University Place

The Straight and Narrow of Plant Material

– Hi, everybody, I’m Paul Ganshert from Ganshert Nursery and Landscapes. We’ve been servicing in the Madison area for almost 70 years. We’re a design build firm with a nursery and welcome to the Garden Expo. So hopefully you’ll get something out of this talk for the straight and narrows of plant material. You’re going to hear a lot of familiar names of plants you probably know except for the cultivars that are connected to that. So basically, they’ll take a normal plant, an amelanchier or whatever, create a cultivar so it’s basically a mutation or a specific thing they’re looking for. What we’re going to be talking about today mostly are these mutations or specific points where the plant is quite a bit more narrow than the species. We kind of have to divide narrow as well because that’s relative. So on one hand you look at a shade tree that might be 70 feet wide or more. Maybe we have a cultivar that gets 40 feet, and that’s narrow. So just so you understand what narrow is. Narrow is different to everybody. Kind of like age. Whenever I just asked if there’s anybody old in the audience, they have to raise their hand once and then they kind of wait and think and we have a conversation about what is old, and all that kind of stuff. So anyway, we’ll get rolling here. So you all have the list there of the shade trees. We’ll start with them. And we start with a great one, well, and shortly here.

This was just a slide, kind of indicative of wrong plant, wrong spot. The funny thing I like about this one, so it’s been trimmed to within an inch of its life. And actually on this site, instead of removing the plant material ’cause the screen was so important, or trimming it back, which you couldn’t take it back any further than it is already ’cause it would just be bare. So what do they do in their infinite wisdom? They added 18 inches of sidewalk. So there you go. There’s another solution. A lot of times for the tall and narrow what we’re talking about is screening. Maybe you have a neighbor like this, hopefully not. We’re trying to block out views and that kind of stuff. Maybe there’s privacy. Maybe we’re trying to divide a space into smaller, a couple of smaller spaces, so you have a private space in your own yard. Obviously wind and snow control’s an issue sometimes and noise reduction.

The thing that most people start with is they say, “Well, I have a limited space so I’ll just put up a fence.” And the realities with that is there’s codes with fences all over Wisconsin. Typically in your backyard you’re not going to be able to put a fence higher than six feet. That’s a limit. In some neighborhoods you can have no fence. Typically in the side yard, front yard, you’re going to have a fence of three or four feet high will be the maximum you can have, if you can have it at all. So the conversations I get into, clients sometimes, is I become the fence, I’m six foot. So we’ll be standing on an area, like I had a woman once, she had a backyard where you came out of a stoop fairly high. She was about three feet off the ground. She said, “I want to build a deck here.” And she had a solid six foot fence around her yard and I said, well, I’m taking a wild guess that your privacy is an issue and it’s important to you. And she said, absolutely. I said, do you have a ladder? And she said, sure no problem, what’s that for? I said, could you just step up onto this ladder, up to this rung, ’cause that’s going to be the level of your deck. And she said, okay. And I said, now look to your right, what do you see? I see all my neighbor’s junk. What are you seeing in back? I see my neighbor’s car. What do you see to the left, so you get the picture. I said, well here’s what we’re going to do. Instead of building a deck, we’re going to get you down as quick as we can, put a patio, add grade. And now that fence actually does something as a six-foot fence. But structurally we’re limited to about six feet. There’s a couple of instances where we can kind of mess around with the law a little bit. And I’ll talk to you about those later, but once we get over six feet then typically we’re going to vegetation that we can screen stuff out with vegetation. Again, sometimes we’re limited with space. If you have a small yard or you have a small space between a sidewalk and a property line or whatever, we’re trying to address that. It’s a challenge, but there definitely are some things that will fit the bill.

Sometimes people look at it as noise reduction. So I can put in an evergreen hedge. And the day after I put it in, you’re going to say, “Wow, Paul, it’s so much quieter.” And I’m going to say, you know what? You’re so wrong. If I have a decibel meter– I do it the day before and the day after that work’s been done, there’s virtually no difference. The only way you can stop sound is a solid surface where it’s going to bounce off. But there is a however here, a caveat. The reality is, is if you don’t see something, you don’t hear it as much. You don’t notice it as much. So if we can hide the visual a lot of time the sound at least goes down if not disappears. So that’s just something to think about with that.

So anyway, we’ll get into some of the plants here. Like I said the trees, we’re going to start with amelanchier. A great plant. Grows really well here. There’s a couple varieties here, grandiflora, Robin Hill, the Rainbow Pillar is another one, and Ovation. They’re going to all be a little bit narrower than the species. The biggest thing with amelanchier is that if you’ve never eaten amelanchier, you’ve got to go do that this spring. It’s one of the first things to bloom. It puts out a fruit really quick and in early summer, you can pluck off varied sized berries. It’s kind of a cross between a blueberry and a pineapple. I’ve heard some other discussion as to what it tastes like. But that’s kind of what it tastes like to me. I had some entry-level guys that just started with us, our firm a couple years ago, I go to, got to a job before they were there. I went around back and found this amelanchier just loaded. So I’m having lunch off of this amelanchier and these guys that were new to the business and they were entry-level guys, came around and they’re like, what are you doing? And I said, oh, you should try one. And they thought it was like a hazing thing or something, but anyway they did try it and I had a hard time getting them to work the rest of the day ’cause they kept nibbling on the tree. But, it’s a great plant.

The Robin Hill and the Ovation typically are white.

That’s going to be a white bloom, which is pretty typical. The common names are service berry, June berry. There’s a bunch of common names or whatever. Essentially, about the only thing that can be challenging with the plant is that you really don’t like wet feet. That’s about the only thing where you can have a problem with them. These guys, the one especially, the Standing Ovation is incredibly narrow. I’ve not used it personally. I’ve seen it. And it’s just, you know, a spire going up. Great fall color. Just a really solid plant, going forward. It’s going to be a kind of an ornamental tree, a small tree or large shrub, multi-stemmed shrub. You can look at it either way.

Betula, so we get into the birch. A thing we ought to have a conversation with first here is the wonderful thing called birch borer and leaf miner. And any white birch, you’re going to have that as a possibility. Even the White Spire that was developed here on campus. There was a great, not so great story with that actually, where the tree, they thought it was true to seed. They seeded it. Some of the seedlings were somewhat from pubescence, some were not. Come to find out that some were very resistant, some were not. It got released to the industry and kind of has messed things up ever since then because of that.

But generally speaking, like when I have a new staff person– I shouldn’t be telling this out loud– but when I have a new designer or something, I say, you’re young, and to get people to think that you’re professional, you got to have some some quick things that you can tell them right off the bat. So if you go in the yard and they have a white paper birch, you put your hand over your eyes and you tell them they have birch borer and you’re probably right. That’s pretty, pretty straightforward. Anyway, these are a couple of really narrow varieties. The Parkland Pillar really seven-foot width. That’s just crazy. It’s just a spike.

