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"Conversations with Alaska Gardeners" is your gateway to exploring the vibrant world of gardening in Juneau, Alaska, where the wilderness of towering mountains and the vast blue sea meet. This podcast series brings to life the unique challenges and unmatched rewards of gardening in the rugged yet beautiful terrain of The Last Frontier. Join us as we celebrate the passion and resilience of Juneau's gardening community, sharing insights, tips, and stories from those who thrive amidst the challenges of Alaskan gardening.
Conversations with Alaskan Gardeners is your gateway to exploring the vibrant world of gardening here in Juneau. Join us as we celebrate the passion and resilience of Juneau's gardening community, sharing insights, tips, and stories from the experts. Here's Margaret Tharp and David Lindrum of Landscape Alaska on
Speaker 2:Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. This is Conversations with Alaskan Gardeners. This is David Lender from Landscape Alaska.
Speaker 2:What a beautiful gardening morning it is. It makes you just wanna get out there and roll around in it. I have had such a marvelous couple of weeks here. It's a the change of the season, the end of the springtime gardening, and the beginning of the summertime gardening. Even though it's been so cold, so incredibly cold, and the ground's still cold, you can see the plant life starting to come alive.
Speaker 2:Things are moving along, and I know that we're a month behind where we were last year. I know that I look back at the photos that I took this last week. I mean, that a year ago this last week, and, boy, the change is something else. Things that were in full flower a year ago are only barely leafing out now. The hydrangeas are finally beginning to grow.
Speaker 2:The miss Kim lilac is butted up and ready to bloom. And last year at this time, they were already done. It was already gone. But you know, you just gotta roll with the flow. Phones are working today at KINY, at (907) 586-1800.
Speaker 2:Get you on the air and into the studio with us with questions, answers, invitations, observations, all those things. And please don't hesitate. Give us a call, and we'll talk to you on the air. So we have a big sale at Landscape Alaska this weekend, and we're offering 15% off on all the rhododendrons that we have. And we've got a lot of them, and they're in great shape.
Speaker 2:They look absolutely beautiful. They have they've already flowered for this year because they came in from down south, but you can see them in their in their majestic plant glory. They look grand. And also climbing hydrangeas. The climbing hydrangea is one of the the, hardiest vines we have for Southeast Alaska, and it grows right on up the trunk of a spruce tree.
Speaker 2:Hey, Jason. Did you open the back door? Okay. So, please come out and see me. We'll be open at 10:00 and open until 04:00 this afternoon, and the climbing hydrangeas just look grand.
Speaker 2:One of the nice things about them is that when it's the wintertime or the fall time and they drop their leaves, they show this incredibly beautiful architecture. They've got kinky branches that have brown bark that kind of peels away and shows the cinnamon color of the underbark, and they're, an ideal ideal vine. Don't plant them on your house, but you can plant them on a on a trellis or a spruce tree or, let them climb a chain link fence, they'll climb almost anything. They've got these, little aerial roots that dig into stuff and pull themselves right on up. Good morning, Con.
Speaker 2:Nice to see you.
Speaker 3:Hey, dad. Good to see you too.
Speaker 2:Okay. So Margaret's out on the job today. She's got her crew, and they're out mowing, but but Conner was generous enough to come and join me on the air. That's a generous guy. You're a very generous guy.
Speaker 2:So the rhododendrons have a cousin called a deciduous azalea. And this is a as you can hear tell by the name, it's a plant that loses its leaves in the wintertime, but it is an absolutely spectacular blooming plant. And they get, oh, five feet tall perhaps. The ones we have are about three and a half to four feet now, and they look they look grand. They also have finished flowering for this season, but they look they're putting their leaves on now gloriously, and they have one of the most beautiful fall colors of anything that we have in the nursery.
Speaker 3:Is the azalea?
Speaker 2:The azalea. And and we're looking forward to seeing them.
Speaker 3:Is this a particular kind of azaleas or just all the azaleas?
Speaker 2:The deciduous azaleas. So there's the rhododendron family is huge. Huge. Absolutely huge. And and they're everywhere.
