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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 Tharpe and David Lindrum of Landscape Alaska on KINY.
Speaker 2:Good morning. This is Conversations with Alaska Gardeners. It's gonna be a one way conversation today, although me speaking. Radio stations, telephones are still not functional. But if you wanna have a question answered, text it to the radio station 805861800, and we'll answer it on the air.
Speaker 2:And if you have any other questions that you can't get to today, you can send them to me at landscape Alaska dot com, and I'll always respond. I've gotten a bunch of questions this week about, things that that, plants in people's yards that they've had for many years, and they're looking at them and waiting for the leaves to appear on them, and they're just not coming. Well, I hate to tell you folks, they're probably not coming. If they're not here now, they're probably not coming. And if they look like they were going to come and then just kind of fizzled, that means that the root was killed.
Speaker 2:There was enough energy in the cambium to get the leaves to start growing, but there just wasn't the push there. So I'm sorry to say that's it for those guys. And then you can look around and see what survived, what survived well, whether in your yard or in your neighbor's yard or around the town, and think if you're gonna have to replace something that died, you should choose something that's tougher. Maybe we won't have another winter like that, but having had one means that it's out there waiting for us. So an ounce of prevention and a pound of cure, but I think that I vote for the prevention side.
Speaker 2:So if you look and it's not just you. Margaret and I have sent at least five dump truck loads of dead plant material to the pond this springtime. It's disastrous and heartbreaking. And some of these things we've cultivated and maintained for many, many years already. But, you know, it's just it doesn't do any good to look at it and wish it weren't so.
Speaker 2:So on that note, let's move on to something else. Margaret's sick today, so it's b. And if you have any questions, don't don't hesitate to send them to us. But otherwise, I'm gonna talk about some of my favorite things. And one of my very favorite things is coming into bloom right now.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna start by talking about plant breeders. Let's talk about how this whole thing works. There are the raw material is the wild plants in the world, and people who are interested in horticulture, in plant breeding, in landscape architecture, in in domestic agriculture, and in agriculture altogether, all look at that big collection of wild stuff as the raw material from which things can be hybridized, developed, selected, and and, in any other way you can do it, manipulated, to give you some other desired result. If you look at the popular red leaf big red leaf maple trees that we have all over Juneau. So those are a Norway maple variety, and Norway maple is a variety that's wild in Europe and there are almost all green.
Speaker 2:There's millions and millions of wild Norway green green Norway maples. But every now and then, there's a red one or a gold one, And it has been like that forever. As long as there have been Norway maples, there have always been genetic variants. As long as there's anything, there's always a genetic variant. There's a chance every now and then in the general population, something shows up.
Speaker 2:There is a theory that in the genetic makeup of all things lie all possible forms of that. So you could have a maple tree that has little fringes on the leaves. You could have a maple tree that has branches that instead of going up, hang down. You could have a maple tree that has has no urge to grow up to the sky would just lay flat on the ground. And every now and then, somebody who's associated with our kind of profession would see that and say, oh, look at that.
Speaker 2:I think that's so cool. And they would take a piece of it and graft it into another root, or take a piece of it and get roots on that. And all those all those various kinds of forms that we see in the nursery business and the landscape business all came because first, somebody recognized a variant in the wild or had a crop of seedlings and saw some variant there in that seedling group. My good friend Carl Munn is a, Japanese maple breeder, and he has about 30 acres of Japanese maples in the Willamette Valley. And he grows 10,000 seedlings a year at least, and he always has his eye looking at them.
Speaker 2:And about fifteen or twenty years ago, he did see one that was really shockingly different. Was in a seed crop of Korean maples, Acer shirisawanum. And this is a tree that instead of having a straight green color as it grew, had kind of a golden yellow color to it, and the young growth was always red on it. So it seemed like it had this kind of reddish cloud around the outside of a golden body. It was a really strikingly different look to the tree.
Speaker 2:So he cultivated that seedling, grew it for about ten years, and in the plant world, you can patent plants. If you have it and you developed it, you can patent it, and that means that nobody else in the world can propagate it. Propagating means take cuttings from it, root them, graft them, have some way to make more out of the out of the single one. So Carl has the rights to allow people to do this. Now his maple has been judged the best Asian maple in the world, and so people all over the world are growing it with his permission or with his license fee, but it is an absolutely spectacular one.
Speaker 2:And since Margaret and I were friends of his, he was able to include us in his marketing group, We've been planting that maple in Juneau for about fifteen years, and there are dozens and dozens of them growing around town. They went through this last winter without a flag, not even anywhere. They they all look beautiful. So it's it's been proven by the climate. It's been proven by the the desire, and the color on it is spectacular.
