PLANTWISE

Nature Night at the Audubon Society

European Ecoroofs: Lessons in Biodiversity

Posted by: Kate Bryant on Jan 10, 2011 at 11:22AM 0 Comments

So many free gardening-related events in Portland year-round – how lucky we are! Here’s yet another wonderful free offering, providing information on cultivating biodiversity in Portland’s own cityscapes through a slide-show field trip to several European cities.

Tuesday January 11, 2011, 7 pm to 8:30 pm

“Jim Labbe, Urban Conservationist at Audubon Society of Portland, will share stories and slides of the biodiverse ecoroofs he encountered while abroad in 2009–2010 in London, England and Basel, Switzerland. He’ll discuss some of the latest design approaches being applied in Europe to promote insect diversity and habitat for ground-nesting birds. Jim will conclude with an audience discussion about the challenges and opportunities of expanding biodiverse roofs in the Portland metro region.”

Nature Night is free and open to the public.

Location: Heron Hall, Audubon House, 5151 NW Cornell Rd, Portland

UPDATE:
Due to the predicted snow and freezing rain this evening, Labbe’s presentation has been rescheduled for Wed, March 9 from 4-5 pm at Portland State University’s Cramer Hall 271.

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Tags: Gardening Events, Garden Design, ecoroofs

In a Tight Spot? Plant This Eucryphia!

Eucryphia x nymansensis ‘Mt. Usher’

Posted by: Kate Bryant on Sep 22, 2010 at 11:29AM 7 Comments

Leatherwood (probably Eucryphia x nymansensis ‘Mt Usher’)

I took these photos about two weeks ago while visiting a friend. The tree is actually in her neighbor’s yard but, lucky for my friend, it grows just feet from her kitchen window. By now, the tree may be past its flowering prime – especially after the recent torrential rains. But the flowers do open over a very long period in late summer so chances are, it’s still looking sweet.

Eucryphia trees have an elegant, upright, often columnar habit (depending on the species). Some are slender enough to fit in the funkiest urban spaces yet not so narrow that they look scarily rigid.

The hardier evergreen species’ leaves – including the one I photographed – are handsome in winter, only suffering in the coldest, iciest winters. The foliage can vary a lot in size and shape, depending on species but it’s always attractive and there are some lovely variegated-leafed forms, as well as selections with lustrous, pale pink flowers instead of the typical white.

Flowers, which range from modestly charming (less than an inch across) to flagrantly showy (three inches across) are white with a fluffy boss of yellow stamens. So elegant! They appear in August and September when few other trees are in flower, and are lightly, sweetly fragrant. When I was traveling in Tasmania, I bought delicious, intensely flavored leatherwood honey made from the flowers.

The genus Eucryphia includes seven species – five from Australia and Tasmania and two from south-central Chile and Argentina.

Leatherwood (probably Eucryphia x nymansensis ‘Mt Usher’), showing off its handsome, upright habit. This plant is growing in a SE Portland neighborhood, with some wind protection between two houses… but exposed to the north. But it’s obviously pretty tough to be in such great condition after the terrible cold of last winter…

Mt Usher (pictured), a hybrid between the two Chilean species E. glutinosa and E. cordifolia, is said to be the most cold-hardy of all eucryphias. Other hardy hybrids commonly grown in the Pacific Northwest include E. x nymanensis ‘Nymansay’ and the more elegant-foliaged, narrowly columnar E. x intermedia ‘Rostrevor’, a.cross between Chilean E. glutinosa and the Australian E. lucida.

The relatively cold-hardy Eucryphias listed above are not difficult to grow if their basic requirements are met. In our inland climate, they prefer a woodland setting where their roots can be shaded and tops can be in sun. They like to be protected (by trees or buildings) from icy winter winds, which can damage the foliage in winter. For soil, they prefer humusy, woodsy, slightly acidic, well-drained soil that receives some supplemental water in summer. (In other words, they are not particularly drought-tolerant.) They’re hardy to about 0-10F, depending on the species, but their leaves can brown and drop in temperatures below 12F, especially if the super-cold, drying winter winds hit the Portland metro area. They thrive in the maritime atmosphere of the Pacific Coast, although they also seem to especially enjoy warm pockets in downtown Portland. (Watch out on terraces, though – they don’t appreciate hot sun, reflected heat or drying winds.)

Good sources for cold-tolerant Eucryphia trees:

Xera Plants – a wholesale outfit whose plants can be found at all these locations.

Cistus Design Nursery – call to ask, as Eucryphia are not on their current availability list but they typically sell several types.

And aha! While looking on line for Eucryphia, I suddenly remembered Plant Lust (I wrote about this on-line plant-hunting resource here.)