Speaker 2:We have native rhododendrons here. If you go up Montana Creek Road and go past the archery range, they're growing on both sides of the road there, and they're probably even in bloom right now.
Speaker 3:And correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Labrador tea?
Speaker 2:Labrador tea is a is a rhododendron also. Yeah. Anyway, they fit into almost every environment, every climate, but the ones that we are all looking for are the ones that'll take our climates. And so that's gonna be the pretty hardiest ones.
Speaker 3:Yep. We like them tough around here.
Speaker 2:We like them tough. And one of the very toughest kinds of rhododendrons is the Yacusimena variety, and that comes from most rhododendrons come from forested environments.
Speaker 3:And have you already told people that they're on sale this weekend at landscape?
Speaker 2:I have mentioned it once. Okay.
Speaker 3:50% off.
Speaker 2:Okay. And perhaps we'll say it again before the morning's over. Anyway, most rhododendrons evolve in kind of a forested environment. These evolve on an isolated spit sticking out of Northern Japan out into the cold frigid ocean, and they are right in track of all those winter storms that beat down on them, and and the has evolved in that environment, and they think this is cushy. They didn't get any winter damage last winter.
Speaker 3:Listen. I mean, I feel the same way. People complain about the rain and the cold. I'm like, what are you talking about? Juno's perfect.
Speaker 3:Juno's so comfortable. It's so nice.
Speaker 2:Wearing your shorts and boots out in the rain.
Speaker 3:Don't know. Much as possible, man.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Well, good for you. You're definitely a natural born son, son of the son of the of the rainforest.
Speaker 3:There was another thing that we have. I've been picking up a few more hours at the greenhouse. If anyone wants to come say hi to me, I'm there Friday and Saturday for the at least through July, if not more. And so, you know, come on by. Talk to me too.
Speaker 3:But we got something that was surprising me. We have some new honeysuckles. Right?
Speaker 2:Yes. They're pretty cool looking. They're pretty cool looking.
Speaker 3:Then we've got two. We've got one that's a vine, and we got one that's a shrub.
Speaker 2:The shrub is really fascinating to me. Yeah? Yeah. I saw them first at the nursery show last year, and the color combination just took me right away.
Speaker 3:Now is it the color combination of the leaves and the flowers, or is it, like, just the flower combinations on its own?
Speaker 2:It's really the the color combination of the leaves. It's in full bloom right now, but you don't even really notice it. It's got got these little yellow flowers on the ends of the new growth. I haven't been down to try and smell them, see if they smell like honeysuckle. I'll do that today.
Speaker 2:But but the green body and the red new shoots on them are just so striking, and they're gonna fit right into the low maintenance landscape scheme. Low maintenance landscape scheme is not leave any dirt exposed. Got it. Plant shrubbery. Right.
Speaker 2:Plant it as much as as you can, plant it as solidly as you can, and then once a year prune it.
Speaker 3:So it's really more about, like, interesting leaves and interesting shapes. Sort of like, you know, if if you're getting your what what's a lime spindrea. It's like if you're getting spireas. Like, you're getting those like, the flowers of spireas are cool, but mostly, you're getting them for, like, their interesting leaves that have so many different colors that go through in a life, in a year, and then have such, a pronounced shape to them. And once again, the flowers are cool, but it really brings so much more to the visual, like, show.
Speaker 2:It sure does. And, also, one of as a as a kind of utilitarian effect, one of the things I like best about these particular spireas is they're easy. Yeah. They're really, really easy. You know?
Speaker 2:You plant them, and they're there. And and these new ones are sterile, so they don't throw seed. And one of the the disadvantages to the older forms of spirea is that you get little spireas everywhere. You know? And while some people may think that's a great thing, personally, I hate to see those plants spread like that.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 2:You know? Put them where they where I want them. That's fine. Let them spread around, and all they become is weeds at that point, and I wanna pull them out.
Speaker 3:Yeah. The only thing
Speaker 2:that makes don't have that.
