Picture from CCJ in Toronto

Gardening from Kitchener

(Trifolium repens)

David Hobson, In the Garden

In the garden: Our own native shamrock is a pretty little weed

St. Patrick’s Day it is, and lawns and gardens may be looking green in places, too.

Chances are a bit of green has shown up with the groceries this week in the form of shamrock.

Well, OK, we can call it shamrock. It probably has clover-like leaves with pink or white flowers. The name shamrock comes from an Irish word, seamrog, meaning little white clover, which is exactly what the original shamrock of Ireland is — Trifolium repens, a clover, and like most clovers, it can be highly invasive.

We have our own native Shamrock — Oxalis Stricta, common wood sorrel.

It’s a pretty little plant with bright green leaves and cheerful yellow flowers, and it’s a determined weed when it shows up in lawns. There are over 800 species of Oxalis, but the lucky shamrock sold around St. Patrick’s Day is likely to be Oxalis acetosella or Oxalis deppei. The former has white flowers while the latter has pink. The base of the leaflets of Oxalis deppei are a blackish-brown colour, hence its other common name, Iron Cross.

Regardless, it is St. Patrick’s Day so whatever you have sitting on the table or window ledge today, it’s shamrock.

My shamrock is Oxalis regnellii purpurea, a plant with perfectly co-ordinated, two tone, purple leaves and lilac flowers. I grow it outdoors in summer, but right now it’s dormant in the garage in the same pail it’s been in for years. It’s actually a number of plants growing from small bulblets that keep increasing in number. Once in a while I sort them out and give them away. Even when it isn’t blooming, it’s a delight.

Oxalis regnellii can be grown indoors, but will lose its leaves and go dormant two to three times a year. Give it water after three or four weeks and it will start all over again. Yes, this shamrock has to be one of my favourite plants, and it isn’t the slightest bit green.

What is green in the garden is a concern, as despite a week of spring, even summery weather, it isn’t growing season yet, but plants will get fooled. I like an early spring, but this is a little too early when I still haven’t finished my late winter tasks. I have pruned a few shrubs, but I like to douse a few things with dormant oil spray around this time.

Optimum conditions for using this product are just as the first hint of green is showing on buds, but no later, as leaves will be harmed — I hope it isn’t too late. This is the time when insects wake up and insect eggs begin to hatch, ready to eat the first leaves. Spraying too early reduces the effectiveness as the spray may be washed off by rain before it has any effect. Best time to spray is on a calm day when the temperature is above freezing.

Dormant oil kits are comprised of oil and lime sulphur which usually have to be mixed prior to use (follow the instructions precisely and do wear suitable protective gear). The oil portion smothers insects while the lime sulphur provides resistance to fungal diseases. Use only when necessary and take care not to spray around ponds or water courses as the ingredients are harmful to fish. Dormant oil will also impair germination of seeds from self-seeding plants.

Evergreen trees should not be sprayed with dormant oil, and avoid spraying the following: holly, sugar maple, Japanese maple, red oak, cedar, and black walnut.

Also avoid spraying cats, dogs, children, and freshly waxed cars.

Especially avoid spraying ponds as it will harm any fish or essential pond critters.

And no, I don’t recommend adding green dye to the spray mix, despite what day it is — it’s bad enough seeing it in beer.

Gardening in Kitchener

In the garden: Ten days of Canada Blooms? Bring it on!

Has it been 16 years already? Canada Blooms, of course, and I’ve attended most. I’ve watched it evolve, seen its ups and downs and changes of location, but I’ve always enjoyed it.

Three years ago it moved from the Metro Toronto Convention Centre (where there was a lot of up and down) to the Direct Energy Centre at Exhibition Place, a move that was criticized by some, but it certainly improved access. Easy parking and no more crowding onto escalators or waiting for elevators.

This year sees a couple more changes that should be positive.

Canada Blooms 2012 is to be held in conjunction with the National Home Show — same location, same building, but completely separate shows — with the advantage that one ticket gets you into both shows.

Another is that maybe the hot tubs will stay where they belong in the home show. The other plus is the show runs for 10 days, March 16 through March 25, up from seven days in the past. This takes in two weekends, allowing those who can’t get there on a weekday the opportunity to see the show with perhaps less crowding.