Speaker 2:If you wanna see it in color, come see me at Landscape Alaska today. I've got three of them that just arrived, and they are so beautiful. But I I say that as an introduction to the general plant breeding world because there are there are stars in the plant breeding world everywhere. And one of the stars that I know of is a man named Peter J. Mezzet, and he's a rhododendron breeder.
Speaker 2:He's passed now, but he was a rhododendron breeder in Massachusetts. And his rhododendrons, the first ones bear his initials, PJM. And there are PJM rhododendrons in about six colors, and they're they're totally different looking than the rest of the rhododendron clan. The leaves are narrow, they're light textured, they're really, really bright green, the plant grows upright rather than spreading, and the leaves turn burgundy colored in the fall. And where most rhododendrons have flower trusses on the ends of the branches with big clusters of brooms of blooms, the PJM rhododendron has smaller flowers in smaller groups that are scattered all through the plant.
Speaker 2:So in the in the early spring and they're blooming right now. The ones that are in town are blooming right now. And there are pink ones and lavender ones and dark, dark, dark pink ones and pale, pale pink ones. They're all kind of that rosy color. And the rhododendron leaves, no matter what, only stay on the plant for two or three years.
Speaker 2:They're always dropping off and new leaves are growing. In this particular case, the older leaves all drop off in the middle of the winter. Most rhododendrons, it happens all all through the season, but in this one, it happens in the middle of the winter. And the older leaves drop off, and then when the plant blooms, you can see the flowers all through the bush. It's really quite spectacular.
Speaker 2:And then other rhododendrons that he bred, he named after the women in his life. And the one that's blooming now in my yard is after his wife whose name was Olga, and this one is called the Olga Mesut. And instead of it being the, upright tight fingers pointing to the sky form of the PJM, It's much, much airier. It's got a body, a a solid body of foliage, and then the blooming branches are kind of wispy, and they reach up above it. And they're in bright, bright, bright pink right now.
Speaker 2:Bright pink. And, when people see it, they go, oh, that must be an azalea because it doesn't look like a rhododendron. But the only difference between rhododendrons and azaleas is pretty technical. It has to do with the flower the flower formation. So when you look at them, you think it looks like an azalea, but it is a rhododendron.
Speaker 2:It's real easy to mix the two up. So Olga meset is in flower now in my yard, and it just came into bloom a couple days ago, and everyone that walks in notices it and goes, what is that? That looks like no rhododendron I've ever seen before. It's really, really pretty. And again, tough as nuts.
Speaker 2:So if you're interested in having something that's that's an unusual kind of shape and that blooms way before all the rest of them, come see these PJM and Olga Mesutz. Now rhododendrons are coming into flower all over town. The ones that are at the Wells Fargo bank in the valley are yakusa maina hybrids, and that's a kind of rhododendron that comes from Northern Japan. And they have full sized leaves and full sized flowers, but they are a diminutive size and they all stay real dense. They don't get the long leggy growth that you see from so many of the other older forms of rhododendron.
Speaker 2:They have real dense, real compact growth. Drive by the Wells Fargo Bank and look at it, and you'll see what I mean. It's just you can't see the leaves. The flowers are so dense on it, you can't even see the leaves. It's a wonderful kind of plant, and it's real peculiar in that it comes from an area not deeply forested.
Speaker 2:Most rhododendrons evolve in a deeply forested world all over the world. There are native rhododendrons here too. If you drive up Montana Creek Road and go past the archery range, they're in bloom on both sides of the road out there. And this is a small leaf kind of rhododendron native here to Alaska. But most rhododendrons in the world have that kind of forested look, And these Yakusamena hybrids come from an area where they're beaten by the storms, and it's really cold and has a a disastrous winter weather effect.
Speaker 2:And they have responded by evolving a way to keep the air around the leaves really, really still. And and that way, like an insulating layer, they can still photosynthesize even when it's the worst weather imaginable. And they've done so by growing a layer of fur on the bottom of the leaves. And this fur is something that's soft to the touch. You can barely feel it, but when you look at it, you can see it.
Speaker 2:And the young growth has it all over it, just not not just on the bottom, but the older growth, it's just on the bottom. And when people look at it, they all notice it. People come and they look at the rhododendron, they go, what is that on that plant? It's called indumentum, but it is just a little fur, little fuzz that holds the air still around the plant. And and about, I don't know, ten years ago, we found this and we began using it.
Speaker 2:And once again, the winter tells the story. If it's something that can withstand winters like this last one and come through and bloom beautifully, then we're gonna add that to our arsenal and make sure that it's really good. And this is a variety that really does turn out wonderfully. I was walking through the nursery this morning on my way out to the car to come down to the radio station, and I see that the flowers are beginning to open on the climbing hydrangea. Climbing hydrangea is one of the most peculiar kind of vines.