The Senior, again it’s 25 feet wide, but normally they get wider than that. And the Fargo there at 10 to 12. Beautiful yellow fall color. It is a great plant. I’ve tried other varieties, Himalaya and some other things like that. We’ve never to date, found a great white birch that is not going to be susceptible to borer, unfortunately. Great plant other than that though. Typically when we’re in this realm with a paper birch, we’re going to steer people toward a river birch and unfortunately there’s no columnar river birches, yet. And I clarify that, yet. Everything that I’m giving you today is stuff that’s around and exists. There’s a lot of work going on for specific characteristics and plant material with the breeders. So, believe me, they’ll be probably 10, 30, 40, 50 more columnar things in the next couple, three years. So it does, it does go pretty quick. So cherries, again, one of the earliest things to bloom.

Typically a pink of sorts, you got the Goldspur.

That’s in the six- to nine-foot range for width. Not, you know, just a smaller ornamental tree. The only problem we typically have with cherries, because they bloom so early, we have issues possibly, potentially, with frost damage to the buds. Where you may not get a flower because of that. If we get a late frost, or something like that, it can take them out. Pink Flair blooms a little bit later and a little bit less susceptible than to the frost damage, and that sort of thing.

They also have, you know, it’s considered a chokecherry, Amur Chokecherry, they’ve got a great bark. Kind of an exfoliating bark that’s really interesting as the plant gets older. But all these are, you know, fairly narrow as far as that goes.

So we get into crab apples.

So when I was young, we used to put in crab apples. There’s crab apple called Hopa. It was a yellow crab apple that the apple was big as an apple. I mean large, large apple. And back in the ’50s, that’s what people wanted ’cause they wanted something that was showy and that stayed on the plant. Well after a while, people kind of got lazy and hated cleaning all that up. So the breeder said, well, we can make smaller apples. Not a problem. They worked on apples. They boom, boom, boom, got it down to where they developed crab apples that had no apples. And we in the North said, well time out, wait a minute. We want apples. Flowers are great, but we only get a couple weeks out of those. We can get six months out of an apple. So we’re looking for a small, persistent fruit is what we’re usually looking for with crabs. So, in the old days, we’d look for something that the flower was really good. That was first thing and then we’d look for a big apple. Well that’s changed. Then it was the flower and then a persistent apple. And then we’re like, well, really, we get more out of the apple. So it should be apple, a persistent apple, should be the number one characteristic we look at. Number two is the flower and then we were like, oops, what about this fungus thing? Years ago, we had a summer where– and this is quite a while ago when I was a kid– we got into July and every crab apple in Madison had three leaves on it and we didn’t know why. So we went to the experts and they said, oh, perfect storm. It’ll never happen again, yadda, yadda, yadda, all this kind of stuff. It’s happened every year since then. So again, the breeders got on the wagon and said, well, we’ll work on that. So now the number one characteristic we look at is that there’s, they’re not susceptible to fungus, or they have a high resistance to fungus. That’s the number one thing. Then that they have a persistent fruit, number two. And flower is a distant third. Typically ’cause it is relatively short-lived. They’re very consistent. They’re easy to grow. A lot of them have the upright form.

They, like I say, they have a great flower that develops, starts developing into the crab apple. Crab apples are small. They drop, they’re not a mess to clean up in the fall and/or they last all the way to the following spring on a lot of varieties. So you have that winter interest that you typically don’t notice until we have that first snow, so you have a backdrop of white and then it really stands out, the color on them.

So we’ve got a couple of different ones here. The Adirondack, obviously, that’s the one, I think it’s coming up here. Marilee, it’s 10 feet wide. We’ve got Adirondack, that’s one of the most narrow ones. I’ve got a six to eight in a white. That Maypole is just a bizarre little plant. It looks like a maypole. It’s really tight and compact, doesn’t get very tall, loaded with fruit, to the point where you think it might fall over. Just a really, really good plant for a narrow space and that. I wouldn’t say any of these are totally resistant to fungus ’cause they’re not. They’re better. They’re not the worst. They’re not the best. They’re better. They’re mostly grown for their form more than anything. They’re going to be nice and tight on that end.

Next, we get into beach. So typically with beach, we’re mostly looking at the leaf.

They have some pretty interesting leaf colors and things like that. These are some real upright ones. The Dawyck Purple, Dawyck Gold, the Fastigiata, and the Obelisk.

Predominantly, like I said, it’s the leaf. You’ll want to put them in a sheltered location. They’re a little touchy to grow, at least get through a winter, you can grow ’em, but getting them through a few winters can be challenging sometimes.

But yeah, it’s that, so basically location’s going to be one of the biggest things you got to look at when you’re looking at some of the beaches that are out there. So there’s Gold at 15 feet wide. All these are roughly, you know, the Dawyck there, the Dawyck Purple on the end. They give you a variety, or a range of six to 15. It really can vary per plant and per site conditions, as to the width on it. So if they’ve got plenty of room to grow and great soil and whatever, they’re going to spread out a little bit. And I think the caveat to any of these columnar growing trees is they will get wider in time, if given room and really good soil and everything else. But it’s probably way down the road. Not much we got to worry about. They’re going to stay pretty tight and columnar for quite some time on the beach. Next, we’re jumping into ginkgo. This is a probably one of my favorite trees by any standard. The straight species is going to get quite a bit wider. So this is a columnar form and I’m using that term loosely. And the fact that it only gets 20 to 25 feet wide. But for a ginkgo, that’s columnar. The one bummer that I’ve seen wit ginkgos, we’re at a talk with an insect guru from the East Coast, this doctor was talking about diversity. And we were talking at our landscape architecture conference about diversity. And he said, so how many people in the room love ginkgos? Everybody raised their hand. Then he started to talk about how many caterpillars young birds need to eat. You know, it’s tens of thousands and the diversity of caterpillars are out there. So, unfortunately, with ginkgos, it’s got so specific that there’s one caterpillar that chews on its leaves. One, period. So as far as diversity, it’s a bummer. It’s not a good plant, right? You can go to an oak, just a single oak, and have two, three hundred different species of caterpillars that’ll be on that oak. Sometimes even more so than like an acre of prairie, or something of that sort, depending on what’s in the prairie. So as far as diversity goes, it’s a real bummer. As far as plants go, it’s a phenomenal fall color. It’s a great grower. It’s got fewer and, well, it’s got basically no disease problems, no insect problems. And here’s, as an industry, we’re kind of shooting ourself in the foot, because when we talk about we want diversity, that’s great. I see diversity as that we just got a huge job of public education out there. Because, we want diversity, that’s true. But then when we have a problem with a plant, we go to the genetics people and say, hey, we have a problem, this insects’ chewing on it. This disease, this whatever, and they’re like, okay, well, we’ll work that out of the mix, right? So they work it down to a ginkgo to where there’s one caterpillar that chews on, right? So we’ve basically reduced diversity down to one and we’re shooting ourselves in the foot. So what we need to do is educate the general public that when you go out and see a leaf that’s been chewed on, you’ve got to applaud yourself and say, yay, caterpillars are chewing my leaves! This is great for the environment. We don’t need chemicals. We don’t need anything. Let’s just let them run, you know. So that’s something that’s a long road ahead. Anyway, the ginkgo, typically they have this really interesting fan shaped leaf. It’s almost, I mean, almost glows in the dark. It’s so beautiful. And that’s what it’s really known for. Especially with kids. They’ll collect maple leaves and whatever else, and whenever you see them and they pull up that fan shaped leaf, they just feel like they got, they found a candy bar. It’s a pretty, pretty cool thing when they’re doing leaf collection in the fall for a school project or something. So, anyway ginkgo, one of my favorites. There are Hornbeam, another great plant. Carpinus, there’s a Frans Fontaine, the Columnaris Nana, the Palisade, the Firespire, and the Rising Fire.