Speaker 3:So The only thing that makes a plant a weed is whether you want it or not.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 3:I was walking my dog at 05:00 this morning. He's getting older, and he wakes me up earlier and earlier every day. And I was walking in the Capitol Park behind the Capitol, you know, the new one. Well, I mean, it's been there for a while where they redid it. It's got like the turf and everything, but they have these long planner beds that have been there for a really long time.
Speaker 3:And there, I was really sort of noticing for the first time, which tells you about my powers of observation, that there are spireas in that bed that are taller than I am. They're like eight or nine feet tall, and they're like seven or eight feet wide.
Speaker 2:Another big archy kind like that?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like they have a like they're multi stemmed, you know, like all the spireas, like so, like, you know, dozens and dozens of stems, but they do sort of look like they're almost a mushroom cloud. Like, they sort of, like, do bend out from the bottom reaching out and then have kind of a domed top, and they're so wide and lush and huge, and I just had never noticed. I don't think I've ever seen a spirea so big.
Speaker 2:And then That particular kind of spirea is called snow mound, and it it is huge.
Speaker 3:It's huge.
Speaker 2:I saw one in Sitka a couple years ago when I was down there. It had to be 10 feet tall. Wow. And the trunks that came out of the ground, it had been planted there for years and years and years and years.
Speaker 3:Oh, you saw it getting torn up?
Speaker 2:No. They asked me how they could manage it. Oh. You know, the the people at search hired me to come down and look through their landscape and give them a guidance to how to how to manage this stuff. And in that particular case, I told them to take a chainsaw to it and cut it off at the ground.
Speaker 2:Oh.
Speaker 3:Because it'll grow back. It's 10 feet tall.
Speaker 2:I know. That's what it was. It was too too large for the area. They were having they they couldn't they couldn't manage it.
Speaker 3:Sure. But it's I feel so sad. I I remember Cordova, one of our salespeople was talking to you yesterday about, like, cutting things back, and she was like, it hurts to cut this back as far as you say I'm supposed to. And you're like, I know, but it's the right thing to do.
Speaker 2:It is. And there you were cutting it back too. That's right.
Speaker 3:Apparently, I wasn't doing it right, though. Reminder to our listeners, this is a call in show. Right, dad?
Speaker 2:That's right. Call in show (907) 586-1800. Yeah. You can also text to that number.
Speaker 3:It's true. But we'd love to hear your voice on this early rainy Saturday morning. Come tell us about, like, the biggest plant in your yard or the wildest spirae you've ever seen or the most far flung rhododendron you've seen in your worldly travels. I went and I eloped in Ireland three years ago, and there were wild rhododendron everywhere. I went to a national park and I just walking around.
Speaker 3:I was just like, heck. I'm surrounded by rhododendrons. Every plant I'm looking at is a rhododendron. They were Rhododendron not forests. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And they weren't blooming, unfortunately. We're there a little too early for that, but they were gorgeous.
Speaker 2:My sister lived in Nepal for a while, and she said the rhododendron forests there were absolutely huge. Woah. Really, really huge. And you couldn't see that the you'd walk around in the forest, but you couldn't see any of the flowers because they were 50 feet in the air. I bet you could look across the valley to the other side of the mountain and see the rhododendrons blooming over there, but where you were, it was just like you're walking around in a big forest.
Speaker 2:All you could see is the trunks. Cool. Really cool. So rhododendrons also have some pests. No.
Speaker 2:And, one of the the pests that is the most dramatic is called a rhododendron root weevil. Eek. I don't know. What a name, isn't it? Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's a big black beetle. It's maybe an inch and a quarter, inch and
Speaker 3:a half long. That's my dramatic reaction to this dramatic insect.
Speaker 2:And they feed at night, so you don't see them hardly ever, but you see the the marks of them, and they they have a particularly distinctive mark. They take a nibble out of the edge of the leaf. If you're interested in it and you wanna see that, look at my Facebook posts in the last few days because I've shown pictures of the leaves like that. And the they look like like a ticket that's had a punch taken out of the edge of it, you know, and they're a pretty pretty effective eater, but that's not really the damage that's done. If you can see that damage being done, it means that the larvae of the insect is down in the dirt eating the roots of the rhododendron.
