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Many shrubs and vines provide spectacular displays of flowers that make a special appeal to beginning gardeners.

A Secondary Consideration

To the nurseryman who sells plants largely on the strength of their display value, flowers are all important. But to the landscape designer whose reputation and livelihood depend on how well satisfied the customer is with his landscape plans after they have been executed, the flower shrubs and vines do not mean much. He realizes that, on the majority of plants, they last for only a week or two, and the owner must enjoy the plant itself for the rest of the year. Therefore, he is more interested in form and texture than in flowers.

The novice garden maker should likewise try to control his emotions lest he sacrifice a pleasant year-round effect for the sake of a few weeks of spectacular flower display. That is why solar garden lights are an excellent addition to the landscape garden.

Valueless Plants

Fortunately, not many shrubs and vines that are popular because of their flowering habits are actually ugly after they finish flowering. But a few are practically useless as far as landscape value goes once their flowering period is over. Nevertheless, if you want such plants in your garden, use them where after they bloom, they will not have to play a major part in the design.

There are, for example, some species of Mockorange (Philadelphus) that for the average small home grounds are simply too large and overpowering. If kept pruned to a suitable size for such places, they are likely to become leggy at the bottom or extremely heavy at the top.

So if you insist on having one or two such plants in your garden for the sake of their flowers, it would be well to use them in the back of a shrub border; the tops would be seen and appreciated during the flowering season, and during the rest of the year the unsightly lower portion would be hidden by the shrubs in front of them.

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Fifteen years has been time profitably spent in an experiment with one flower – the African marigold. It’s taken a small garden plot, a few choice seeds, patience and careful work. By a process of elimination of the inferior and the selection of the best seed plants year after year, a very artistic and superior strain has been developed.

In the Spring of 1994, seeds of the Orange Prince, Yellow Supreme, Sunset Giants and a large unnamed variety, were planted; each in a separate bed. About 100 plants were set out before June 10; two to four plants around a good, firm stake. As they grew they were tied carefully but securely. This first season produced a large harvest of fine blooms. The very best ones in size and color, and those of artistic form that stood erect on strong long stems, were saved for seed. They were bunched as to color and hung up to be thoroughly dried before the seed was taken.

The elimination of all plants as they began blooming, bearing single, semi-double and strong-odored blooms began at once to be beneficial. The first Summer, at least, 60 percent of the plants were destroyed before the bees and insects had an opportunity to cross pollinize the best blooms with pollen from the inferior ones in the garden. Each year the operation was repeated so that during the first five years, the number of inferior plants was reduced to about 18 percent. The next five years, by actual counts, the per cent was lowered to 12, and the last five years not over five per cent have been inferior producing plants.

The selection of best seed plants, year after year, has produced outstanding qualities of color, odor, general size of blooms, the length and strength of stems and large strong plants. These features began to manifest themselves in a small way from the very start. They have increased in degree throughout the whole trial. The color range following all the original varieties, from a very light, pale yellow, through gold to a very deep orange, has been maintained and their brilliancy intensified. While intensely full, or complex, the blooms are unexcelled in artistic beauty.

For the first seven years, the percent of large blooms – four inches or over – was under the usual 10 per cent claimed for the African marigold group. From then on, the per cent reached 10 or over. In the fourteenth year, out of 420 plants, one patch of 320 grown from seed taken from the run of the garden, yielded 22 per cent. The other patch of 100 plants – seed from special blooms – produced 18 percent.

The African marigold, grown around stakes and tied firmly, makes a glorious display of color from August 1 until heavy frost comes; sometimes here as late as November 20. They are fine for cutting – 10 to 29 fine blooms – and with good odor, color, strong stems and foliage, make an unforgettable bouquet for the home or office.

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Fire-blight is a bacterial disease that attacks a number of different woody plants in the apple family. Affected are apple, crabapple, pear, mountain ash, hawthorn and cotoneaster, to name a few. The disease is often spread by bees during pollination. It can be carried by moisture and may spread to other trees or parts of trees through splashing rains. New growth seems most susceptible.