Extending the show will pose a challenge for exhibitors with floral displays as plants will have to be kept in top condition for several more days. It also means the staff will have to be present at the show for a longer period, just when the garden industry is gearing up for spring. Still, I doubt the average visitor will notice these changes and will likely enjoy the show as much as ever.

Last year the theme of the show was Juno Rocks, where gardens were designed to reflect the perspective of talented musicians such as Ben Heppner and Jully Black. It was such a popular and imaginative theme that it’s back this year with Juno nominees Feist, Jann Arden, Keshia Chanté, and singer-songwriter and multi-instrumental performer, Royal Wood, teamed with Sarah Slean.

I’m a big fan of both Leslie Feist and Sarah Slean. And besides being a great singer, the irreverent Jann Arden cracks me up. Her garden will be a lyrical meadow featuring a small brook and a bench carved with lyrics, but after seeing Jann’s centrefold in the latest issue of Zoomer magazine, I’m wondering what else might appear in it.

The garden of Feist, a big Juno award winner, is meant to play on notions of time and is titled Past in Present. It’s described as wild, unkempt, and a bit rambling — sounds like my kind of garden.

Sarah Slean and Royal Wood’s garden is to have a strong environmental theme, while that of Keshia Chanté will be sleek and contemporary. I like the idea of combining musical influences with garden design. And besides, a garden is a perfect place to listen to music — unless it’s Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumble Bee, or worse still, Vaughan Williams’ The Wasps. Think I’ll stick with Feist on my iPod when I’m out weeding.

One display garden I’m especially interested in seeing is by the City of Taipei, Taiwan. It is going to reflect the culture and horticulture of Taipei and will be the first international presence at the show.

Besides viewing display gardens at Canada Blooms, I’ll be seeking out the latest seeds and plants, trying out new tools and asking probing questions about the contents of the latest wonder fertilizer.

If I can sit still long enough, I’ll take in a couple of presentations, too. There’s so much to hear and to do and see at Canada Blooms now that we have 10 days to get through it all — and to take in the hot tubs and aluminum siding at the Home Show.

Find Canada Blooms information online at: http://www.canadablooms.com/

Gardening

David Hobson, In the Garden
Fri Mar 02 2012

Desert Botanical Show is worth a visit

The plan was to escape the snow for once, except this was the winter without any.

Regardless, it didn’t discourage me from taking a trip south in February to do a little hiking around the red rock country in Arizona. Even there we walked in snow at higher elevations, but in the community of Sedona apple blossoms were blooming. And down in Phoenix spring was well underway, a perfect time to explore the Desert Botanical Garden under a dazzling blue sky.

I couldn’t possibly miss the opportunity to see this extraordinary garden. It’s filled with rare and unique plants of the Sonoran desert, which covers much of the southwest United States and parts of Mexico.

The idea for the Desert Botanical Garden was conceived back in the 1930s by local people who saw the need to preserve their native flora. The garden has grown to 58 hectares (that’s 143 acres) with more almost half of them under cultivation containing 50,000 plants: yuccas with flowers on four-metre stalks; huge, spiky agaves; desert wildflowers; and, of course, cacti in all shapes and sizes — including a bonus group of priceless ones at the entrance, created in glass by the renowned sculptor Dale Chilhuly.

Volunteers started the garden and it is volunteers who keep it humming along, all 1,100 of them. I met a number stationed along the trails, working as interpreters and happy to speak to visitors about the plants in their care.

One section that’s named Plants and People of the Sonoran Desert contains plants that were used to house, clothe and sustain the human desert dwellers of the past. Another is reserved as an outdoor classroom where cottonwood trees shade groups of schoolchildren who gather to study the plants and, with luck, will grow up to be tree huggers, except hugging is not a good idea in this garden.

Getting around is easy on the wide, paved trails — they’re essential, as wandering off piste is neither permitted nor advisable where the majority of plants are assertive cacti, especially the huge, ubiquitous saguaro.

This is the cactus of countless old westerns, the original cartoon cactus, growing as tall as 15 metres with multiple arms reaching for the sky. A volunteer was on hand to explain how the arms sprout forth to increase production of the night-blooming flowers that appear in April. These are followed by ruby-coloured, edible fruit in June.

I also learned that birds nest in holes pecked into the side of the Saguaro. The plant co-operates by forming a smooth callus to line the hole, making a perfect nesting box. What did surprise me was the sight of a dead Saguaro. Somehow I thought it would simply turn mushy and rot away, but not so. Instead, it resembled a bundle of split cedar rails.