Speaker 2:So there's nothing you can get to with it, no kind of treatment you can get to it, but but there is a naturally occurring nematode that goes after those larvae. And you can mix it in water and pour it around the roots, and they get down in there in the dirt, they hunt down the larvae of them and kill them and eat them.
Speaker 3:Some people have guard dogs. Some people have guard nematodes.
Speaker 2:There you go. And and we've treated all the rhododendrons in our nursery with this nematode.
Speaker 3:It's
Speaker 2:true. And if you need any nematodes to treat your own rhododendrons, get in touch with us.
Speaker 3:And they're really easy to use. I was one of the two people treating them yesterday, and you take a scoop of this really soft, almost styrofoam like material that is a whole bunch of larvae, and you put it into a jar, you fill it up with water, you shake it, and then you just pour that jar of water and nematode larvae on the top of the root mass of your rhododendron, and they take care of it from there.
Speaker 2:And they take care of it from there. And it's a naturally occurring nematode, just not in the concentrations that we really want. Got it. They're wild here. You know?
Speaker 2:If you dig up the dirt and if you're a soil scientist or a microbiologist Mhmm. You could identify them and say, oh, there they are, but not in the the concentration that we want to treat these pests.
Speaker 3:That's really good to know. I was gonna ask you about that. That's excellent because there's so many horror stories about, like, trying to deal with different pests by introducing other pests and it's going so badly. So it's nice to know they live here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They do. And, we love it. We love it that it works. We treated all the rhododendrons at the Park Shore condominium project.
Speaker 2:They they had a pretty bad infestation there. And it took about three years to get them under control, but they're gone. Cool. Uh-huh. It looks it look you you can't tell.
Speaker 2:You know, you can't tell they were ever there. Awesome. Rhododendrons are evergreen, but that doesn't mean that the leaves are perpetual. Right. They only stay on the plant about three years.
Speaker 3:That's still such a long time. That's crazy. Three years? Yeah. I mean, to think of a leaf, you know, when you think of leaves, you don't think of a leaf staying on something for three years.
Speaker 3:It's just cool.
Speaker 2:Well, the same thing is kinda true with pine trees. When you look at a pine tree, you know, you see it's evergreen. It's got the big foliage all around the outside, and then you look at it for a minute and you see that the interior of it, there's no needles at all. It's just bare branches going out to the outer edge of it. And the same thing is true with pines.
Speaker 2:They only keep their needles, like, two or three years depending on which variety. And that's one of the reasons why there's always that pine needle litter around pine trees. As you know, it's a naturally occurring process. Right. Grow new ones, shed the old ones.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I guess I just thought it happened more frequently than that.
Speaker 2:Well, I know that Sitka spruce is one of the very few of the conifers that if you cut the branches off, it'll start growing new foliage out of the bare trunks.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. I've seen that. It's really crazy.
Speaker 2:It's really it's it's very rare in the conifer world, but it's pretty exciting.
Speaker 3:Imagine if that happens to you, like, you get your hand cut off and you start growing fingers all over your arm.
Speaker 2:Okay. I'll imagine that. That's sort of a strange analogy, but I can imagine that. Alright. So, what's coming this next week?
Speaker 2:So so, you know, gardens in Juneau are springtime gardens. You know, all the color happens early, and then it's kind of about the July 4. It starts fading away, and and the the midsummer crop comes on. And midsummer perennials and midsummer flowering plants, you know, they're gonna operate from now until the autumn comes, and this is their glory time. And there's not as many of them in our our regular gardens around here as we would wish for.
Speaker 2:But the hydrangea hydrangea really fills a lot of that gap. They're just about to start blooming now, and, they're gonna have flowers on them all the way until it freezes. And the flowers change color. Mhmm. They start off pale green and they ripen through pink to dark red, and the foliage turns to burgundy color.