In general, pears are the most susceptible plants to this disease. The most evident symptom of fire-blight is the blackened or browned stems and leaves of new growth at the tips of the branches; infected flower clusters or partly developed fruit will appear similarly scorched as though seared by a blowtorch. When the disease enters older wood, infected parts look sunken, wrinkled, and when cut appear brown and dead. The sunken tissues are known as cankers. Once the disease enters the main trunks of trees, there is little that can be done to control it.

The disease strikes in areas where the growing season is wet and damp. It is less likely to be serious where air is dry and not humid. One way of overcoming it is to plant fire-blight resistant varieties. County agents or extension horticulturists can provide lists for your locality.

Pruning out newly infected parts can help reduce disease spread. Cut at least six inches below the region that appears infected. Disinfect pruning tools in alcohol or in mercuric chloride solution one part to 500 with water (it is highly poisonous) before each cut. If infection has entered the main part of the tree, pruning is of little value.

It is useless to discourage the bees, since they bring about cross-pollination necessary to get fruit. One possible solution suggested by a plant pathologist is to dust the entrance to bee hives with a fungicide like Captan. Whether this is effective, and whether it might harm the bees, are things that need further research.

The best precaution at present against fire-blight is to spray the trees during the pollination period with a weak Bordeaux mixture or an antibiotic spray (Agrimycin, Streptomycin, Agri-Strep). The spray should be applied just as trees are coming into bloom. Occasionally gardeners ask why their fruit trees fail to set fruit. There are many reasons. A number of kinds cannot set fruit from their own pollen. A mate must be provided to furnish pollen. This is very true of apples – it’s always wise to plant at least two or more trees, and at least two or more varieties. Late frosts sometimes kill flower blossoms, or bad weather at blossom time may restrict bee activity resulting in low pollination. These are just a few reasons for poor fruit set.

Now is the time to rake dead leaves and grass out of the lawn and prepare for new growth. Snow-mold may have attacked a lawn leaving dead patches treatment with a fungicide to will help control such disease.

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Success in grape growing depends greatly on pruning. Best time for this is the early months of the year. A warm day in January or February when the ground is clear of snow is ideal, but the job should be accomplished before the middle of March when the sap rises.

Pruning is perhaps the most important skill the vineyardist must master. He must realize that fruit is borne only on wood of the present season which arises from wood of the previous season. This means that last year’s new wood is the only source of buds which grow into shoots bearing probably one to four clusters of grapes each.

The problem becomes (first) one of cutting back a limited number of good canes to a few buds which will produce as many new bearing shoots as the vine can support, and (second) cutting off entirely all remaining (even good) canes which would over-tax the vigor of the vine. With experience the grape-grower learns to tell from the looks of the cane, the size and growth of the vine in the previous year, and the variety’s characteristics for bearing, which and how many buds to leave.

He must constantly plan ahead for new wood low on the vines, so that the vines do not have to spend too much of their energy maintaining a great amount of unproductive wood. This necessary balance between fruiting canes this year and new wood for next year’s crop is difficult both to explain and to achieve, but usually the tendency of the beginner is not to prune severely enough.

More trimming and shaping comes after the grapes have bloomed and set the bunches. Each fruiting cane tries to grow on out into a long leafy cane beyond the three or four clusters which have formed. To make the plant use its strength for the fruit, these should be snapped off at about the second joint beyond the grapes. New shoots will try to grow at these points and often at the joint opposite the grape cluster, but these should be kept broken off as summer progresses. Keep just enough foliage to support the plant properly by making food and to shade the fruit. Usually the bunches of grapes should be thinned by about one-third so that they will ripen faster and more evenly.

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The Augustine elm is well adapted to street tree planting. Its compact, deep root system lets it flourish and support itself in a limited area. At Winnetka, Illinois, several trees which were planted in a four-foot square of soil chiseled out of solid concrete have made satisfactory growth during the last five years.

Its root system is also desirable because in general trees with compact, deep roots do not cause much sidewalk lifting and cracking. American elm and other trees with wide spreading, shallow roots are noted for the damage they do to concrete.