Speaker 2:It's not just that it's so hardy, it doesn't die, it lives here very well, but it has really aggressive growing techniques. It has little tiny roots that grow out of the stem, so it can hang on to whatever it's climbing up. It's very, very popular here to plant it at the base of your Sitka spruce tree and let it climb up the tree trunk and cover the tree trunk entirely, and then when it blooms, it's white flowers all over the trunk of the Sitka spruce. It's quite spectacular. I think it would even grow on the Hesco barriers.
Speaker 2:I don't know, but if I could imagine Hesco barriers being converted into a sea of white flowers as the hydrangea grows up on it. They crawl by the cells. Now you would never plant it on your house because it would it would try and, dig into it, but you can plant it on other things around the yard or make trellises. I've even seen it used as a ground cover where it crawls around on the ground and covers the ground entirely. It's quite an unusual look, you don't expect to see something like that.
Speaker 2:In the wintertime when the leaves drop off it, it shows its bark and branch structure and it looks like a bonsai plant. Every little two inch difference kinks one way and the other, and the old shaggy brown bark peels away, revealing the kind of cinnamon red brown underneath it. So it's got color in all the seasons of the year and it's really a very spectacular plant. The blooming flowers are very similar. There are plant breeders focusing on varieties.
Speaker 2:You know, there's pansy breeders, there's dahlia breeders, there's daylily breeders, there's iris breeders, and all of these have, support clubs. So there are like the Willamette Valley Fuchsia and Begonia Society, and they have as their reason to get together, they have a common appreciation for fuchsias and begonias. And I have to confess, I can sink myself into that world so easily. It's a world of not quite fanaticism, but shared enthusiasm, let's say. And when we look at the, the new offerings every year, there are shows, in California and in Virginia and in Upstate New York and all over the country that have a focus on different kinds of plants and the people come to them and help judge which ones are the the best looking ones.
Speaker 2:And places like the Chicago Botanic Garden and the Botanic Garden in San Francisco, and the Botanic Garden in Los Angeles all have different species that they focus on, and they sponsor trials. So the one in Chicago does mostly hardy perennial plants, and they have an ongoing I know it's been fifty years or so, ongoing trials checking out which chrysanthemums are going to be the best in different kinds of weathers, and what kind of peony is going to do the best, and what kind of new peony can be judged worthy enough to be included in the nursery's offerings. And you just never know, you never know where it's gonna come from. It can come out of the blue from some amateur who looks around in his garden and finds some kind of odd thing, or it can come from a well funded research and development organization like Sakata Seed who's been breeding annual flowers like snapdragons and pansies and violas for generations. And every year, they release another half dozen varieties of new kinds, and I'm sure you'd notice that over time, the flowers get bigger.
Speaker 2:The colors get more intense. The plants now are smaller with bigger flowers on them. They breed for tighter growth and with bigger flowers because everybody's yard is smaller, and people are looking more at containers. And rather than having a big sprawling plant with a few flowers on it, people like to have something that's gonna have a lot more flower density, a lot more flower compaction. And you could have in a container, you can have a cornucopia effect of plants coming and spilling over the edges and just being so full of flower you can barely see the foliage.
Speaker 2:That's our goal. We like it like that. We wanna have it be so that it's so continuously flowering and ideally, one that you don't have to go and deadhead, that you don't have to pick. If anybody has a question, go ahead and text it in. I'd be glad to respond to them.
Speaker 2:But 1805861800. So we're shipping stuff all over the Southeast now, sending things to Sitka, to Haines, Skagway, and Cake. And if you are in a community like that and you're interested in having stuff sent to you, don't hesitate to reach out to me. The Japanese maples we pack up and put on the seaplanes come through really nicely. And a big flat of pansies is a welcome addition when you live someplace where you don't have a nursery or you have only slight choices.
Speaker 2:I'm willing to order things for you if you think that's something you really want and have it included into our order stream. What's coming this week are a set of hybrid Japanese maples from a famous nursery called Isley. And they're in the Willamette Valley, and they have been crossing Japanese maple species, Acer japonicum and Acer palmatum, for about fifteen years trying to get a viable, hearty, attractive, fast growing kind, and they have come up with a couple winners. I went to the nursery show last fall. I saw these in fall color.
Speaker 2:They were spectacular. I ordered a few, and they're in town now. We just can't get them until Monday. So in the beginning of next week, if you're interested in Japanese maples, please come and look. I have the ones from Carl Munn, not just Munn's Moonrise, but a lot of other forms, including Tamukiyama.
Speaker 2:Tamukiyama was first recorded in the fifteen sixties. It's a name variety from Japan. We can see it in the prints, we can see it in the textiles. This tree has very, very identifiable shape, and it's still in production, still in appreciation. It's a weeping form with finely divided leaves that's a dark purple in the summertime and turns to a fire engine red in the autumn.