Speaker 2:They're really a great midsummer to autumn flowering shrub.
Speaker 3:Do all hydrangeas do that?
Speaker 2:No. This particular series, this they call them paniculite for the flower form. Right. Like, a lilac is a paniculite flower. It has a long stem with a bunch of little flowers coming off it.
Speaker 3:It's a pinnacle.
Speaker 2:Like, it comes
Speaker 3:to like, it's a point. So it's sort of like this cone of smaller flowers.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right. Exactly. That's what they are.
Speaker 4:David Connard, about this time last year, you were telling people by the July 4, they needed to fertilize something. I don't remember what plan it was.
Speaker 2:Thank you for reminding me. That's really true. My friends that are rhododendron farmers, that's their phrase. You gotta fertilize the rhododendron before the July 4 for flowers the following season. And so what's happening
Speaker 3:It's not very catchy.
Speaker 2:Well, maybe we can get Jason to make a jingle.
Speaker 3:There we go.
Speaker 2:Feed your roadies
Speaker 4:by the by the July 4 or they'll die, something like that.
Speaker 2:Something like that.
Speaker 3:That's Or
Speaker 2:or the flowers will go by
Speaker 3:by a great first draft.
Speaker 2:Maybe the flowers will go by by. Yep. That's thanks for reminding me that.
Speaker 4:Do we have fireflies?
Speaker 2:I've never seen a firefly here.
Speaker 4:Okay. Do we have any jumping worms? Jumping worms. Asian jumping worms. Sorry.
Speaker 4:I just watched the show last night, and I was talking about the death of fireflies in The US and that these Asian jumping worms are replacing night crawlers and getting rid of all the leaf fallout and getting rid of all the ground and turning it into nonporous. Anyway, just didn't know if that had hit here yet.
Speaker 3:I heard about this one.
Speaker 2:I think we got pretty porous ground, you know, where the where the forest is anyway, where it's been scraped away.
Speaker 3:I'm gonna have to look up these jumping worms when I get out of here because now I've not heard of that.
Speaker 2:What a thought, though. Camping worms. One thing I did realize a few years ago when I was working with the water conservation group that earthworms aren't native here.
Speaker 3:All of Blows my are mind.
Speaker 2:What? Blows my mind. It does, doesn't it? Yeah. That the glaciation wiped them all away whatever there had been, and any that are here now have been brought in and then bred and spread.
Speaker 2:European. And and, also, there are in North America, there are native ones, but not here in Alaska. And in the Upper Peninsula, there is a a zone, Upper Peninsula Of Michigan. There's a zone there where the the worms have gotten that far, and they haven't gotten any further north yet. It moves, and you can see the change in the forest floor.
Speaker 2:Oh. Where worms are there, there's less litter because they eat it
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 2:And pull it down into the ground. And where they're not there, there's a lot more litter under the trees. It's very interesting.
Speaker 3:Very interesting. Cool. I wanna visit the worm line.
Speaker 2:Okay. Kinda like like what they're building out
Speaker 3:there by the river, that big dike. So we're we're getting near the end of the show. What are our hours at Lansing Of Alaska right now this summer?
Speaker 2:Open at 10:00. On Sunday, open at noon. Close at 04:00 unless there's a bunch of people around, and then we'll close later. There we go. Have to.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Have to. If you have visited us before, we are on the Backloop Road right next to Goat Hill. 11029 is the address.
Speaker 2:And our our mailbox is painted to look like rhododendron flowers.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. Big shout out to Nami Horn for giving us that wonderful gift and having it commissioned to be painted by MK McNaughton, some wonderful local phrase And
Speaker 2:and I she didn't sign it. Well, luckily, it
Speaker 3:still exists.
Speaker 2:I'll have to have her come out and sign it for me. Great idea. Yes.
Speaker 3:You can give her a
Speaker 2:you can
Speaker 3:give her a rhododendron.
Speaker 2:Big sale today. Lots of perennials coming next week. Mhmm. You know, the midsummer perennials, and that'll be things like bleeding hearts and asters and bee balm. Love bee balm.
