Plants of Portland

I just got back from an exceptionally wonderful week in Portland Oregon. I was there for the Independent Plant Breeder's Conference, and got to spend a couple extra days tooling around checking out amazing gardens and nurseries! Too much fun. Here are some photographic highlights.

 A gorgeous selection of Veronica incana seen at Xera Plants. It is always a great plant, but this is by far the nicest form I've seen. Yes, they sold me a plant, and yes, cuttings are already stuck!

 Want to guess? Buddleia! Yes, this is a butterfly bush! Buddleia colvilei 'Kew Form' to be exact. Excuse me while I stop drooling. Not even close to hardy for us, of course, but still.

Fall color was just about perfect... here's a shot of the Japanese maples in the garden of Dan Heims (as in, Terra Nova) He was one of the organizers of the conference and a perfect host. Thank you Dan!

Japanese maples + moss = Perfection.

Attendees of the conference all busy taking photos of the spectacular maples at the Japanese Garden.

More Japanese maple perfection... I can't get over that PINK one on the left! Amazing.

One of the conference tour stops was Terra Nova... This is where all your heucheras come from. Kinda amazing. It was fun to see behind the scenes a little, and meet some of there breeders. I have to admit, I love their heucheras and kniphofia even more now that I've met Janet Egger, the genius breeder who creates them, and flat out one of the coolest ladies I've ever met.

 Gorgeous planting at Cistus nursery.

More Cistus beauty... I took lots of pictures at Cistus, most of which didn't come out well, so you'll have to use your imagination. Basically, truly amazing collection of gorgeous plants, most of which I could only sigh over, wishing they would be hardy for me.

This just made me sick. It is a bad picture, but this was just one of the many lush, vigorous, flowering blocks of Gentiana acaulis I saw at Edelweiss Perennials. Huge, gorgeous flowers of absolutely perfect blue on plants that were growing like WEEDS. If you've ever tried growing Gentiana acaulis here in the midwest, you'll appreciate my insane envy... I had a little patch that I was inordinately proud of... before it completely shriveled up and died in the baking heat and dry of this summer.

Would you guess this is in Oregon? This was at Rare Plants Research, where again, I walked around looking at gorgeous plants that I could never grow in Michigan...

Besides all the gardens and nurseries and amazing plants, the conference itself was amazing. A veritable who's who of horticulture was attending, I got to meet and hang out with a lot of incredible people and have a terrific time. If you are interested in plant breeding, I highly recommend attending the next one in 2014. Particularly because it is going to be held here in Michigan! Either Lansing or Grand Rapids, I believe, so I'll get a chance to try and make other people jealous of the gorgeous plants we can grow here.

Do you need a new plant?

Trying to decide if you need more plants? 

This handy-dandy little tool will answer that question every time! (Click to see it full size)

Bogging it up

I drew this a year or two ago... It was meant as a dramatic exaggeration, but... um... this is what my truck looked like after a trip I took earlier this summer visiting the great plantsman, Stan Tyson:

And yes, that is a pickup truck. The bed was already full.
And those plants are, sarracenia pitcher plants!

This what many of these plants look like growing in a bog garden we visited.

Along with venus fly traps, and sundews. All cool carniverous plants... and growing outside in zone 5 Illinois. I vaguely knew that these were native, hardy plants, but until I saw them growing so happily and beautifully in ground in Illinois it never really struck me what cool and useful garden plants they are.
So, thanks to Stan's incredibly generosity, I loaded up with an amazing collection of pitcher plants, and back at Arrowhead, started preparing them a place to live.

Basically all hardy carniverous plants grow in very acidic, nutrient poor bogs. That's what they catch bugs -- they don't really eat them, they simply break them down as a source of nitrogen and other nutrients. Bugs as fertilizer. (most tropical carnivorous plants grow in another nutrient poor situation -- as epiphytes on the branches of trees.) So, to grow them at the nursery, I've built an artificial bog along the side of one of our greenhouses. We dug out an existing (weedy, over grown) bed, put down a pond liner, and filled it with a mixture of peat and sand.

I divided each plant, and into the bog they went. I've got to say, so far, these are some of the absolutely easiers plants to take care of. With most plants you have to walk the line between over and under watering. These guys want to be totally soggy, so as long as they're not actually submerged, they seem to be pretty happy. The only trick is keeping the water acidic. Most tap water is quite alkaline with disolved minerals, and will bring the pH up too much. Positioning this bed where it catches the runoff from the roof of the greenhouse means they get mostly rainwater, which is what they prefer, only getting water from our well as a last resort.

I'm really excited about this new collection of plants! Once they bulk up a little, we'll be listing them in the catalog. So dramatically beautiful and unlike anything else we grow.

I have the feeling these are just going to be the start of a new obsession... there are so many more sarracenias to collect, not to mention beauties like this gorgeous little sundew:

Flies around the nursery better look out.