Speaker 2:And it's it is trained to be about a four foot tall trunk with the branches then weeping down to the ground, and they look absolutely stunning. And then when the fall comes and the color changes, they stand out like a traffic light. It's that kind of red. It's not a dull red like you see on a lot of plants. It's a real, real exciting and vibrant red.
Speaker 2:And there's one called Aurium, which is a brilliant yellow foliage. And there's one called Viridis, which is a finely divided very, very pale green foliage. And all these kinds turn colors at different times of the year. They become both focal points and backgrounds and environments. And people have them as large plants, and people keep them as small plants in containers like a pet, and people have them as bonsai trees.
Speaker 2:All this stuff is there's people who are thrilled by all these kinds of effects. There's a local bonsai group. Most of these gentlemen are older than I am, and they have for years climbed up around the tree line and identified wild trees that grew in the harshest of environments that are gnarled and twisted and growing only barely in places where it's really, really tough for them. And these gentlemen, over a period of four or five years, will go up and cut a little bit of the root every year, and when you cut the end of the root off, the root piece that's left will sprout new roots, and that'll be closer to the trunk. So over a period of four or five years, you can dig all the way around the little tree, cutting its roots just a little bit this year and a little bit next year until you've got a very compact root ball, and then you can dig it up and bring it down below and containerize it.
Speaker 2:And I've seen trees that are mostly mountain hemlocks and western hemlocks, and they are, to my eye, incredibly beautiful. I went to the National Arboretum a couple years ago in Washington DC, and The United States has a national bonsai collection. And we have about 200, two fifty trees in our bonsai collection, and they range from geckos and redwoods and birch trees and maples and oaks, There's individual trees and little groves that are in trays, and the star of the show is a Japanese red pine that the Japanese royal family gave to the American country on the occasion of our bicentennial. And this is a tree that the family has had in their possession and cultivation for over four hundred years. It looks like it's two thousand years old and it's about three feet tall.
Speaker 2:It sits in a little tray. It's gnarly, it's in perfect health. It looks like it could live another two thousand years without any trouble. If you are an appreciator of natural form and natural beauty, this would be the kind of thing that you would just have to sit down next to and stare at for a while. It would be so compelling.
Speaker 2:And I know that people have bonsais in their homes and offices that are indoor plants, and these are ones that would be, dwarfed varieties of the common indoor plants we have that are made to look ancient and old by cutting and pruning and twisting and forcing them to have the bends and shapes and bark effects that you would expect of great age. It's both an art form to create and one to appreciate as if it were a flower arrangement. The new flowers coming for the rest of the summer. We've reached the end of the spring blooming time, the first spring primroses are ending their growth, we're moving into the midsummer, we're moving into the Shasta daisies, the peonies, the delphiniums, and now the bee balms and the mint family members are coming. There's a kind of a Shasta daisy called Becky, which has won horticultural awards all over the world because it makes a huge flower.
Speaker 2:It's a big plant, it gets to be waist high to me and it's sterile. It doesn't throw its seed around. One of the worries about ornamental plants is that if there's something that produces seeds, they're going to be everywhere. And when you drive down Fritz Cove Road and you see how the ditches are filling up with those white daisies, that's a wild kind that is spreading via seed down the highway edges and it makes its presence known. And that kind of spread into the wild world of non native plants or even native plants that are native someplace else is something that we always worry about.
Speaker 2:We worry about it changing the local ecology. I like to see the yellow the white daisies. I like to see the what we call Dames rocket growing all over the hills downtown by the side of the roads. They're pink and white and cream colored, and they're really fragrant. I recognize that the appreciation for the attractiveness of it kind of masks the effect of what they're doing as they eat up the rest of the world.
Speaker 2:But you know, it's just like that. Things come and go, and it's out of our control. It's in the wild world, it's out of our control. There's nothing we can really do about it. There are some things we spend tremendous efforts on controlling, but something like the Dames rocket or the Shasta daisies, we just let them be.
Speaker 2:There's nothing you can really do about it. One of my friends is fanatic about removing mountain ash trees from the wild world. It's a European clone and it does invade natural stands and pretty soon the natural stand is subsumed by the imported stand. He's made it his life's work and profession to prevent them as much as he can. And if you see a gentleman out there attacking mountain ash trees, it's most likely John Hudson.
Speaker 2:Good for you John, keep it up. We're coming to the end of my show, I've got another minute. I'll be open today at Landscape Alaska. I'd love you to come by and see me. We can look at the Olga Mesut rhododendron together.
Speaker 2:We can see the climbing hydrangeas, and we can go out and inspect and play with the Japanese maples. Mun's moonrise maple, the most spectacular Asian maple in the world. Well, I'll see you next week. This has been Dave from Landscape Alaska. Margaret will be back with me next week.
Speaker 2:We'll have more conversations. And until then, happy gardening.
Speaker 1: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.