Speaker 2:Midsummer color. Yeah. Love bee balm. What an aroma.
Speaker 3:So cool. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's a mint family.
Speaker 3:It is. It grows like crazy. I just I love the tiered flower. It's very doctor Seuss. It's like you've got, like, a stem and then a big ball of flowers, then out of the middle of the big ball of flowers, another stem grows up, and then you got another big ball of flowers.
Speaker 3:It's just like these pom poms growing into pom poms going
Speaker 2:into pom poms. Astounding.
Speaker 3:It's very in my mind. In that's another great word. Yeah. I like that. Thanks.
Speaker 2:So and you're right. They they are very, very unusual, and and people make tea out of it. You know, make a really aromatic and healthy kind of tea.
Speaker 3:Out of the leaves, I presume?
Speaker 2:Leaves and stems. Yeah. Have you had it? Yes. Is it good?
Speaker 2:And not only that, I've even just eaten the leaves because they're it's in the mint family. Right. So they're real flavorful. Sure. But it's a different taste than the than, like, peppermint or spearmint.
Speaker 3:Sure. I mean, that's interesting. I'll try that. I'll give it to do we have any right now?
Speaker 2:Do you
Speaker 3:have any bee balm?
Speaker 2:Sold them all, but but we have them coming Tuesday or so. Great.
Speaker 3:And, also, as a reminder to anyone listening outside of town, we have a website, and we do ship. So if you are interested in having any of this bee balm or honeysuckle or rhododendron or climbing hydrangea over in Sitka or Ketchikan or Hanes or Gustavus or anywhere else, go to our website or give us a call. Shoot us an email, and we can package them up and get this sent over to you on seaplanes.
Speaker 2:Reminds me, I've got something for you to send us Sitka this week.
Speaker 3:Too bad.
Speaker 2:Oh,
Speaker 3:yeah. Forget it.
Speaker 2:Oh, well. So, yeah, I like having stuff be able to go out of town too, and I I enjoy the fact that that we can share we can share these things to people that don't have access to some of them. Yeah. Boy, if I I was walking through the nursery this morning, and there were so many birds. So very many birds.
Speaker 2:I bet I bet I saw 60 birds just as I was walking from the house to the truck, and they were on the ground and in the trees and in the and running and flying and shooting around. It was it was inspirational. You know? I I know that the bears and the deer are what we really think about when we think of wildlife, but, you know, it's really the birds for me. The bird.
Speaker 2:I just love them. Yeah. I it And they don't knock the garbage cans over.
Speaker 3:And they don't knock the garbage cans over. They are really special. It's really nice. And, like, being in Landscape Alaska at 5AM is a really special place to be. It's really, really wonderful.
Speaker 2:So I have these these weeping larch trees that died in the winter two years ago, and it broke my heart for them to die. I just haven't had the heart to cut them down. Margaret and I were talking about it yesterday. She said the hummingbirds are nesting inside the corpses of those large trees. That's so beautiful.
Speaker 2:Little tiny hummingbird nests.
Speaker 3:We are so lucky to have hummingbirds. My friend used to run an Airbnb here, and some Europeans came and stayed in it, and she said that they came out and that they were absolutely losing their minds looking at some hummingbirds flying around. Like, they were actively weeping looking at them and that that was the moment that they realized that hummingbirds only live in The Americas.
Speaker 2:I have no idea about that.
Speaker 3:There's no hummingbirds in Asia or Europe or Africa or Australia. They're all in The Americas. We're very lucky to have hummingbirds.
Speaker 2:I'm delighted. Absolutely delighted. So people had had disastrous winter experiences with their arborvitaes. You know? And they got splayed apart by the snow.
Speaker 2:Her branches were broken. They looked like, instead of looking like exclamation points, now they look like fingers of a glove spread apart. And so, you can tie them back together. You can can tie them to prevent that, but there's another alternative. And if you are interested, come look and see the dwarf western red cedars.