Basically the common names, hornbeam. Some of them do have a slight resistance to black walnut, to the juglans, so that could be a decent thing. The Palisade is one specifically that you cannot have salt anywhere near. It’ll just eat that plant up. But the rest of them are pretty resilient and pretty tolerant.

And they’re so narrow, especially that nana there, the Columnaris Nana, with to a two to four feet for width. I mean it’s like a light pole. It’s pretty. It’s kind of a strange thing, but it’s interesting. They typically all have a pretty nice fall color in the orange to red.

Just a pretty tough plant overall.

The next one up, we’ve got the hackberry. So I’ve never, hackberry, it’s a tough, tough tree.

It’s used on city plantings and stuff like that ’cause they, you can abuse the living heck out of it and it doesn’t blink. Tough plant. This is a variety, the Sentinel, obviously only 12 feet wide, again, this really columnar form. The issues that I’ve always had with hackberry is they’re pretty susceptible to witch’s broom where are these funky mutations in the branches that look pretty strange. And they can run rampant on a tree. They also have a thing called nipple gall where they have these little bumps all over the leaves where it looks like it’s got acne. That’s kind of unsightly but if your plant doesn’t, if you’re lucky enough that you don’t have that problem with your hackberry, God bless you. Because I’ve seen a lot of it and it’s not– We put it in areas where that’s not going to be a problem and people don’t mind that it’s got nipple call, or witch’s broom, or whatever. This plant will just keep growing. It’s tough as nails. You can throw anything at it and it doesn’t even blink.

Honey locust, another fairly tough plant. Again, we’re looking at Street Keeper here. 20 foot is narrow for a honey locust. We planted a lot of Skyline and Shademaster when I was a kid. It’s a great plant other than the fact that they have a really buttressed root system, where the roots come to the surface and they keep coming to the surface. So whenever we go to somebody’s yard and the roots are up, they say, well, what do I do now? Do I mulch it, whatever? And, unfortunately, you get a fair amount of people and they want grass. And it is attainable under a locust because it’s filtered shade with such a small leaf. Well the only thing we can do is add a little bit of soil to cover that and all we’re trying to do is just making sure that the mower doesn’t scar the roots. That’s all we’re trying to do. It’s going to come back. It’s going to punch through the soil again, continue to come up. If they don’t mind and we can hopefully convince them into not having grass underneath there then we can make it into a mulch bed, maybe through the drip line or whatever. And try to minimize some of that screwing around with soil, and that kind of thing. But a tough plant. The one thing we learned in the industry, this was probably, maybe 10 years ago, we really thought that we weren’t going to have any more honey locusts because we ran, the industry ran into a huge problem with canker.

What it turned out to be was just a cultural problem that we had in the industry. So in the industry we’re real busy, you can only dig plants at certain times a year, so on and so forth. So pruning often gets pushed off to the winter and sometimes that’s best, but with honey locust that was– The typical thing was we would prune honey locust in the winter. Come to find out they said, well, let’s just see if we try pruning them in the spring, if that’s still going to be an issue and that’s all we had to change. And the canker went away. Because you had that open wound sitting all winter and the canker just spread all over the place. So culturally, we learn every year about something. I mean, whenever I talk to somebody about a disease or an insect problem, or whatever, I usually preface it with this is this year’s X, because next year it’s always something else, you know. It’s just a moving target for us.

But yeah, tough plant, filtered shade, pretty good. It will have some die back and drop a few branches and stuff. But it’s not, not too bad as far as being dangerous, or anything like that.

Ironwood, again, tough plant, Autumn Treasures. Again, we’re talking 20 feet is narrow for them.

It’s very, very, very urban tolerant. So salt, I mean drought, just about anything you can throw at it, it’ll take, and won’t skip a beat, so a tough plant.

Definitely underused.

Poplars, so this is the plant that you see, like, in the Parade Magazine on Sundays. They say, oh you want a hedge in a week and a half? We got a plant for you. There you go. So typically it’s going to be some type of poplar. They grow like a weed. The problems that we have, typically as they age, they die back. They’re fairly short-lived. They’re fast growers. And you can pretty much assimilate fast growth with weak wood. So you’re going to have issues with stuff dropping down, whether it’s from wind, or dieback, or whatever. But incredibly columnar. Almost nauseatingly so. But, some guy must have been out there like the Johnny Appleseed selling these things because I go out and sometimes I’ll see way out in the country on an old farmstead, you’ll just see a line of these things on one side that somebody tried to use for a windbreak. Well the rub to that is a deciduous tree usually doesn’t work real well for a windbreak. But anyway, they’ve got a million of them and they’re planted probably– They could have gotten by with a third of the plants that they put in because the guy said, well space maybe two feet, when in reality they could have spaced them every five or whatever. But he sold a lot of plants, so he did his job. Anyway, there’s a Tower, Erecta, and the Sentinel here, are three of the varieties that are more on the columnar side. The Erecta is one probably, the narrowest it’s going to be in the 10-foot range. Close to that Tower one. The one issue you run into too with popular is they sort of have this cotton that they can diffuse. Almost like a cottonwood. And so they’ve developed, like the Tower, is cottonless. That’s one of the characteristics for it. But I know the Erecta that’s in town here at a couple places and it’s doing really well in Madison, Wisconsin. Again with the poof and stuff that’s coming off of ’em, if you can find a male plant, which good luck. The only way you’re going to find ’em is oh, it doesn’t have the powder to it, so okay, that’s a male. When they’re younger there’s just about no way to figure out what’s a male and a female. But you would if you could, you’d want a male. So you don’t get that issue.