…so just go to Plant Lust and type Eucryphia into the search engine to see a listing of available plants in our region. (So far, all from Gossler’s Nursery in Eugene, OR.) You can click through directly to Gossler’s from the Plant Lust site, too, which is nice.

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Tags: Flowers, Trees, Garden Design

Design Tips from Dan Hinkley

notes from the 2010 PPA conference in Portland

Posted by: Kate Bryant on Jul 25, 2010 at 04:20AM 1 Comments

Plant explorer, gardener and witty fellow Dan Hinkley giving a talk at Cistus Design Nursery in 2009. I was so rapt listening to him talk the other day at the PPA conference that I forgot to pull out my camera.

I try to avoid joining groups and engaging in activities where I have to wait in lines, sit in chairs for hours at a time and dutifully clap between endless rounds of announcements.

But late last week, I got a call from the plant-savvy Dan Heims, owner of Terra Nova Nursery, breeder and wholesale producer of new perennial plants (especially famous for Heuchera and Echinacea). He was at the Doubletree Hotel at Lloyd Center where the Perennial Plant Association was holding its annual conference. “You need to get down here,” he said. “there are some really cool containers in the lobby that you should see…”

This is not the first time Mr. Heims has egged me into getting my sorry self to attend an official horticulture-related conference – and I must say, I’ve always been glad I went when all was said and done. So I huffed over to the Doubletree Hotel at Lloyd Center lobby on Thursday, only to learn that Dan Hinkley – superstar plant explorer and lecturer – would be speaking that afternoon. I had no option: I joined the PPA and forked over an additional $75 to hear the afternoon’s remaining lectures. All previous plans fell by the wayside.

As well as the containers designed by local nurseries on display in the lobby, there were several other lectures to attend before Dan Hinkley’s time at the lectern: I learned about the best performing garden bamboos from wholesaler Boo-Shoots owner Jackie Heinricher (good resources on that website, especially about good clumping bamboos) and about the complexities of fern nomenclature from the irresistible and outspoken Judith Jones of Fancy Fronds. (She’s the ultimate fern advocate and her website fern descriptions are enough to make even the most mediterranean-oriented gardener fall in love with ferns.) But I’m a sucker for Dan Hinkley’s talks because he always sneaks some crazily beautiful rare plants into his presentations and, well… he’s so funny!

His talk was titled “Plant Marriages: Exceptional Combinations Using Foliage Aspects”.

He opened his talk by asking: How do you place plants to make them sing?

He showed slides from his old garden at Heronswood: the first, what he called “a vomitous combination” of perennials in a border, with no structure or grace. It was, he said, “like a large whale had washed up on shore and rotted”. He showed an image of the same border a year later, when he’d made some improvements. It was okay but, as he pointed out, no great shakes. His third image, taken a few years later, demonstrated what he’d learned in the intervening years: to build balance, height differentials, foliar texture, and repetition (of color or plant form) into his gardens. So how did he do it?

His talk outlined three simple garden design principles he had used to make his borders “sing”:

- Punctuation (a bold-leafed plant)
Sometimes adding just one bold-leafed plant like a cardoon (Cynara sp., Gunnera sp., Darmera peltata, Nicotiana sylvestris, or Fatsia can completely shift the look from drab to dazzling. For his audience, he digitally altered the photo of the garden, adding and subtracting various large-leaved plants to show what a difference its presence made. Wow!

- Exclamation (a “statement” plant)
Whether used as a single statement (look at me!, says a dramatic clump of bright red, 5-foot tall Lobelia tupa) or a sustained conversation used throughout the garden to break up the sky (scattered Green Arrow Chamaecyparis nootkatensis or narrow holly (Ilex crenata‘Sky Pencil’), exclamation plants need breathing room and will lose their punch if crowded. But are brilliant at creating the sense of height and dimension in a space by drawing the eye upward. Again, he popped plants in and out digitally and the difference was extraordinary.

- Accentuation (repetition of particular plants or plant colors or textures)
This is the hardest principle to enact for those of us who are plant collectors. But it’s one of the best – and easiest – ways to tie a garden together by creating a common link and knitting the whole together. I liked his observation that you can actually borrow a color in a neighbor’s yard and build on it in your own yard. He also added that repetition doesn’t have to come from plants but can be created by placing similarly colored pots throughout a garden, hanging buoys or lanterns, stoneware balls, or other objects that are meaningful to you and the site. The digital appearance and disappearance of objects helped illustrate his point.

If you haven’t done it before, remember that the old-fashioned method of simply shifting potted plants in and out of your own garden to see how they look in various spots works perfectly well when designing. It’s nice to give yourself a few days to live with something in a particular spot to see if you like it there. Just remember to water it while you’re deciding!

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Tags: Gardening Events, Garden Design, Plant People