Speaker 2:And this is a so the the wild kind of red cedars get to be 250 feet. You know, they're gigantic trees. There's no reason to to have something like that in your front yard, but the dwarf ones
Speaker 3:I mean, it sounds pretty cool.
Speaker 2:It does, doesn't it? And I I know that our house in Portland has a gigantic western red cedar in the front yard, and it's really cool. Really, really cool. But for the for the purpose I'm talking about, which is like hedging and privacy screening, these dwarf western red cedars called northern spire, they really do the job. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And since they've just got a single trunk, they don't get beat up by the snow, and the deer don't eat them. Plus, they get to smell like cedar rather than arborvitae. They're pretty cool like that.
Speaker 3:That's pretty cool. Yeah. I love the smell of cedar. I mean, who doesn't? It's so special.
Speaker 2:Walking into the nursery now, you walk by a a whole panoply. Planopy. Panoply. Panop a whole panoply of these cedars lined up like a like a wall and the Japanese maples around them. And the Japanese maples contrasted with the color of the cedar, really effective.
Speaker 2:Glowing, glowing green, glowing pink, glowing red, and the different shapes of them, the arching forms, the weeping forms, they're just delightful. So if you're, in the mood for a little visual excitement and and, exercise, get your cup of tea, come stroll around landscape Alaska today, and enjoy what it really looks like as as the seasons change.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:And the Sitka roses are butted up again for another bloom show. It won't be long before they're all bursting out into color again. And the newly arrived perennials are gonna come this week.
Speaker 3:We'll be full up back up again. Yeah. You were talking about hydrangeas. And with those changing colors of leaves, does the climbing hydrangea do that too?
Speaker 2:No. It doesn't. Mhmm. But it does bloom. Huge blooms.
Speaker 3:I am house sitting a house on Main Street, and the house across the street from it has climbing hydrangeas all over a rock wall right on the sidewalk, and they look so beautiful. Like, it's really stunning, and they really cover everything, and they have big leaves. It really is this, like, beautiful, lush verticality. And I don't know. I like, I know that most vines, especially when you're down south, like ivies, I should say, are like parasites and, like, are kind of a problem.
Speaker 3:Like, if go in the woods and around Portland, like, the woods are just choked with ivy. But I also I just love vines. And these ones aren't parasites, but they do have really strong gripping things. And so, like, their roots will just grab into stone and wood and anything that you sort of train them on, and they will just cover it in hydrangea. And then it'll all bloom, and you'll have this big wall of big blooms.
Speaker 3:It's really special.
Speaker 2:It is. And I I think about it, vine as something climbing, but you're right. If it doesn't have something to climb up, it will spread out as as a layer. Mhmm. And as a ground cover, it's a fantastic plant.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it's so thick and vigorous that it suppresses any weeds that are growing around there.
Speaker 3:That's true.
Speaker 2:If they if they can't get light, they can't grow. Mhmm. So we've got a couple minutes. We have time for one quick phone call if somebody calls in, but I don't think they're going to today. I think people are snuggled in having another cup of coffee, looking out at the weather.
Speaker 2:Sounds terrible.
Speaker 3:Or in their boat. Who would wanna be in bed at this hour?
Speaker 2:I don't know. Absolutely. Well, we'll be there waiting for you with our arms open. Come see us today. Come visit us.
Speaker 2:Come give us give us a call.
Speaker 3:I'll be there?
Speaker 2:I'll be there.
Speaker 3:We'll be there.
Speaker 2:Cordova will be there. Yes. It'll be a fun time for all.
Speaker 3:We'll introduce you to all of our pet nematodes.
Speaker 2:And we'll look at the birds.
Speaker 3:And we'll look at the birds together.
Speaker 2:Okay. So then this is David Lindrib from Landscape Alaska with Conor Lindrib of Landscape Alaska, and we'll talk to you next week. And until then, happy gardening.
Speaker 1:Conversations with Alaska Gardeners is your gateway to exploring the vibrant world of gardening here in Juneau. Join us as we celebrate the passion and resilience of Juneau's gardening community, sharing insights, tips, and stories from the future. Doctor. KELLY: