madness campaign to promote better pruning vs. Behi Bonsai's January 9th post wondering why PlantAmnesty gets to decide aesthetics...

 

We Can Do Better

"We're not the fashion police, but people need to know that shearing everthing in sight is considered bad taste," exclaimed Cass Turnbull recently over tea at Swansons Nursery. I was interviewing Cass for a story on PlantAmnesty's Shear Madness campaign.  Cass points out that such non-discriminating, all-over pruning creates an ugly maintenance nightmare of watersprouts and die back...but that story will run in Pacific Northwest magazine in the Seattle Times in January.

In the meantime, in the hopes of inspiring gardeners into pruning to enhance, rather than destroy, the natural shape of their trees and shrubs, Plant Amnesty is sharing some of their horrifying photos with Plant Talk....

In the spirit of city beautification, if you'd like to call out any such pruning atrocities around your neighborhood, send me a photo at valeaston@comcast.net, and I'll post it here and send it along to Cass....thanks....

Just think... "Leschi Lollipops" and "Yikes we're Naked!" used to be living, growing, beautiful plants, before they were mal-pruned into distressed objects....

 

Off With Their Heads

Euphorbia, that is. Why do I keep seeing gorgeous, thick clumps of chartreuse-blooming spurge all over the place, while the clump in my garden is....well...gangly would be the kindest way to describe it.

I've never quite known how to prune these beauties, and each type has different requirements. Lower growing clumps can just be sheared down after blooming, or if they get mildewed. But how to deal with the willowy show-stopper Euphorbia characias ssp. wulfenii?

 My favorite all-time pruning book, The American Horticultural Society Pruning and Training, by Christopher Brickell (DK Publishing) to the rescue...Turns out that wulfenii stems are biennial, meaning that they develop in one year and flower the next. Here's my mistake - the stems should never be shortened; in midsummer, after the chartreuse flower domes have finished blooming, simply cut down spent stems to speed up the plant's natural cycle of renewal. Each bloomed-out stem should be cut  down to the base of the plant. This won't look as bad as it sounds, because you should leave in place all the stems that haven't yet bloomed. And don't worry, this is a vigorous plant that will regenerate quickly. 

So as soon as the flowers on this lanky wulfenii in my Whidbey garden fade, I'll cut it back to the ground. Remember, ALWAYS wear gloves when pruning any euphorbia, because the stems bleed an irritating, milky substance that can cause a nasty rash. 

 

Yes We Can

As long as we don't get overzealous and clear away all the dead parts protecting plants from future freezes, we can get out there and make the most of this amazingly mild spell of weather. January is on the way to being the warmest on record, with soul-strengthening glimpses of sunshine.

Don't get carried away by those daffodils and precocious crocus pushing up so bravely out of the soil...it's still too wet to tramp around in the dirt and many plants, like hydrangeas, roses and hardy fuchsias are best left alone until mid-March....

But go ahead, clean up your pruners and indulge your garden lust. These chores are best done in the depths of winter, even though it doesn't feel like it out there:

Prune out winter damage and thin out the oldest, largest canes on woody shrubs like forsythia (above), flowering quince, mock orange, and plums. But don't toss the clippings...cut them to a reasonable length for a tall vase, bring them in and submerge the entire branch in lukewarm water for a few hours to jolt it out of dormancy. Then put the bare branches in warm water in a vase to force them to flower indoors for a lovely burst of springtime.

Kiwis, grapes and figs are best pruned when they're fully dormant, so now's the time. Thin out 1/4 to 1/3 of the oldest canes on your blueberries. You can also prune apple, elderberries, gooseberries, white currant and European pears. According to the folks at Raintree Nursery (and they should know) it's best to wait to prune Asian pears until at least April. 

Flowering quince

High Summer Immersion..or...The Edge of Abandon

Tending the garden in high summer is a balancing act. I adore it when the garden fills out so fully, grows so tall, that to step outside is to be immersed in flower, foliage and fragrance. Any garden that is so tamed, so well groomed that it doesn't grow blowsy by now misses summer's sensuousness. My garden's  borders are blurred, bees buzz everywhere, hummingbirds blitz through, and I'm in heaven.