So that’s Erecta on the left there. That’s Sentinel is just weird looking to me. I just, I don’t know that I could plant ’em close enough to make a hedge, number one. You could do a really nice alle down a driveway or something, but you’d need 9,000 of ’em to do any good at all. Typically yellow fall color and they’re okay. Generally populous, they’re kind of short-lived, because they grow so fast. So I don’t, we don’t really use a lot of ’em around here. Tree lilac, so this plant, I’m sure you’ve seen it all over Madison in the street terraces and whatnot. The nice thing is it does, it does extend the lilac bloom, because it blooms after the normal lilacs bloom and it extends that lilac bloom. Huge, white plumes that turn into these seed pods that give interest through the winter. I mean you could just take a bag of salt and dump it around the trunk and the thing won’t care. It can take so much abuse of the urban environment. It’s crazy. It’s a nice dwarf plant. So when we have wires and things like that, it’s going to stay under wires. I had one situation, and to this day, I never did figure out why, but we had one plant years ago, and this woman said, so it’s been in three years. Paul, I know sometimes it takes time for it to bloom, but it didn’t bloom, didn’t bloom, didn’t bloom. We’re in year three. I said, wow, maybe give it one more year. I checked with all the experts I know, we couldn’t figure out anything. I mean, the thing was just sterile. That’s been one in I don’t know how many hundreds of these we’ve planted. There’s just really a bizarre, bizarre experience. Great plant, maybe it’s a little overused because of all these attributes. But I can’t speak highly enough. The Golden Eclipse there is going to be a variegated. It’s not white variegated, it’s more yellow. And it maybe doesn’t have quite as good a bloom as the Ivory Silk. But incredible plant. Like I said, it really extends the season with the lilacs there.

Linden, okay so I’ll go on record that I’m against linden. I’ll just tell you that right now. So this is one, the current cordata, so it’s only going to be 15 feet wide. They get really wide. The problem we have with lindens is their grown habitat. When they send up a central leader, I can’t tell you how much time it takes in the nursery to get one of these things to have a straight leader. And it’s not so much that it’s straight, but it’s by itself, because they’ll– They send up a leader and then over here comes another leader and then up here comes another leader. So they have all these split leaders which make it incredibly weak wooded. When you look at branching structure, most people go, oh, that’s probably a pretty strong angle, something like that, ’cause it doesn’t have far to go. That’s the weakest angle you can have. The strongest angle is a burl, 90 degrees like that. So anything where you go back toward narrower and narrower, that’s going to be weaker. And these things are, I mean, they do it all the time. We had a client not far from here and I explained to him that. He said, well, take out that second leader and that kind of stuff. I’m like, it’s going to look bizarre. It’s going to be flat and take forever for it to fill in. He says, oh I’m patient. I’m okay. And I said, and it’s going to come back. Another one’s going to jump in in a couple years down. So anyway we take it off, it just looks like somebody butchered the back side of the tree, but luckily that was the house side, so from the street it sort of looked fine. Anyway I went by there a couple years ago and, sure enough, there’s a couple more leaders that have come off of that and he hasn’t done anything and I just, I’m not a big fan of lindens. Just mostly for that structural reason and that.

Maple, so a ton of maples.

Freemani, there’s one called Autumn Blaze that’s overused. The problem, what we have is we’ve got, it’s a cross between a Silver and a Red. So what we have is we have the vigor of the Silver and then we have the color of the Red. So we did that. Autumn Blaze, we don’t plant much of it all unless somebody really asked for it and then we have a real good conversation about frost crack. Because the trunks tend to frost crack on the south side of its plant. And there’s definitely issues because of that. There’s other ones that are full-sized trees that work really well. Deborah and Brandywine and a couple other ones that don’t have that characteristic of the frost split.

This one, Armstrong, is a narrow version. We’ve used it. It’s a great tree. It does not seem to be susceptible to frost crack that I’ve seen, at all. It’s got a narrow head on it. We’ve put it in a couple situations. I had a client who really, for a screen, they wanted this tree. They wanted a major tree close to the house but they didn’t have the room for it, and we had just enough room to squeeze one of these in there and it gave him the screen he wanted without going all over the house and having to be trimmed and butchered all the time to keep it off the house. So right plant, right spot. Like I said, it’s a cross between a Red and a Silver. The problem that we had when I was a kid, we planted a lot of Red maples, Norway maples, Silver maples, and Sugars. The problem we had with the Reds and the Sugars is when you’d plant them bare root, we’d pull them out of the straw and you’d pull out a Silver maple and there’s all this fibrous root system. You’re like, great, okay, and then my dad would say, well, you’ll know, when you get to the Red maple. So you pull off these Silver’s or even the Norway’s, very vigorous, vigorous root system. And then you pull out this tree and there’s one root going off to the side. That’s a Red maple. That’s what they do. They just don’t have a good root system. That’s why they struggle sometimes and sometimes we have issues with transplanting them.

My one push I’ll save for professional nurseries is that they actually root prune. So if you think about it, if you have a tree and it’s got this funky root, and that’s the only root it has, if it’s never touched for many, many years and then you go into ball it and you cut that one root, you just cut your neck at that point. And that tree is probably not going to survive. So what they do is they come in and they root prune on a regular basis and what that does is whatever they make a cut, now they induce roots to grow and they can get a much better root system because of that.

So obviously Red maple, red fall color, pretty straightforward. The biggest thing with a lot these is the width. The Armstrong’s one, pretty good one in the 15-foot range. There is, I’m not sure if I got a picture of it, there’s one called Sugar Cone that’s really narrow. But you’ve got Red Rocket that’s only 12.

And it’s really, you know, kind of a short tree at 35 feet.

Once they get in the ground and they’re established, they have a pretty good growth rate but they’re always going to sit a little bit that first year they’re transplanted before they take off. But, yeah, great varying degrees of red but, you know, red fall color, that’s pretty amazing.

The one sugar on the bottom there is called Sugar Cone, with a 15-foot width. So it comes from a native but because of it’s cultivated variety, now it’s technically not native. There’s this new thing called nativeares and I won’t even go there. It’s just somebody playing with words.

The sugars are great, orange fall color typically, pretty solid if you want some syrup. There’s a lot of attributes to it. But there are a couple ones and the one called Sugar Cone, that was one of the most narrow and it will even take a little bit of shade, which some of these plants will, especially in the maple family ’cause they’re an under story.

Oaks, so like I was saying before with the diversity, I mean, you can’t get any better than an oak. The number of caterpillars that are going to go on the oak species is crazy, absolutely crazy. So if you want diversity in your landscape and in the world and your community, plant an oak. And we’re off and running.

So we’ve got this Bonnie and Mike. It’s a variety off of a Swamp White oak, only about 15 feet wide with the name Swamp White. Guess what, it takes water pretty easily so that’s one nice thing. There are other oaks that won’t take wet feet, like Pin oaks hate having wet feet. So you wouldn’t want one of those sitting around.

A couple things they have developed in that Pin oak, that Green Pillar, I believe there it is, up there, yep. There’s some issues with chlorosis, which is fairly typical with a Pin oak. When you’re in an alkaline soil, and guess what, we have an alkaline soil. So we have alkaline water that we’re watering through alkaline soil that gets down to alkaline limestone. So it’s just, we’re kind of– You can’t change their soil to be acidic. You can add stuff here and there and maybe it helps the plant briefly, but you can’t physically change your soil to be acidic. Not around here. If you want acidic soil, head north. That’s the best thing I can tell you, so.