The trees and shrubs of the Sonoran are designed to retain water and reduce transpiration from their leaves. The cottonwood tree here have two sets of roots — one close to the surface that spreads beyond the drip line and another that drives deep into the earth to reach the water table.

The creosote shrub (Larrea tridentata) is another plant with a strong will to survive harsh conditions. It has no connection with the common wood preservative, but it does have many uses, particularly medicinal, though like many herbs, it’s dangerous if used unwisely.

It really isn’t a friendly bush. To conserve moisture, it inhibits the growth of other plants in the area. And its small, resinous leaves wouldn’t spare a hint of moisture for the thirstiest coyote. When it does rain, however, the leaves fill the air with a pungent odour, considered unpleasant by some.

A volunteer showed me how to sample the fragrance by simply breathing on the leaves, then taking a sniff. My conclusion? It’s more a deodorizer than a designer air freshener.

As usual, there were too many plants and too little time, but I thoroughly enjoyed my visit and highly recommend it for anyone passing through the Phoenix area — and it almost never snows in the Desert Botanical Garden.

McFee Photos

30,000 Year Old Seeds Germinate and Grow

It's Alive! Pleistocene Plant Blooms Again

A Siberian plant frozen in the permafrost 30,000 years ago has been brought back to life.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Content provided by AFP

The seeds of the herbaceous Silene stenophylla are far and away the oldest plant tissue to have been brought back to life.

The previous record for viable regeneration of ancient flora was with 2,000-year-old date palm seeds at the Masada fortress near the Dead Sea in Israel.

Fruit seeds stored away by squirrels more than 30,000 years ago and found in Siberian permafrost have been regenerated into full flowering plants by scientists in Russia, a new study has revealed.

The seeds of the herbaceous Silene stenophylla are far and away the oldest plant tissue to have been brought back to life, according to lead cryologists Svetlana Yashina and David Gilichinsky of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The latest findings could be a landmark in research of ancient biological material and the race to potentially revive other species, including some that are extinct.

And they highlight the importance of permafrost itself in the "search of an ancient genetic pool, that of preexisting life, which hypothetically has long since vanished from the earth's surface," they wrote.

The previous record for viable regeneration of ancient flora was with 2,000-year-old date palm seeds at the Masada fortress near the Dead Sea in Israel.

The latest success is older by a significant order of magnitude, with researchers saying radiocarbon dating has confirmed the tissue to be 31,800 years old, give or take 300 years.

The study, in today's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, described the discovery of 70 squirrel hibernation burrows along the bank of the lower Kolyma river, in Russia's northeast Siberia, and bearing hundreds of thousands of seed samples from various plants.

"All burrows were found at depths of 20-40 meters (65 to 130 feet) from the present day surface and located in layers containing bones of large mammals such as mammoth, wooly rhinoceros, bison, horse, deer, and other representatives of fauna" from the Late Pleistocene Age.

The permafrost essentially acted as a giant freezer, and the squirreled-away seeds and fruit resided in this closed world -- undisturbed and unthawed, at an average of -7 degrees Celsius (19 Fahrenheit) -- for tens of thousands of years.

Scientists were able to grow new specimens from such old plant material in large part because the burrows were quickly covered with ice, and then remained "continuously frozen and never thawed," in effect preventing any permafrost degradation.

In their lab near Moscow, the scientists sought to grow plants from mature S. Stenophylla seeds, but when that failed, they turned to the plant's placental tissue, the fruit structure to which seeds attach, to successfully grow regenerated whole plants in pots under controlled light and temperature.

"This is an amazing breakthrough," Grant Zazula of the Yukon Paleontology Program at Whitehorse in Yukon Territory, Canada, told The New York Times.

"I have no doubt in my mind that this is a legitimate claim."

Paleaobotanists have known for years that certain plant cells can last for millennia under the right conditions.

Some earlier claims of regeneration have not held up to scientific scrutiny, but the Yashina/Gilichinsky team was careful to use radiocarbon dating to ensure that the seeds and fruit found in the permafrost were not modern contaminants from S. Stenophylla, which still grows on the Siberian tundra.

Arctic lupines, wild perennial plants in North America, were grown from seeds in a lemming burrow believed to be 10,000 years old and found in the mid-20th century by a gold miner in the Yukon.

Zazula recently used radiocarbon methodology to determine that those seeds were modern contaminants, according to the Times.

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