Q&A: Summer Plants for N.C. Gardens

Banana is one of the plants you'll learn how to grow in
Duke Gardens' Landscape Plants for N.C. Gardens class.

If this week’s heat has got your brain in “summer” mode, why not take that thought a step further and think about summer gardening? Bobby Mottern, a landscape architect and Duke Gardens’ director of horticulture, spoke to Gardens intern Crystal Cotton about the summer session of his “Landscape Plants for North Carolina Gardens,” which begins this Thursday.

What are some of the struggles N.C. gardeners might face?
A lot of people who take the class have moved down here from other areas, usually from up north, and the first thing that they realize is how difficult the soil is for gardening, because it’s mostly red clay.

The first thing they learn is how to deal with the soils. Then they learn how to use plants that do better in this area, because it’s hot. And it’s not necessarily the heat during the day that’s the problem, it’s the heat at night. Sometimes we just don’t get cool at night and that tends to be the deciding factor for plant material, where they can and can’t live.

Pests are another concern, with deer being the biggest pest. Insects and diseases are different things we have to deal with. But overall, the Southeast is a great environment for gardening; we usually get decent rainfall and temperatures are not too extreme. Because of the climate, the plant palette here is more developed than in other areas. We are able to grow many plants that require chilling during the winter, such as peonies and lilacs, but we can also grow salvia and agapanthus that are cold-tender.

What are some common mistakes people make in gardening here?
There are frequent mistakes that people make. Soil condition is number one. People dig a hole and they put the plant in it. They think it’s going to thrive and then they don’t understand why the plant begins to suffer. You’ve got to have quality amended soil with plenty of organic matter. As they say, “You don’t want to put a $10 plant in a 10-cent hole.” You want to make sure your soil is of equal value to the plant you’re buying.
Other issues: I think people water too much, especially their lawns. They also fertilize too much. They let the TV commercials guide them, instead of really understanding what kind of plant trouble they have, what kind of lawn they have, and understanding what it really needs. So we try to talk a little about irrigation and water practices, because we really have to be smart with how we use our water. And deer—unless you live in downtown Durham or Raleigh, you’re going to have deer, almost no matter where you are. We usually talk about what deer do not eat.

What are some of the some of the plants that will be featured in this class?
We’ll focus on perennials; herbaceous plants that go dormant during the winter and come back every year. Some specific plants we’ll discuss are purple coneflower, rudbeckia, veronica, phlox, herbs, hostas and daylilies, tropical plants like hardy banana trees and elephant ears, ornamental grasses, and many more.

What makes those plants so ideal?
They’re tried and true plants. They do very well. They’re easy to grow. They give us a nice flower or interest level throughout the summertime. Some people think it’s all about color, but it can also be a lot about texture, meaning the size or look of a plant’s foliage when it is not in bloom. Some plants have large leaves with really bold textures, such as banana plants. But then you put things like that beside ornamental grass, which is really loose, airy and light in texture, so that creates a lot of interest from combined textures. So that’s another way to generate interest when you’re not gardening just for color.

What does garden design involve?
How you would use plants, how you would group them, how you combine them with other plant material, how you would use the plant to benefit you. Let’s say something has a really nice flower and is very fragrant—you want to make sure to plant that by your patio or beside the back doorstep, someplace you’re going to be walking or sitting and enjoying that space to appreciate that fragrance. Maybe something attracts butterflies or hummingbirds—you want to plant those things where you can see those animals come into your yard.

By the end of the class, what do you what participants to have learned?
I want them to comfortable with the amount of plant material we’ve discussed in the course and for them to go to nurseries and recognize plant material and know those plants are going to do well in their yards. They’ll also be able to envision their own yard as we’re talking about plants in class, and when I say, “This plant has to be in the full sun and well-drained soil, it can’t sit in a wet location,” they’ll start to think about these areas in their yard.

Where are the best places to find these plants?
I try to recommend plants you’ll find at small nurseries and also plants you’ll find at the big box stores.

There are still a couple of spaces left in this course, which runs for four Thursdays from 10 a.m. to noon. For more information or to register, please call 668-1707 or email slsmith@duke.edu. The course is part of Duke Gardens’ Home Horticulture Certificate program, though anyone may take the class.

Saturday is Spring Family Fun Day

Making "sound sandwiches"
at Family Fun Day

By Crystal Cotton
Do you recall those days of playing in the woods, collecting rocks, going on wild insect hunts, and making dandelion jewelry?