The good thing about oaks, a lot of them are very urban tolerant. They can take a lot of abuse. They’ve got great fall color. Some of the issues we run into are when they hold their leaves. Often oaks will hold their leaves and, you know, a lot of people that are very fastidious, they want to get out there in the fall, get all the leaves collected and you look up at the oak and it’s dropped a tenth of its leaves and then two weeks later it drops another tenth, then maybe a month later it drops another tenth. And you’re into winter and it’s still dropping tree– So that can be annoying to people. Some people think it’s interesting and they like the fact that it, in the middle of winter, you got this white ground cover and now you’ve got some of the leaves dropping down, and it add an interest to it. So it just depends on your perspective. So, some of them, they’re like– Like there’s one called Street Spire there. That’s one that does not hold its leaves. It drops them and we kind of move on. So, if that’s an issue for you that’s maybe one you want to go after. That one called Kindred Spirit, that’s a kind of a cross between an English oak and a Swamp. So again it can take some wet situations.

Again fairly, fairly bizarre and narrow.

Six feet, that’s just crazy. They have a plant that’s only six feet wide that’s a shade tree. Not going to get much shade unless you’re a telephone pole. But anyway, a great plant. Can’t say enough about oaks. We need to plant more of them for sure. And we’ve got a lot of great ones that we can plant and even in the Madison area.

Sweetgum, Liquid Amber, so all I can say with this is good luck. I’ve got some people that, a couple clients that have it and it’s actually alive. And that’s the hardest thing is getting it through our winner. I should have qualified at the beginning, I’m old school, so I think Madison’s zone four and I will until I die. When they changed to zone five, I just, all I ever asked is did they have a conversation with the plants about that? Because I’m pretty sure they didn’t. That all of zone five plants weren’t out there going, oh, yeah, we’ll volunteer for four. We’ll see if we can make it. You know, knock yourself out. Anyway, we do use a reasonable amount of zone five plant material and I, even myself, my wife had picked out this cute little annual. It’s like a Corkscrew Rush and put it in our garden. I’m like, well no sense, it’d be dead. You’re not going to see it next year. And surprise, surprise, the next year came up. So this thing’s zone six. We’ve had alive now and it’s not in an extremely protected area, it’s been alive in our yard now for four years. And every year it comes up, I’m just, what, how are you doing that, you know? Can you talk to your other buddies that are zone six because they need some help really bad, really, really bad.

Anyway, Liquid Amber, like I said, if you’re going to plant it you got to put it in a pretty sheltered location.

Another one, the tulip tree. So the species itself does really well here.

Most of these other cultivars are marginally hardy. And again, they have the funky form.

The one called Little Volunteer. The one thing about that is it’ll grow to 12 feet in four years from a whip. So it’s a very fast growing, very fast growing. Again, if you can keep it alive through the winter, yadda, yadda, yadda, those other things come into play. But that is definitely one concern with those.

So we’ll jump to some shrubs. So again, remember, narrow is depending on how you’re looking at things. Cornus mas is a great plant. One of the first things to bloom in the spring, beautiful, beautiful yellow blooms. This variety, the pyramidal, it stays fairly narrow. Again 10 feet, that’s narrow for a Cornus mas. Great, yellow blooms that develops into a red fruit. It has a little seed inside. You can eat ’em. Oh, pretty tart. But they will be used, like, for sauces and things like that, if you want to. All I’d say there is good luck, you got to beat the birds. So, they typically jump on them pretty fast. But great, you know, it’s either considered a large shrub, small tree, that kind of thing, depending on where it is. Typically it’s more considered a shrub than it is a small tree. But yeah, really, really sour fruit and the, like I said, the bloom’s going to be coming out usually in March right along with Witch Hazel, in that range.

There was a second one there called Golden Glory. Another one that just gets a little bit wider.

And it’s got a little variegation to the leaf on that. Elderberry, like the native elderberry, is a weed. It grows like a weed. I mean it just, it comes up all over. And we’re always, usually, where you don’t want it. Anyway there’s a couple of them that will have this really dark burgundy leaf to them. This one’s called Black Tower, six to eight feet, three feet wide, whatever. I’ve never had really good luck with elderberries. They tend to die back. We’ve tried them in our nurseries. I can’t tell you how many times, to where I’m ready to strangle the growers.

We’ve tried them on less water, on more water. We’ve changed the media we pot them in. We’ve done everything under the sun and they do not like to be sitting in a pot in a nursery. They just kind of go downhill. So I can’t say it’s something I’d highly recommend. It does have this growth habit. If you can grow it, call me. ‘Cause I’d like to come see it. Because we’re not having much luck with them. Hibiscus or Rose of Sharon, they’ve actually trained this now into like a tree form. A great plant. It’ll start blooming in the summer, late summer into the fall and pretty late. The one thing you got to watch with this is in the spring we’ll get calls saying, hey, Paul, it’s dead. And I’m like, well, the fact that it’s April 12th, I’m pretty sure it’s not dead. But, there’s no signs of buds. This is like one of the last things to pop bud. So it’s going to look– Everything else is going to be in full leaf, whatever, and you’ll just start to see it popping. So you just got to be aware of that. There are a lot of different varieties of the broader ones that have different colors and things like that. Again, hardiness can be an issue. We had, I think it was three years ago, I can’t remember the exact circumstances of winter, but I would say almost every Rose of Sharon that we had put out there died. And then we went to nurseries to get them, they didn’t have any, ’cause they all died. I don’t know what the factor was. A lot of times it’s how we go into winter. If we go into winter dry. If we go into winter wet. I mean, there’s a lot of issues like that that can wreak havoc with plant material, so. But, I wouldn’t give up on it. It’s a great plant. It blooms when a lot of stuff isn’t blooming. And if you have a friend or for my sake, an office manager whose first name is Sharon, it’s awesome, so.
(audience laughing)
Lilacs, again, we’re looking here, this, this Violet Uprising. It gets six, six to four, six feet tall, four feet wide. Again, that’s narrow for a lilac. It’s got a great bloom, the smell, typical lilac, time of year, just a great shrub going through. But it is, again, you got a play with the word narrow as to what exactly that means. But it is narrow considering other lilacs. It’s basically in the same venue as a Miss Kim lilac. And, again, you got to be careful with names. Miss Kim, when it was released a long time ago, they said, hey Miss Kim, we have a dwarf lilac. And I said, oh, wow that’s awesome. We’re using these things, put them left, right, and not only supposed to get X tall, five, six feet was what we were told in the industry. That is wrong. That is totally wrong. They’re nine, 10. But nine, 10, that’s a dwarf compared to a normal lilac that’s going to get 12 to 14. So it all depends on your perspective, you know. Some of these guys, their perspectives are pretty bizarre. But anyway, you got to compare it to sometimes just a species as to what it’s doing. Ninebark, so another one. They came out with one deep, deep burgundy leaf, kind of pubescent. This is kind of a replacement for Purple Leaf plum. Purple Leaf plum, if you have one, again, keep them and let everything eat the leaves, Japanese beetle and everything else, but anyway, people got frustrated with that. So, then we’d go to Diabolo Ninebark, that was the first one we substituted with. Now, it didn’t have a glossy, purple leaf. It was kind of pubescent. It was, you know, it’s good that way, flower was good, but maybe not as good, you know, something. But we’re like, hey, but it’s not getting chewed. Life is good, you know? So anyway then with Diabolo, all of a sudden we’d get these, you’d have a huge plant and again we didn’t realize how big it was going to get. It gets huge. And then all sudden one spring you’d wake up and there’s one branch coming out and it’s green as green can be, out of the center of the plant. It’s just some mutation in the plant. You cut it off, maybe it’ll come back. Maybe it doesn’t, who knows. So then they went through this. You had Diabolo, then they came up with Summer Wine dwarf variety. They’ve got another one called, little bitty guy– Anyway, they had a couple other little ones. They are smaller, fairly narrow. Sometimes powdery mildew can be an issue with some of them. I’ve seen some that were pure white from powdery mildew, so that sometimes can be an issue. But, again, in a spot it can stay fairly, fairly narrow, this particular variety. Viburnums, again they’re going to get big typically. This one only, and I use the word loosely, only get six feet wide. Some of the issues we run into with the Viburnum, so we’ve got a shoot bore. We’ve got a few other things that are really attacking them. And like with Viburnum trilobum, I really, I love the plant, but I just have a really hard time putting them in somebody’s yard just because I’m just about guaranteed you’re going to get shoot bore on that thing. Even with the dwarf varieties, Alfredo and a couple others, you’re probably going to get the shoot bore and you won’t notice it until all of a sudden you walk out one day and the branch, there’s just going to be one branch laying on the ground. And you’re like, who’s the kid that ran through my shrub? What the heck? And then you go over there and you look at the bottom of the branch and it looked like somebody takes a drill and just drilled around the bottom from this bore and it gets so weak and it just falls over. It’ll fall over, it’ll still be green. It’s still alive, for a while. And then eventually if you go up to it and grab it, it just pulls right out of the ground. Sometimes they’ll go away, there’s treatments you can put down on, all that kind stuff. But do you really want to be doing that? So anyway, and there’s a lot of work going into plants that might be less susceptible, hopefully resistant to that going forward, could. Trilobum generally speaking, great plant, great fruit, great flower, I mean, just hard, hard, hard to beat.

So anyway, a little narrow one here with the Royal Guard.

Willows, this is was one that was brought to my attention by a good friend of mine. So willow, surprise, surprise, it can take wet situations. I know you are all amazed at that and probably writing that down right now. But basically it’s a Corkscrew willow. It’s going to kind of grow in a tuft. It’s zone five, so maybe it won’t make it through the winter. But we’ve had really good luck with it with some clients. And then probably you’re just going to mow it down every three years. Just cut it down to ground and let it come back, and we’re off and running. That’s the kind of abuse it can take and/or you can cut it back for stems to decorate in floral displays and stuff like that. But pretty tough plant overall.

So now this is the caution slide, okay. So I got to talk about this a little bit. So we’ve got a few plants that are invasive.

So, and we could have a three hour conversation on invasive. I’m really not going to call it invasive, let’s just call it really happy where it is, or, you know, those kind. So, you got to be a little cognizant of that.

But basically in the Norway’s, like when the invasive things kind of came to the state level, we had a lot of the people come in and they said, we got to get rid of all maples. And we in the industry were like, whoa, timeout, timeout. And then they’re like, oh, yeah get rid of all of this, And we’re like, nope, no, no, not. Let’s get rid of the word “all.” Let’s go specifically. And let’s work down the line. And let’s figure out what has value and what doesn’t, kind of thing. Generally speaking, normally maples jump all over.

Not a good plant. Berberis, same thing, heavy seed producers, go everywhere. You find it in the woods a lot. It can take some shade. Helmond Pilar, the one thing I’ll say about that, very interesting upright growth, it can take drought. It’s a tough little plant and it has very few seeds. It’s not that it has none, but very few. So at least you’re helping the cause a little bit there with that one.

Pyrus, the pears again, I’ll go on record. I’m not a big fan of pears. Not only for this but there’s other reasons with how they grow and stuff like that.

We had a project in Middleton for some street trees and we planted, I think, there were evenly, they had to plan 100 trees or something. So we had 33 of these, 33 columnar maples, and 33 Ivory Silk tree lilacs. Every one of these died. Everyone, and it’s, and believe me, we planted them exactly, the way they’re supposed to be planted. Everyone died. Guess what, they put in another one, something else, the next year. They actually had the fortitude and wherewithal to change the variety, there’s a concept for you. So anyway, not a big fan of those. People like them. They bloom really early. But I just, I’m not a real, real big fan of them. And then of course we’ve got not only Rhamnus, the Buckthorn, but we’ve also have Honeysuckle and stuff like that. So you go to any woods in Wisconsin and that’s why you can’t walk through the woods. Is because of the Buckthorn and the Honeysuckle, and that kind of thing.

There is one called Fine Line, it’s got a cut leaf.

There’s a little bit argument in the industry as to whether it seeds or not. If it does, it’s almost nil. So if you want an upright plant that’s got that cut leaf, I’ve got one in my place just because I try everything and see what it does before I even recommend it.

Right now, it’s about seven feet tall. It’s about this big around.

I go on record, I was the one that planted a ton of Columnar Buckthorn when I was a child. So you can all hate me. But that was just a plant that was well used back then when you needed a deciduous plant that was narrow. You couldn’t beat a Columnar Buckthorn. Unfortunately, in the industry we didn’t realize the seed proliferation from the birds and what it was doing until it was kind of too late. And that was an easy plant, I swear on Columnar Buckthorn, the only time you’d ever prune a Columnar Buckthorn is with a chainsaw, right at the base. And I tell you, by the end of the year, it’d be back up to five feet tall and it’d be off and running, so it was a tough plant. Not so good to plant though. So, but anyway, the Fine Line, if you’re going to go that route, it is actually– You can still buy a Columnar Buckthorn in Colorado and a couple other states. It’s illegal in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and a lot of the Midwest states. You can’t grow it or buy it. But it’s still out there in some places. And that just goes to show you it might be a problem here but it’s not a problem on the East Coast or it’s not a problem there because of soil types or other vegetation ecosystems, whatever, whatever might be the case. But just definitely be careful when you’re looking at that. So we’ll get into evergreens. Boxwood, this one called Green Mountain, we use a fair amount of it for an upright evergreen. Nice and tight. Takes very little trimming. You can trim the livin’ heck out of it, make it look like a giraffe if you want, I don’t care. They do take, they’re pretty kindly to pruning and stuff like that. But they’re a pretty easy plant to grow, three feet wide. I’ve got one at my house, it’s beautiful, it’s green. If you put it up to a house, it doesn’t die off on the backside like a lot of evergreens do. It’ll stay green all the way around, so it’s a good, good plant. Arborvitae, again, we got to go back old school. So on the far left there, Pyramidalis, what is the ones that you see in the cemeteries. So you got a headstone and you got this thing that’s 30 feet tall and it’s split and busted, and whatever at the top from snow. And anyway, we just don’t use that plant. Haven’t used in 30 years, 40 years, I don’t know how long. Anyway, and the next one, occidentalis, typically it’s called Emerald Green. We first used that quite a few years ago. We had a batch of about 100 come in, and 100 died. And we never did figure out exactly why, if it was a balling issue or what it was. But I was really gun shy to use those after that. We went to the Holmstrup. We’ve had really good luck with Holmstrup. Not going to get very wide. The problem with Holmstrup is doesn’t get very wide. So if you want a screen, we need twice as many plants or three times as many plants to do a screen. The other thing with Holmstrup is it’s going to take a while. So people say, oh, I went to a big-box store and I got a nice little one-gallon Holmstrup that’s a foot tall, you know, but I want a screen. I’m like, well you planted it for your grandkids ’cause you’re not going to see it, but anyway, you get– So we’re just getting now in the industry, where I can get Holmstrup that are six, eight feet tall, something like that, that we can put in and give you an instant hedge right away. But before, when this first came out, you couldn’t do that kind of thing.