In addition to its desirable root system, the fairly compact top and ascending branches make the tree suitable for street planting. Overhead interference is not great. The tree can be planted in median strips as well as between sidewalks and street. In Cicero, Illinois, a two and one-half mile median strip was planted with these elms. In several years they produced lots of interesting shadows and provide a distinct separation between the lanes of traffic.

Its compact shape also makes the tree ideal between fairways on golf courses. In large areas group plantings of the tree are more attractive than individual plants. However, on a large site where there is a lot of grass as a foreground and tall trees as a background, an individual specimen commands a lot of attention.

Group planting does not rule out the use of the Augustine ascending elm on the home grounds. The tree blends nicely with other large trees and in small areas can be used as an individual to fill a need that any tree might serve. On large lawns where several trees can be used, an effective arrangement is to plant a tree at both sides of the rear of the property and one along the property line on either side of the house and slightly to the rear of the house. This gives a triangular arrangement which enables the trees to tie the backyard setting together.

The definite V crotch that most Augustine ascending elms have presents a problem of durability. Generally trees with horizontal branches are best able to resist wind and ice damage. However, this elm withstands all weather conditions despite its V crotch. Its strength may lie in the fact of its upright limb structure.

Any well-drained soil that supports deciduous trees will also maintain Augustine elms. Planting is the same as for any tree. Dig a large hole, spread the root system in the hole and firm soil around the roots. After the hole is filled, mulch the area with peat or ground cobs. Prune to eliminate irregular branches and establish a balance between the top and roots. Last of all, wrap the tree, and water every other week during the first summer, if necessary.

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The landscaper must decide whether deciduous plants (those that drop their leaves) or evergreens should be used in the foundation planting. Your taste and your climate will be the key factors. But remember that a mixture of the two is rarely, if ever, desirable – although an evergreen ground cover can well be used with whichever type of plant you decide on. Indeed, such a ground cover might be even more useful and effective around deciduous material than around evergreens. It will keep the planting from looking sparse and bare after the shrubs go dormant and drop their leaves.

Seasonal Changes

Deciduous plants grow much faster and larger than most evergreens so you need to know more about plant habits generally to use them properly. As to which type offers the greater interest throughout the year, it may surprise you to learn that the deciduous plants lead. In many parts of the country such plants go through four seasonal phases in each of which they take on different characteristics.

As an example, imagine a high-bush blueberry growing near a window from which you can see its branches. In the spring it is decked with attractive creamy-white lily-of-the-valley-like flowers, a beautiful sight to behold. By mid-summer it has picked up its full foliage and also a crop of cool-looking blueberries which attract birds and add life to the garden. In the fall, few plants can surpass the brilliant foliage coloration of this species. And, finally, in the winter, the zig-zag growth of its bare twigs is attractive, especially when sheathed in ice during a sleet storm.

Evergreen Phases

Most evergreens, on the other hand, have but two phases which are not too strikingly different. In the late spring and early summer the new bright green growth contrasts pleasantly with the dark green older growth. After a few months the two blend into one more or less uniform greenand that is the extent of the seasonal change.

Of course, they present a beautiful picture when covered with snow, but if the snow is heavy it may split off branches or bend them over and permanently spoil their looks. Give that aspect of the situation some consideration in your planning if you live in a region subject to ice or snowstorms. Look around and see how evergreens on properties in your locality have fared.

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Have you ever come home from work dog-tired on a cool evening and smelled fried potatoes and onions? In my book, they belong alongside freshly baked bread as a “welcome-homer.”

If you, too, are a confirmed onion eater, no matter what anyone says then you might like to know what varieties are best suited to the many. different uses of onion.

There are hundreds of varieties of onions, but we seldom use more than four or five.

Here are some facts that will help you “know your onions.”

“Bunch” onions are those which are used green. They may be used in salads and relishes.

There are many varieties of the “dry” onion type. Any of these can also be used green. Some are better winter keepers than others.

Some are excellent keepers and good for general use.

A small, mild variety is good for creaming and for glace onions. They are best when used before fully mature.

Spanish onions are a good all-around variety but cannot be kept too long. They are good fried or creamed.