Well, perhaps you can get back to this during Duke Gardens’ Family Fun Day on Saturday. The point of this day is to enjoy nature and learn more about it through science-themed activity stations.

building a fairy house

Kids and their families may work together to build fairy houses, concoct gel slime, make volcanoes in a bottle, paint with plants, dissect lima beans and see how plants can grow in a plastic glove. Families may also join the Great Fish Release, in which they’ll put the first fish into the newly refurbished fish pool at the foot of the Terrace Gardens.

making "ooze"

Part of Family Fun Day’s mission is to encourage families to bring their children closer to nature in their everyday life. That’s something that Stefan Bloodworth, curator of the Blomquist Garden of Native Plants, focuses on often with his own family.

In Bloodworth’s house they have “screen-free Sundays,” in which using screens of any sort – from television to computers – is forbidden.

“It’s just a time for the family to be together and get back to nature,” he says.

“When the kids know those other distractions aren’t an option,” he says, “that’s when they start looking for things to do.”

"sound sandwiches" teach children how vibration affects sound

Simply by starting with amphibians and insects, he says, you can begin to explain exactly how dependent a frog is on all of these other little pieces of its environment.

“Keep it simple, keep it interesting, and then really challenge them to make connections in their own brains,” he suggests.

learning about plants

An event like Family Fun Day can be helpful for parents who may have difficulty getting their kids outside and playing.

Durham mother Catherine Clabby likes her 12-year-old daughter to get outside and have fun because “it’s real free play.” Being outside allows kids to move their bodies and release energy, she says. “It just calms everybody down.”

“The Gardens are so great because it’s a refuge where you can come and walk and just be enveloped by all the beautiful plant life,” she says. “It’s just a place to go and relax.”

Participating in the Duke Gardens Family Fun Day could be the start of a whole new family adventure full of hiking, biking and becoming more familiar with our natural surroundings.

Family Fun Day will be Saturday, May 28, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. For more information about that and other nature-focused events, including summer day camp, please go to gardens.duke.edu or call 668-1707.

Sarah P. Duke Gardens creates and nurtures an environment in the heart of Duke University for learning, inspiration and enjoyment through excellence in horticulture. The Gardens is at 420 Anderson St.
Crystal Cotton is a junior at N.C. Central University and a communications intern at Duke Gardens. This column first appeared in the May 21 Herald-Sun.

Can this stick be part of a fairy house?

The Spring Plant Sale Continues

By Lauren Sims

Thanks to all who shopped at our fund-raising Spring Plant Sale. Duke Gardens raised roughly $10,000 after expenses. And the preview sale for members drew our highest gross ever. The preview also attracted new members who wanted first dibs on the wide array of plants -- including about 40 Duke employees who took advantage of a membership discount.

If you missed the sale, all is not lost. There are still some fabulous plants available at the Gardens' Terrace Shop, just waiting for you to give them a loving home. And for an added "Duke appreciation" perk, Duke employees may have a 20 percent discount on these plants from May 18 through May 25. (Update: this sale is now open to the general public & the plants will remain on sale until they're gone.)

There are a collection of colorful hanging baskets to choose from, full of flowers such as pink verbena.

We also have the stokesia 'Mary Gregory,' which will have a feathery yellow bloom.

The kaleidoscope abelia is a great option and always keeps you guessing; its leaves change color throughout the year.

There are some gorgeous bushes available, like the red-tipped cleyera japonica or santolina.

Cleyera japonica

Santolina

And we have a selection of the ever-popular hostas (see our hosta video) and the hardy banana plant.

Banana

If you're looking to attract wildlife to your garden, come check out the Joe Pye weed (which your neighborhood butterflies will love) and nepeta “catnip,” (which will please both the cats and the bees).

Joe Pye Weed

Nepeta 'Catnip'

(cats love it)

And if you’re looking to attract the envious glances of your neighbors, you can’t beat the sheer beauty of plants like the camellia, the spice rose, and the peony 'Scarlett O’Hara.'

Spice Rose

Duke Gardens can also help you stock your edible gardens this season. We still have a wide variety of herbs available, including rosemary, oregano, lavender, chives, chamomile and sweet basil.

Add that to our squash plants and blueberry bushes, and you are well on your way to a delectable summer garden!

Blueberry

Make planters with flowers, herbs & succulents

Learn how to create a living carpet from sedums
in a class at Duke Gardens
Photo by Jason Holmes

By Lauren Sims
One of the perks of the spring gardening season is having fresh cut flowers in your home – a small gathering of blooms on the coffee table, a fragrant mix of flowers and blooming branches in the entryway. Such arrangements bring the outdoor garden indoors. But no matter how diligently you tend them, within a week or so that perfect arrangement will have wilted and died.

Floral arrangements need not have such a short life, says florist and gardener Jay Stolz, who will lead several courses on living designs this spring at Sarah P. Duke Gardens. Instead of relying solely on cut flowers this season, consider a more natural design strategy, Stolz says. His living flower baskets combine differently shaped plants and flowers with blooming branches, sticks, stones and even live grass.