Generally speaking, arborvitae are pretty low key. The one thing we always get in the spring, we’ll get a ton of calls saying, hey, our arborvitae is half dead. And I’ll say, let me guess which half. It’s the middle. I’ll take a wild guess that it’s brown in the middle. And they go, yeah how’d you know that, Paul? I say well, so technically speaking, I won’t get into too much botany, but technically, if you really get into it, they’re not in evergreen, because they have this fawn. It’s a leaf, and that’s what happens as it grows it drops about a third of those almost every year. And then it drops heavy when it’s transplanted from transplant shock. So whenever we plant any arborvitae I say, okay, it’s looking really good right now, and here’s what’s going to happen. It’s going to thin out. It’s going to be a little bit thin by fall, but once you get through next year’s growing season it’s going to flush back out and you’ll never know the difference. Because once it flushes back out, all the stuff that drops typically is on the inside and you can’t see it. You might see it at the bottom of the plant but you can’t see the brown so much. And really, if you just go in there, grab the stem, I’ll go there and it’ll be brown and people say, oh, my God, Paul, it’s some disease, and I’m like, no. I grab the stem and I shake it and it drops out and I go, there you go, next, next question. So anyway, that’s what they’re susceptible to. But yeah, just really stay away from the pyramidal arborvitae. That’s kind of an old school plant. The one that gets used fairly often is one called Techny. It’s a variety– That actually probably was that first slide I showed you that was trimmed. All I can tell you with that, people say, oh, it’s too big, or whatever, so I go to people and I say, okay, I can put in 39 Holmstrups and give you a screen or I can put in five Techny and give you screen, if you keep it pruned. Arborvitae is the only evergreen where I can– So say you want it to be maximum height is eight feet and it gets up to 12 feet, or something like that. It’s the only evergreen where you can go in and surgically remove the central leader and shape that and with one growing season you’ll never know you were there and it doesn’t do any detrimental work to the plant. Any other evergreens as soon as you cut out that leader, it will never, and I mean never, grow out of that point. You’ll get a side shoot that comes out of the side. Like if you could really see in a spruce, and they did that, you’d have the main stem would come up and then there’d be a bud off to the side and it just kind of goes, whoop, like this, but on the outside, you’d go, oh, it’s a perfect Christmas tree. It looks great, but once you go look on the inside and you see that, that’s going to snap off ’cause it’s a really weak branch structure. So it could be problematic down the road.

Cypress again, touchy around here.

Some people have had luck with them. I really don’t go there. I just like stuff that I don’t have to replace. And these guys can be a little touchy.

So a couple varieties there. If you see seriously, you look at that, this is a more of the False Cypress, the Chamaecyparis. So they’re going to be in a weeping variety. We use one, they’re just called Golden Mops. It’s incorrectly used more as a small shrub, but then it takes off and eventually gets big where it will throw out a central leader. These guys typically all have some kind of funky shape, weeping, contorted, or whatever. And either people love them or they hate them. There’s no in between on these. So, just because of the form.

Junipers, so very common to the area. A tough plant, take drought. Some of these don’t have quite as much issue like with snow load and stuff like that like we had years ago on a lot of plants where branches broke off because of snow load. Pretty tough plant. Deer typically don’t bother them. Whereas like arborvitae, that’s like caviar to deer. Normally you’ll see arborvitae out in the environment and the bottom five feet will be gone. And again, we get calls hey the bottom five feet died off. And we go out there and the top’s fine. You have deer in your area? They’re like, no, no, I live in the city. I’m like, you have deer. They ate it, that’s all I can tell you. So anyway, you can fence them off for a while and maybe sometimes what we’ll do is we’ll put deer friendly plants back in the corner of your lot and we just say, you’re welcome to come here, but if you’re going to eat, there’s a cafeteria. Just stay back there. Another thing is if you have a dog sometimes in and around the house that can keep them at bay as well, both from the dog chasing them, but also the smell.

So spruce, again, pretty durable unfortunately with that one on the middle there, it’s a Blue Spruce. We have this disease called Rhizosphaera. They don’t have testing on this yet, my guess is it’s going to get it someday. It might be slower. Sooner or later we don’t know. But generally speaking you don’t want to plant any straight Blue Spruce. Unfortunately, there’s still nurseries out that sell ’em. Kills me to see that happen ’cause they’re just selling you a problem. And there’s no cost effective way to treat it.

And it’s really a weird disease where, like most diseases, are either top down, bottom up, whatever. They have some polarity to them. With Rhizosphaera, there’s that dead branch over here on the top and then there’s a dead branch over here on the bottom, then there’s one in the middle and there’s one here. And it’s a really slow process. So it’s kind of painful to watch. Anyway, these guys are extremely narrow. You’re going to get some bending a little bit. But they typically have a pretty good central leader that they’re pruned too. But really they have something, especially the one on the left there that’s only going to get two feet wide. That’s just outstanding. But usually a tough plant. It takes drought situations. Don’t want to put them in a wet situation. They’ll just rot away. But other than that a really, really, really tough plant.

Yews, some more deer caviar. They’ll chew on yews like nobody’s business. Unfortunately, they’re normally a fairly slow growth rate out of the nursery and stuff like that. So people wonder why that plant costs what it does. Well it’s a 14-year-old plant to get it to that size. We typically have the pyramidal arbor, yews, when you had a mustache with two evergreens on either end back in the ’50s, they’ve got this one, the columnar one on the cuspidata. We’ve used a lot of the Hicksii. The only negative we’ve seen is if those central leaders aren’t strong enough you’ll get a little bit of snow that’ll push them out. That being said, I’ve never seen one break. They’ll push ’em out so it looks like a kind of a squashed cigar. Typically within a little bit of growth rate they’ll come back together. They can also be banded to stop them from doing that. But another great plant. We’ll get into perennials just quickly. Perennials generally speaking, we’ve got the grass families.

