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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780807843666 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The University of North Carolina Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/1992 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 202 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.55(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Growing and Propagating Showy Native Woody Plants
By Richard E. Bir
The University of North Carolina Press
Copyright © 1992 University of North Carolina PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8078-4366-6
Chapter One
Natives in the Garden
Native plants belong in your garden for many reasons. The best reason is that they are good plants for the landscape. Many natives, like many exotic species, will tolerate a wide variety of landscape conditions, providing the flexibility necessary for successful home landscapes. My yard has wet and dry spots, hot and cold areas. There is never enough space, so plants get crammed together in my "American cottage garden," competing with each other and contending with the activities of a family, neighborhood pets and wildlife, and soil that is never quite what it should be.
Event though some plants' natural habitats are very restricted, when brought into the garden and given the minimal care that most of us provide for the rest of the landscape, many native plants will thrive or at least hold their own. A good example is the pinkshell azalea, Rhododendron vaseyi. It is native to only a few counties of the North Carolina mountains and is rarely found growing wild below 3,000 feet in elevation. How could something so "rare" be worthy of a place in your garden?
First of all, many uncommon plants in the wild are not "rare." On a May drive along the Blue Ridge Parkway and down Highway 215 in Transylvania County, North Carolina, I saw at least 5,000 pinkshell azalea bushes in bloom over a stretch of about twenty miles without ever leaving the road. Nature provided a show to take the breath away. Somehow "rare" doesn't seem like the right word for a plant that dominated the flowering plant display over many miles that day. Perhaps because of where this azalea is native (i.e., the exposed cliffs and oak-shaded forests of the southern Blue Ridge), it has been an excellent candidate for moving to other, much colder climates.
Hardiness zones are one of the ways horticulturalists describe how much cold a plant can tolerate. They are determined by the average minimum temperature in an area. Each 10° drop in temperature places a region in the next-lower-numbered hardiness zone (Zone 11 being that with the highest average minimum temperature and Zone 1 that with the lowest). Asheville, North Carolina, and Roanoke, Virginia, are in Zone 6. Columbia, South Carolina, Raleigh, North Carolina, and most of Tidewater Virginia are in Zone 7. Much of coastal North and South Carolina are in Zone 8, but folks lucky enough to live along the coast near Charleston may claim Zone 9. Remember, however, that these zones are based upon averages. I've lived in the Blue Ridge for a little more than a decade, but I've never seen an average year. Map 2 shows plant hardiness zones for much of the eastern United States as determined by the United States Department of Agriculture.
It is important to remember that the map reflects average temperature extremes, not overall average temperatures. However, these extremes of cold are often what limits a plant's survival.
The map can provide insight into which plants might be suitable for your garden or that of distant friends. For example, pinkshell azalea is native to Zone 6, yet I know of pinkshell azaleas thriving in gardens in Zones 4 and 5. Perhaps this is a southern beauty to send to your friends up north. Pinkshell isn't supposed to move south well, but I've seen plants covered with flowers in the heat of Raleigh. In areas warmer than their native mountains, pinkshell azaleas must have shade from the afternoon sun and a good organic mulch to keep moisture even around the roots.
Azaleas have a reputation for dying if they have "wet feet," yet pinkshell often grows wild in bogs or in "seeps" filled with sphagnum moss at the bottom of mountain cliffs. However, it is one of those plants that can tolerate a wide variety of conditions. Established pinkshell azaleas survived the terrible droughts of the 1980s, when the soil turned to dry powder and the oak trees providing their shade started to die.
Why isn't pinkshell azalea more widely known? For one thing, it is a deciduous azalea, meaning it is bare of leaves in the winter. This worked against it in the 1950s and 1960s, when we were taught that good landscape shrubs must keep their leaves all year. What rubbish! Further it blooms a week or so before flowering dogwoods. Timid souls that we are, we find it a bit too chilly to linger outdoors at that time of year. If planted where you can see it from inside your warm home looking out into a wooded setting on a gray spring day, however, pinkshell is guaranteed to buoy your spirits. Finally pinkshell has no fragrance.
Pinkshell azaleas and many other native plants have difficulty surviving when transplanted from the wild. Your chances for success with a plaint collected from the wild are limited even if you are willing to baby the plant for at least a year.