“I hope to be able to create something like a natural setting outdoors and move it into the home in the form of this arrangement,” he says.

The key to creating an appealing live display is to pay close attention to the patterns and boundaries of nature, Stolz says. Look for how a plant grows out in the garden and notice what it requires of the environment in order to thrive. If your arrangement does not reflect the needs of and relationships between your plants in nature, then whatever you will create will look false or unbalanced. Respect the information that the natural world provides, and your plants will be more likely to survive and flourish.

Such live indoor designs are not restricted to flowers and grasses. Indoor herb planters are another way to bring the outdoors in, and they have the added benefit of being useful in the kitchen. Again, Stolz cautions us to be mindful of the needs of these plants. For one, it is a mistake to crowd a bunch of herbs into a small space. The fullness of your planter may look nice, but your plants’ health will suffer. Each plant needs about 6 inches of unimpeded space in a deep planter. Herb roots grow down, not horizontally, so a shallow or crowded container will hold them back significantly.

In the end, planting live arrangements is a matter of aesthetics and attending to nature. When you’re designing, combine and rearrange plants until you like what you see. Then ask yourself, will these plants grow well together? Are they useful to me in such a way that I will be invested in helping them to thrive?

Learn how:
To work with Stolz’ guidance on your own planters, consider taking his spring Duke Gardens classes: “Spring Flower Basket,” April 21, 3-5 p.m.; “Herb Planter,” May 5, 3-5 p.m.; “Create a Living Carpet: Sedums and Succulents,” May 19, 3-5 p.m. To register or for more information, please email registrar Sara Smith at slsmith@duke.edu or call 668-1707. Please also see our full class and events schedule (PDF) online (or a brief roundup on our blog).

Sarah P. Duke Gardens creates and nurtures an environment in the heart of Duke University for learning, inspiration and enjoyment through excellence in horticulture. The Gardens is at 420 Anderson St.

Lauren Sims is a graduate student at Duke Divinity School and a work-study assistant at Duke Gardens. This column first appeared in the Durham Herald-Sun on April 16.

Plant Sale Preview: celandine poppy

Photos & text by Lauren Sims

With the Sarah P. Duke Gardens Spring Plant Sale just three weeks away, I sat down with curator Stefan Bloodworth to find out more about this year’s plant offerings from the Blomquist Garden of Native Plants.

This year, the Blomquist will feature a wide variety of woodland perennials. Among them, one great option to consider is the celandine poppy. Its sunshine-yellow blooms are reason enough to bring this plant home. But Stefan says that this plant has more than looks to recommend it. The celandine poppy is a naturalizing woodland perennial, which means that it spreads by seed very readily. So you could plant a couple of these poppies this year and, within three or four years, you could have quite a collection of them. This is a great way to fill out a garden bed. “You get more bang for your buck,” Stefan says.

If you’d like to see these flowers in their element, they’re blooming right now in the wildlife garden of the Blomquist Garden of Native Plants. That's the garden just to the right of the Blomquist's gate house entry. Come on out and take a look!

The Spring Plant Sale is April 30 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Admission is free. Duke Gardens members may attend a preview sale from 5 to 7 p.m. on April 29. You can sign up for membership on site or in advance. For membership info, call 684-5579 or write to millicent.snow@duke.edu.

Stay tuned for more preview videos and blog posts.

Author lecture: "The Founding Gardeners"

Author interview roundup by Lauren Sims

When UK-based author Andrea Wulf first visited the United States in 1987, she found the caricatured nation she had heard about—full of big cars, huge malls and endless billboards. As she explained in an interview with Kirkus Reviews, “In America, I believed, I was more likely to see someone driving a riding-mower than pruning roses.”

But Wulf also found much more than that caricature. “At its roots America is a gardening nation,” she said in the same interview. She explores those roots in her new book, The Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature and the Shaping of the American Nation, which she'll discuss in her appearance at Duke Gardens on April 14 at 7 p.m. The book looks at America’s founding fathers (Jefferson, Washington, Adams and Madison) and how their lives as gardeners and farmers influenced their political sensibilities.

For the founding fathers, gardening was intrinsically linked with revolution and the new America. “They not only created the United States in a political sense, they also understood the importance of nature for their country,” Wulf told Kirkus Reviews. “Golden cornfields and endless rows of cotton plants became symbols for America’s economic independence from Britain; towering trees became a reflection of a strong and vigorous nation; native species were imbued with patriotism and proudly planted in gardens, while metaphors drawn from the natural world brought plants and gardening into politics.”