There’s the Karl Foerster grass is probably the one that’s used quite a bit now. The thing you got to be careful with grasses is that they’re not rhizomatous. So they don’t send out rhizomes and they don’t have a heavy seed production. And that’s exactly what the Karl Foerster does not have. It doesn’t throw out seeds, doesn’t throw out rhizomes. It stays a real nice, tight, foot to 18 inches in diameter. Gets about four to five feet tall. And that’s from the ground level up, every year. So you can leave it up during the winter, cut it down in the spring, let it come up. My one thing that bugs me a lot is I call them turtle necks. When people cut them back they’re afraid to cut them to the ground. They leave this much around there. So it’s brown and then the green grows up through it. So now I got this beautiful green with this brown turtleneck around there. I just hate that look. But anyway I digress per usual.

So yeah, the Karl Foerster.

We’ve got this sea grass, sea oats there. They’re up in the upper right hand corner. We’ve got switch grass, tough plant, another plant that can take some juglans from black walnut. The panicum.

Then we got the little loosetrum. It’s extremely drought, that Little Arrow, drought resistant as well as, again, you can plant it at the edge of a walnut for the juglans and it’ll take that kind of abuse. So we’re going to jump into just a few perennials, quick. And, again, bare with me what’s up and straight-and-narrow sort of thing.

We’ll start with some of the sun ones.

The Hollyhocks there on the left. It basically grows from the ground up. Everybody’s like, oh great, I put it in and it just keeps coming back. It’s you know, it’s a per– Actually it’s the seeds is the only reason that’s coming back. If you strip the seeds on that plant it won’t be there next year. ‘Cause the seeds drop down and then it rejuvenates from seed production. It doesn’t rejuvenate from the root. But it’s an old plant. Used to find it around a lot of farms and stuff like that. Easy to grow, big blooms. Kind of fun to watch as it starts to bloom and the flowers open up as they go upward, it’s pretty cool. Henry Eilers, again, it’s a fairly narrow Rudbeckia.

It’s got a really nice show for it, for the flower. Doesn’t tend to spread like some of the other stuff could. And that’s either a good thing or a bad thing. Does well in like a rain garden, a cut flower. It’ll bust through clay. Butterflies, I mean– It’s got a lot of great attributes for that.

Now we’re in the shade. So we’ve got Monkshood here. Again, fairly narrow and a foot and a half wide. There’s not many things that only get that wide. Great blue color, cut flower. Going to be late summer into fall, you know, as much as deer resistant as anything can be, it is. I mean, if the deer are pressed, they’ll eat anything. And same thing with rabbits. People have always asked me for lists for deer and list for rabbits and it doesn’t exist. I’m sorry, no matter what anybody says. If they’re hard pressed enough, they’re going to chew anything. We’ve seen ’em chew some really bizarre things in hard winters. This winter, they’re going to be chewing on some weird stuff as well. Just ’cause they got to survive. So anyway, great, great plant. Tough, easy to grow.

The bugbane on the left there. There’s green leaf, there’s the burgundy leaf, very tall stems with these flowers. Beautiful flowers, kind of sway in the wind. Just really, really nice plant.

Fills in an area really well. The Ligularia, the Rocket there, great plants. Sometimes it looks like a rocket, literally, those blooms, sometimes are huge and they stand up quite a bit. So when they say it only gets two feet tall, that’s the actual leaves of the plant. The stems can go much higher than that. And it’s kind of a nice backdrop or mix it in with other things where that’s blooming and around there. It doesn’t like drought. That’ll shoot it down. It can take heavy shade and it can take wet situations as well.

So from there we’re getting into kind of an iffy area. We’re talking into somethings that we’re going to train. So with pruning you can do espaliers. We can do just about anything you want. These are some good examples: apples, pears, ginkgos, beech, linden, Japanese maple. Japanese maple’s a little bit of a push. But I mean, if you’re patient, you can get it there. But really for us, if somebody really wants an espalier, we’re going to probably pick a pear, because most people they go, oh I want an apple. And I’m like, do you really? Do you want to spray it that much? You want to spray it every six weeks so you get an apple? Oh, maybe not. So anyway, with pears, pretty easy to grow. Virtually nothing to spray. Diseases, you know, today, maybe next year, another problem. But, anyway great thing. And now they’re becoming more and more available. It’s not a cheap plant because it took a lot of time to get it there. All the pruning and everything else. And typically we’ve got to grow it on something, a wall, a structure, or whatever that we’ll put up that might be H-shaped or whatever. And then we’ll train it every year. We’ll do some pruning to give a fairly heavy fruit set on each of those shelves essentially. Pretty easy to harvest a fruit. It’s right there in front of ya. And it’s a vertical growth garden, as opposed to something that’s going to take up a lot of room. Trellises and vines, and things like that. We do a lot of trellises. The one thing I can tell you with a trellis, a trellis is not, and I repeat, a trellis is not a fence. Just so we understand. And if you ever talked to the city, when you’re putting up something and it’s got to go more than six feet and it’s not more than four to six feet wide it now has become a trellis. Put a vine at the bottom of it, there’s nothing they can do about it, okay? We had a gentleman over on Waubesa. He had a crazy client next to him. He needed a screen that was 16 feet tall. We couldn’t do a fence obviously. We tried other things didn’t work for whatever reason. I came up with an idea. We doubled up panels of lattice, so it was 16 feet tall, four feet wide and then we had one section with two posts. Then we moved back about six inches and over about three feet, put up another two posts, then we moved forward and over about a foot, so they were offset. They weren’t connected. Wasn’t a fence. And we had a vine at the bottom. The neighbor, because she was who she was, she complained. City came over. They said, she’s saying it’s a fence. I’m like, you tell me it’s a fence. It’s three individual pieces. All trellis, lattice work, vines at the bottom. Trellis. Next question. And they walked away and said there’s nothing they could do. So anyway, you can tweak things a little bit. Hydrangeas, beautiful climbing hydrangea, a little slow out of the gate. But once it gets going, boy, look out. It just takes over. Beautiful white blooms. Clematis, a lot of the purples and different colors and stuff. There’s also one that’s more in the spring, early summer. There’s one in the fall that’s more of a white that will give you a lot of blooms and fragrance. Trumpet vine, boy, it grows like a weed. Honeysuckle vine, it’s a great plant and it’s not a honeysuckle that’s going to end up in the woods, right? Okay, so I guess I got to wrap things up here. The only other thing I was going to say is there’s one annual. You should write this one down, Elegant Feathers. This thing is amazing. I tried it last year on a fluke. My wife brought it back. It is a cute little evergreen looking thing. We put it in a pot that was a foot in diameter. We had five of ’em. By the end of the year it was seven feet tall. I repeat, seven feet tall. It was probably about 18 to 24 inches wide. It was amazing. You could use it for a screen for God’s sake. And it stayed. We finally cut it off. But I’m actually messing around with it. I pulled in one into our garage and one in our basement to see if I can get it to overwinter, we’ll see. But anyway, it’s a great annual, great, great annual. And then if you’re really ambitious, there’s all sorts of other things you can do. We talk to people about, I mean, can a woodpile be beautiful? Sure it’s narrow. There’s all sorts of other things you can stack, rocks, you can make a metal structure, fill it with rocks. There’s all sorts of other ways that you can get at least some kind of screening when you have a minimal space like that. So it really just depends on how creative you want to get. Thanks for coming.
(audience applauding)