Additionally, you should not remove plants from the wild because you are stealing unless the plant was growing on your property or you have permission from the landowner and because many plants that are rare or endangered will grow only under very special conditions. Sometimes the act of removing the plant you desire is enough to destroy those conditions. Even plants that are not rare or endangered may never reestablish themselves in the area to which they are moved. The only reason for transplanting a native woody plant from the wild to your garden is in order to save it when you know the area in which the plant is growing is about to be destroyed. Home, business, and road construction probably threatens more plants via habitat destruction than plant collectors ever could.
The North Carolina Botanical Garden in Chapel Hill has been promoting the concept of "conservation through propagation" for years. They are asking gardeners and nurseries alike to propagate native plants, grow them to landscape size, and plant them. All that is ever taken from the wild is a few seeds or an occasional cutting from particularly desirable plants. Plant populations in the wild are not endangered by this practice. For gardeners, however, there is a better reason to practice conservation through propagation. Nursery-grown plants are better plants. They have been grown under conditions that are as good as the nursery workers are able to provide. They have healthy leaves and roots. Usually they have been pruned and fed, so that they look like good landscape plants as well as have an excellent chance of surviving in your garden with only the minimal care needed to establish any plant worth having.
The end result of the North Carolina Botanical Garden program is that there are more rather than fewer native plants. Nursery or home propagation helps to ensure that native stands of plants remain for everyone to enjoy, preventing erosion and feeding wildlife, while the same species grow in our gardens, feeding our senses and attracting butterflies and bumblebees. Pinkshell azalea is just one of the native plants that has been adopted by a few nurseries. If you can't find the woody native plant you want locally or in a mail-order catalog, ask your landscaper or garden center that normally carries native plants. It may take a while, but they should be able to find one for you.
Woody plants are the shrubs and trees that live for years. Rather than dying to the ground each year like herbaceous perennials, they have stems made of wood. All too often, good information about woody plants for home gardeners is either hard to find or difficult to understand without a degree in botany or horticulture. This is unfortunate (and a situation I hope to remedy by telling you about these plants in language you can understand) since shrubs and trees provide the backbone for most landscapes. They represent an important and often sizeable investment. Properly selected native woody plants are well adapted to our region. As a result, they will succeed in your garden.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Growing and Propagating Showy Native Woody Plants by Richard E. Bir Copyright © 1992 by University of North Carolina Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Part One. Natives in the Garden
1. Getting Natives Started
Propagation
Seeds
Cuttings
Pruning and Transplanting
2. The Landscape
Site Analysis
Soil Preparation
Soil Physics
Soil Chemistry
Planting
Mulch
Competition
Fertilization
Pruning
Part Two. Plant List
Appendixes
1. Landscape Fertilizer Rates
2. Landscape Sizes and Germination Requirements
3. Showy Native Shrubs and Trees for Moist Sites
4. Showy Native Shrubs and Trees for Dry Sites
5. Showy Native Shrubs and Trees That Attract Wildlife
6. Showy Native Shrubs and Trees That Will Tolerate Neutral or Slightly Alkaline Soils
7. Sources of Rooting Hormones and Other Horticultural Supplies
8. Sources of Seeds for Native Woody Plants
9. Nursery Sources of Native Woody Plants
Selected References
Index of Scientific Names
Index of Common Names
General Index
What People are Saying About This
This is that rarest of things: a gardening book that's even better than the description on the back of the jacket.—Horticulture
Bir . . . invites both novices and professionals to take a closer look at plants unlikely to be encountered at the local garden center. . . . Before you plant this year, no matter where you live, examine our showy natives. Bir suggests that one of them might be the plant you're seeking.—American Horticulturist
Targeted pointedly at gardeners in the eastern United States, this eminently sensible book nonetheless will be welcomed by gardeners everywhere who grow plants native to the southeastern and mid-Atlantic states—and that includes most of us.—Pacific Horticulture
The book's first 42 pages offer one of the clearest, most succinct introductions to plant propagation I have seen anywhere. . . . In short, this is that rarest of things: a gardening book that's even better than the description on the back of the jacket.—Horticulture
A useful book for the amateur gardener looking for a single source of basic information on plants that are growing in popularity as landscape material in the home garden.—Brittonia
This is a beautifully organized, double-duty volume that belongs in the library of anyone interested in native woodies. Not only does this book include everything you need to know about propagating them, it boldly sifts and winnows the myriad possibilities down to a truly select group of native ornamentals.—Native Notes Newsletter
For those whose interest is either floral beauty or horticulture, this book is excellent. It, like its subjects, is showy: not loud, far from overstated, but elegant in its attention to detail, and in its palette of colours. The colour is found in the prose, and in the marvellous photographs which . . . are by the author.—Wildflower