Furthermore, founders such as James Madison spoke out early about the need for environmental preservation in this resource-wealthy nation. Tobacco had become an incredibly important cash crop in the colonial economy by the 18th century, Wulf explained in an interview with c-ville.com. Unfortunately, it drained the land of nutrients within just a few years. In order to keep production high, farmers would simply clear virgin forests and begin planting on new fertile soil.

As early as 1818, Madison spoke out against these practices and warned that deforestation could not continue unchecked. This belief was radical for the time, but Madison understood that Americans could only benefit from their resources as long as they guarded and nurtured them. For Andrea Wulf, Madison’s preservation politics was eye-opening. “For me that was the greatest surprise in writing this book: he’s this forgotten father of environmentalism,” she told c-ville.com.

For more about Andrea Wulf, you can read a short biography online.

TICKETS: For tickets to Wulf's April 14 Duke Gardens appearance, please contact the Duke Box Office at 919-684-4444 or tickets.duke.edu.

BUY THE BOOK: Duke Gardens' Terrace Shop has copies of The Founding Gardeners for sale.

Praise for The Founding Gardeners:

"This is a timely and passionate book, with resonances beyond today's legion of new gardeners, worrying about the cost in air miles of the food they eat. Wulf traces the birth of the modern environmental movement back beyond Thoreau and Muir to the founding fathers' passion for nature and plants, and in particular to a speech by Madison in 1818. Humankind, he said, could not expect nature to be 'made subservient to the use of man': man, he believed, must find a place within 'the symmetry of nature' without destroying it.

-Katherine Swift, The Guardian

“This book will fascinate anyone interested in gardening, agriculture or American history, offering new insights into four familiar lives and conjuring up the gardens of the new republic.”

-James Grande, Mail on Sunday

“There is a huge amount of fresh research in this valuable book, including the first proper examination of the gardening exploits of presidents James Madison and John Adams. The Founding Gardeners is a great achievement and deserves its place on the shelves of political as well as garden historians.”

-Tim Richardson, Country Life

More reviews

Class preview: Season-Long Bloom

Christmas fern

By Lauren Sims
Photos by Jason Holmes

Human beings are creatures of habit. This makes our lives and choices easier, when you know what is for breakfast, or look forward to the favorite TV shows, for example. But in your garden, repeating the same plantings over and over simply loses its appeal.

For people aching to escape the humdrum garden this year, Duke Gardens instructor Lauri Lawson, of Chapel Hill’s Niche Gardens, has some tips for creating a stunning season-long perennial garden.

First of all, think of your backyard garden as a year-round companion. Triangle gardeners can take advantage of an extra-long growing season that lasts well into the autumn months. Lawson urges people to make use of the full year of bloom, “from the little spring ephemeral bloomers that start the season off to the more boisterous blooms of summer,” and on into the oft-neglected fall plants which can significantly expand your color and texture palettes.

Hardy ginger lily

Lawson advises gardeners to keep in mind the nature of perennial plants when planning and planting a perennial border.

“I think the beginning gardener wants bloom, bloom, bloom, bloom all the time,” she says. But this is not the basis of a low-maintenance perennial bed. Instead, you’ll need to learn the growing times of your plants and plan for the sequence of blooms they display. That way, there will always be something interesting to see in the garden. Also, take note of the textural properties of your plants and incorporate non-blooming structural elements like ornamental grasses for added visual interest.

Finally, Lawson suggests that local gardeners take advantage of the horticultural knowledge and displays in the Triangle area. In addition to several excellent nurseries, Triangle gardeners have access to a variety of public botanical gardens, including Duke Gardens, and even private homes that hold exquisite garden tours.

“We live in one of the horticultural meccas, where there are almost too many gardens to tour,” she says.

Poke around area gardens and take notes of what plants and plant combinations appeal to you, says Lawson. Then take that inspiration home and transform your own backyard space.

If you’d like to learn more, consider taking Lawson’s Season-Long Bloom class at Duke Gardens on April 5 from 6:30 to 9 p.m. The class is part of the Gardens’ new Home Horticulture Certificate program, but anyone is invited to take it. For information or to register, please call 668-1707 or email slsmith@duke.edu. See our full list of classes & events here. Also, mark your calendars for Duke Gardens' Spring Plant Sale, featuring Duke Gardens plants, other plants ideal for this region from Duke Gardens and other vendors, and other nature-related gift items. The sale is April 30 (9 a.m.-2 p.m.), with a preview sale for members on April 29 (5-7 p.m.).

Sarah P. Duke Gardens creates and nurtures an environment in the heart of Duke University for learning, inspiration and enjoyment through excellence in horticulture. The Gardens is at 420 Anderson St.

Lauren Sims is a graduate student at Duke Divinity School and a work-study assistant at Duke Gardens. This column first appeared in the April 2 Durham Herald-Sun.

Indian Pink