Of course, if you are a real, honest-to-goodness onion eater, you’ll want to grow a few red ones. Now, there’s a real onion!

Leeks are a less-known member of the onion family. They are used mainly in Vichyssoise and are sometimes used in a casserole with a cheese sauce. Leeks may be stored like celery.

We should not fail to mention our old friends, the chives. There are few garden plants as adaptable and useful as chives. If your family doe knot care for an overpowering onion flavor, chives are for you. A very few seeds will give you all you can use for years plus a share for all your friends. An occasional trimming with the power mower will keep young, fresh, new tops at their flavorful best.

In the fall, you can bring a small clump into the house for your kitchen window. They will provide plenty for the winter.

Chives are excellent in potato salad and cottage cheese if added just before serving.

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When a gardener asks me how to collect plants in the wild I’m apt to say “Don’t do it.”

This answer is not prompted by any view of conservation, but one of dollars and cents and labor.

Just figure it out for yourself. For one, or a few plants you drive 20 rough miles into the mountains (40 miles round trip at .75 cents per mile). Then there is the problem of lugging tools and wet sacks a half mile to the location of the plants. Then comes the digging of the plant or plants (why do the “selected” ones always grow among rocks?) After the plants are burlapped comes the time to carry them (35 pounds or more) back the half mile to the car. After a hurried trip home the plants are planted and watered. Somehow they always look much more scraggly when they are out in the open. What is the result? A 50-30% chance that the scraggly plant or plants will survive.

I don’t like the odds.

As for me, I’ll go to a good nursery and pay 10 to 15 dollars for a well-shaped plant growing on a pruned and active root system. It’s already dug, so all I do is take it home and plant it. The odds? About 95 to 5 that it will never show that it has been moved.

For all usual cases that is still my answer.

Those Rare Plants

There are unusual cases where collecting is worth the trouble, however. If you find a special plant, one with unusually large or colorful bloom, better foliage or something of the sort, it may be worthwhile to bring it into your garden for further observation.

The only catch is that of the chance of losing the plant in transplanting it. With rare plants you just can’t afford. 50-50 odds.

Here is a trick for juggling the odds in your favor.

When you have selected your plant, decide how large a ball of earth you should lift with it to give it a good chance of coming through if it has a good root system. Don’t forget that a wild plant almost always has so wide ranging a system of roots that you can’t hope to collect more than a small fraction of it.

Now draw a circle of the selected diameter around the plant. Mark the quadrants of the circle. Now dig a trench around two opposing quadrants. Make the sides straight down to the full depth of the future ball, cutting all roots cleanly.

The trench need be only as wide as the digging tool.

Now fill the trench with a light, fluffy mixture of compost (“forest duff”) and a little soil.

If you do this in October or November you can then relax until Mareh: Then return and repeat the operation for the other two quadrants.

At the next planting season you can ball this plant, working from the outer edge of the trench. Your plant will have formed a multitude of fine feeding roots in the light back-fill in the trench.

Under such circumstances you should hardly lose a plant in a hundred.

Did I hear you say “That’s hard work?”

It certainly is. I’m sure you will agree that it is too much for any ordinary plant.

Of course, if your plant is as unusual as you think it is, it’s worth it. If not, be lazy like I am. Just let your nurseryman do the work. It’s cheaper really, and it surely saves a lot of spade work.

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Most Enthusiastic gardeners agree that gardening is a grand adventure with thrilling experiences at almost every turn. Yet as I look around among my gardening acquaintances. I am amazed to find that many miss much of the joy of their hobby by limiting their activities to the few short months of summer.

There are many ways the hobby of gardening can be an absorbing enterprise the entire year, and one of them is by allowing the seed and nursery catalogs to carry you through strange and exciting adventures during the winter.

There is an idea abroad among matter-of-fact gardeners that a seed or nursery catalog is merely sales literature for ordering plant materials. Their catalogs are discarded after their needs are ordered so as not to clutter up the house. They miss the pleasure and instruction which can be theirs from the correct use of catalogs.

To make clear what one gardener thinks is correct use, let me recount a few of the exciting adventures that have come my way during the years in which I have let seed and nursery catalogs be a part of my year-round living, but please overlook the perpendicular pronoun if it becomes too prominent!