And yet, when you let your garden go to this point of near-abandon, all of a sudden it's too much. I find huge squashes hidden between the leaves, fava beans overgrown and leathery, plants crowding out and shading their neighbors. You know how your hair looks best right before all of a sudden it looks horrid, and you realize you're badly overdue for a cut? That's your garden teetering on the edge of overblown.....

Besides all the watering, high season gardening is a constant tinkering, clipping, harvesting, cutting back and filling in. It's a matter of clipping enough to keep plants producing and upright. But not so much they aren't still luscious enough to submerge you in summer glory.

Here are a couple of photos taken in my garden this morning, when a lovely marine layer blew in to  cool the air and soften the light:

Orienpet lilies on the right, sweet peas and orange dahlias to the left. The striped grass is dwarf Miscanthus sinensis 'Zebrina'. The little blue flower in front is borage, and it's edible. The lower photo is the same scene framed by the dark foliage of a chocolate silk tree (Albizia julibrissin 'Summer Chocolate')

 

It's Time to Prune Your Pines

Pruning can be the most confusing of gardening tasks, but not when it comes to pine trees. See those tall, thin candles on the pine above? Control the size of your tree by snapping off a proportionate amount of candle every May. Now's the time.

Candle pruning is such an easy and efficient technique, and you don't even need to use clippers. If you want to limit your pine tree's growth, simply snap or snip the candles off at the base. If you want to make it bushier and keep it from growing too much, pinch the candles in half. If there's room for your pine to grow quite a bit taller, simply leave the candles alone this year, or snap off the tips to help the tree bush out a little. That's it. I've kept the pine tree in the photo  - I think it's a Vanderwolf's pine - in a pot for years by pinching off at least two-thirds of each candle every year. As you can see in the photo, I haven't quite gotten to the task yet this year - maybe tomorrow.....

Sun Drunk

A gardening friend asked if you could get drunk on the sun? It sure feels like it the last couple of days, when the temperatures soared to over 70 degrees. What a fine  excuse for a gardening marathon, the first hard-core stint of the year.

Here's my springtime sequence of tasks, which I try to do in order, but always get pulled off track , usually by a transplanting chore. With interruptions for nursery runs or writing down ideas and plans, here's the drill:

First I clean up, cut back, and do the early pruning, like roses, clematis, hydrangeas and evergreen ferns. I cut back woody heucheras to just a little stub, tidy up leaves, evergreen grasses, and this year, unfortunately, dug up a number of corpses of dead plants, like lorapetalum and hebes, lost in the big December freeze.

Next I work on the soil, adding more to raised beds with "shrinkage" over the winter, piling compost on all the beds, and scratching in a balanced, organic fertilizer around heavy feeders like hosta, clematis, hydrangeas, roses, sweet peas. Water thoroughly.

I check all the drip hoses in the raised beds, and replace or re-route soaker hoses if need be. This must be my least favorite chore of the year...

Now is the time to transplant anything that needs more space or a different situation. It's also time to divide overgrown or congested perennials, like crocosmia. I dug up all my strawberries this year, dividing up the mother plant, re-planting the more mature babies.

Plant! Seeds, starts, fresh baby perennials - over the last couple of days I've planted a trio of Helenium 'Mardi Gras' (above) a few 'Carmen' oriental poppies (below), rows of lettuces, broccoli, cauliflower. Artichokes, sedum, swathes of coppery little carexes..and I haven't gotten to containers, yet, or trimming out any of the beds, annuals or any warm-weather vegetables, but I'm trying to remember to leave space for sunflowers, nasturtiums, pumpkins, carrots, and beans....let alone dahlias!

Water, and add a top dressing of rich, dark well-composted manure mulch so the plants are well fed and the beds look tidy and fresh.....                                                                                          

 

Enjoy the look of bare soil between plants, because it won't last long....