Hit the Dirt; Getting to Know Plants

Hi this is Claire I cried when this is hit the dirt. Now I get to talk about one of my pet topics which is getting to know plants. I have a hard time. Imagining. How anybody can enjoy gardening by which I mean just growing things whether they're vegetables trees or loans unless you know and understand what the plants are where they come from and what their personalities and preferences are there. The plant kingdom is enormous. Constantly changing and infinitely fascinating and beautiful. And the more you know about it the more dealing with it becomes a fascinating thing to do. There's an old axiom that says A weed is a plant in the wrong place which is a very good idea in the same way that Barbara Woodhouse says there are no bad dogs I believe that there are no bad plants. There are maybe plants in the wrong place. I was forced to eliminate the one thing from my list of really bad plants. Recently when somebody came into my nursery and asked if they could buy some thing that they had a piece of in the

car and from the depths of their car they produced a handful of what I know as Bishop Weed also known as ground elder and they said the neighbor had this all around the house and it was really beautiful and where could they get some. Now I wage a constant war on the stuff in my garden. It is a plague and I thought well they prove that there are no bad plants somebody even wants to grow this thing and there are certainly interesting bugs insects and they are probably small mammals that find the stuff interesting useful place to hide in. So the other day we were being berated by a customer in the nursery for pulling horsetail which is a weed wherever we run irrigation it likes to be wet constantly. And some dude leapt on us for pulling up a very important medicinal plant. So there there are no bad plants there are just plants in the wrong place. I have a very nice photo that was one of my favorite things to read to people which is very brief which comes from a book called The Education of a gardener by Russell Page Russell Page is one of the great garden designers of the century. He's talking about his early experiences as a kid learning how to garden. I learned about plants rather

quickly by dint of holding them. I get began to suspect from their feel in their appearance what kind of conditions they would enjoy and soon I began to be able to guess their place of origin. I learned their names simply by writing down in full the name of any plant I saw for the first time. Even now when I see a plant which I cannot name for the second or even the fiftieth time I write out the name in the end one learns it. So I would say that to start learning about plants the first thing you have to do is to learn their name when you're introduced to somebody or to a dog or to a house or a village the first thing you want to know is what is its name it has a name it suddenly has an identity if you don't know the name of a plant. I don't think you can begin to understand what it is. The and by names I mean they're Latin names. Latin names of plants are fascinating things to get to learn. I had one example of a really great name for what it will tell you if you learn what the name means. One of the names that people studying horticulture and plants and you have to learn Latin names like sort of 20 a week for the rest of your life is a plant called methyl Sequoia bodies it's one of the great sort of tongue twisting plant names it is the dawn Redwood which is a wonderful plant in itself a

great plant to learn about it was only discovered in 1941 in eastern China somewhere. Well metal is great for changed and Sequoia is the big giant redwood which was named after an Indian sheep so Metis acquire is a changed Redwood and glitter toe means carved and strong bodies were actually clipped post-road bodies means like flip Coast robots. These bit meaning sort of resembling and clip post robots is another plant and clipped toe means carved in the strobe means. The cone. So there you have you have a funny looking Sequoia with a carved cone which doesn't tell you a whole lot about where the plant comes from or how to grow it but it does give it a sort of an identity and they a place in your mind that you can hang it hang its personality on learning common names is hopeless. When I came to America I found that all the plants that I knew by one common name are known by something else here. And you can go through the Red Sea the White Sea the coastal cedar

thing on this coast and the Cedars mean for different things to 10 different people. And the what I think of is the native cedar which is this through you is known by arborvitae and red cedar and white cedar here it's hopeless you will never know what plant you're talking about until you get its proper name. The next thing that everybody has to know about a plant that you are handling and planning to grow is where it comes from. I mean where it comes from geographically if a plant comes from the northern part of Canada it's very likely to grow fine in Maine. If it's native to the high plains of America it's very likely to do fine. Natives of Scotland they thought of Norway stands to reason that these plants will probably adapt to living in Maine. There is a great series of plants that have Ammar in their names am you are the Amur River is a river in Siberia and somebody must once have gone and collected all sorts of plants from this region because there are many plants there's the Amur privet there's an amber choked Cherry as our honeysuckle and more. These are all

very highly ornamental plants which work extremely well in Maine because they come from an even nastier climate than we experience. Maine at its worst. What about the red the native red maple. The Acer ruber of the maple that turns a lovely red colors in the fall not the one with the red foliage all summer which is in fact a Norway maple. The red maple extends it has one of the longest North-South distributions of any plant in the world it may be the widest ranging plant in terms of it can span from. Close to the Arctic Circle all the way down to Florida. The same tree growing through all those different climate zones. Of course there's always a fascinating garden origin which is the catch all phrase for plants that have been in cultivation so long that nobody knows where that where they really came from or what their origins are. Then there's a question knowing its habitat something about his ecology. Is it like these silver maple which is a plant of low lying bottom lines and flood plains or is it something like a sugar maple

which is a resident of Rocky upland ridges. If you know those things about the plant you will have a fair idea of what kind of conditions it will grow in the little mountain cranberry which is a fascinating plant from Maine that is its Vaccinium which is the same genus as blueberries that it has it's called Vita is it day which I don't know what it means subspecies minus and it's a little special plant that lives only in Maine. It lives on the tops of mountains in Maine and along the coast and exposed Rocky situations. And there you have it once you know that about that plant you can know exactly how to grow it. Not going to know is where they grow in relation to other plants. Are they plants like rhododendrons which are typically understorey plants they like to grow snug in underneath large mature trees or are they plants that grow typically are exposed to sand dunes and knowing that about a plant will also give you plenty of clues to the conditions that it would like to grow or grow in in your garden. Another sort of position that plants Occupy is that place in plant succession

imagine a slowdown or a storm in a forest and then think about what that piece of land goes through in going back to being a forest which might take it 50 to 100 years. It starts off with the opportunists the blowing for masses of seeds things like fire weed which comes in and makes a pink carpet all over the whole blow down all fire area and lives only for a year or two is rapidly shaded out by alders and populous and raspberries which are in turn shaded out by spruces and fur in this area and eventually Theoretically by the large hardwood. Now. Many of our best perennials. Come from these opportunistic things that colonize open spaces and a great big hairy lip for a few years and they're not crowded out it is no advantage to this plant to be a very long lived plant it only needs to live for a year or two tons of seeds and wait for another blowdown to occur somewhere else and so it shouldn't surprise us to learn that many of these plants things like asters a lot of the daisies. Look at I can't think what else. Our short

lived plants that spread rapidly and generate tons and tons and tons of seeds that's the ecology of that plant that's it. It's mechanism for survival. I think that becoming a successful gardener. Requires you to know. Something about the plants that you're growing and. Learning something about its name and its ecology is a good place to start. This is correct right I'll see you next.