Let us assume that this winter evening a raging blizzard prevents you from going out. A new seed catalog has arrived in the day’s mail. Your evening is not lost, because your catalog will provide you entertainment if you will approach it in the right manner. As you sit down in your snowbound living room, let us suppose that your catalog falls open to the muskmelon section and that your attention is directed to one of the new hybrids.

Its description is so enticing you wonder what gardeners did before the days of hybrids. Then begins a delightful journey into the past, and if I happened to be the snowbound gardener, the journey would go something like this: I would reach for my file of old catalogs to be reminded of some of ths; good old varieties perhaps no longer available. I could no doubt recall the first time I tasted the superb quality. Then my glance might fall on an old Maurice Fuld catalog, and fancy would surely run rampant, finally coming to rest, no doubt, on a Japanese variety-perhaps, with “the sweetness of `honey dew’ and the delightful flavor of a high quality pear.”

From here, I might travel the uncertain road followed by De Candolle throughout the world in his search for the muskmelon’s origin. I would see Africans on the banks of the Niger gathering and eating little wild plum-sized melons which Thonning named Cucumis arenarius; and inhabitants of Northern India eating the wild form, which Roxburgh called C. turbinatus. A variable plant with fruit from the size of a plum to that of a lemon, its flesh may be sweet, insipid (such as some of the modern kinds we grew the past sunless summer) or slightly acid.

My mental wanderings would next take me to the hills of Persia, now Iran, where in modern times the world’s best melons are grown. Then, if I had more time and did not get too sleepy, I could follow the muskmelon from its introduction into Europe, perhaps about the beginning of the Christian era, to the present, savoring many of my own cultures during the years that I have grown muskmelons. Eventually I would return to the new hybrid described in my new catalog.

As you can see the world of the landscape and garden does not only happen in the greenhouse or outside in the dirt.

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Layering is a safe, sure, simple way to increase many types of plants, and particularly the climbers and danglers with which this book is concerned. The first requirement is that the plant have long, lax or drooping stems – which vining plants do. The rest is easy, because the stem is not severed from the parent until the new plant is well rooted and can survive on its own. Humidifying devices, bottom heat, and close protection are seldom called for.

Garden plants layer readily, sometimes even spontaneously. And layering is equally easy for indoor or greenhouse vines. A wandering stem or runner is simply pinned down on the soil in a nearby pot, and severed when it is securely rooted.

Ground layering in the garden takes place at the base of the parent plant. Loosen and lighten a small section of soil, and mix in some peat or other humus to help hold moisture. Select a firm, semiwoody stem, and open the thick skin in one of several ways to speed up rooting. The stem can be nicked underneath with a sharp knife, or split and held open by a small piece of toothpick or match, or simply twisted just enough to break the outside skin and separate a few of the inside tissues. Some plants insist on rooting at or near a node, others don’t care where. And some softer stems don’t even need to be nicked.

Now, bend down the long branch and bury the portion to be rooted in the prepared soil, leaving the tip section of the branch sticking up. Anchor it with a stone, clothespin, or crossed sticks. When the buried stem is well rooted, cut the old branch between new and parent plant, and transplant or pot the offspring.

Simple ground-layering can be modified or embroidered so that more than one plant is produced from each operation. In serpentine layering the stems are covered with soil at intervals, with sections of the stem looping up in the air between. Multiple, or continuous, layering works on plants and vines that root readily all along the stem or branch. The entire stem is buried, except for the tip, and new plants that come up at intervals are cut apart and transplanted.

Air layering is a procedure for thick, upright, canelike stems. The stem is nicked or opened near a node or not, depending on the plant; and that section of the stem is enclosed in a ball of moist sphagnum moss. This is held in place by a firm bandage of polyethylene, a plastic that permits passage of air but holds in moisture, tied to the stem at each end of the ball with soft cord. Check occasionally to make sure the sphagnum has not dried out. When you see roots inside the plastic, cut off the stem just below that point and pot up the new plant, its root ball intact in the moss.

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