Episode 3314

- [Narrator] It's springtime, and daffodils are showing off in the garden beds of a couple of collectors in Watertown. April Moore finds a lot of gotta-have varieties in this spectacular assortment of mid to late bloomers. Then Annette Shrader strolls through the hundreds of plants in the Lath House at the JC Raulston Arboretum. This structure provides a microclimate for plants that perform best in the shade. She'll showcase some of these unique perennials, shrubs, and trees. Join us. Gaining insight into daffodil classifications and an appreciation for each variety's uniqueness.

- It's late March and we're here in Watertown to see these beautiful mid to late season daffodils that are part of the collection of Jennifer and Jeff Harvey. Jeff, thanks for having us.

- Thank you for coming. We're excited that the daffodils decided to stay this nice for you. We had a lot of heat last week, but we still have a lot of daffodils that are doing great.

- [April] And these will keep blooming into April, won't they?

- [Jeff] Yes, we have some that are still putting up buds, so we'll get some bloom into, for another two or three weeks, yeah.

- Awesome. I'm excited to see what you've got for us. This is a beautiful variety and I can see that it's called Seize the Day, but there's a whole lot of letters on this label and can you explain to me what those mean?

- Yes. So the color grade goes from the tip of the petal to the tip of the trumpet. So this one has a great deviation of color. It starts off as a deeper yellow and fades to the white at the base of the trumpet. Then from the trumpet it goes from the white and gets to a darker yellow at the tip of the trumpet. So that's why there's six different cup letters. It's a darker yellow, a white yellow, then a white, and then it goes white and it stays white in the middle of the trumpet and then it gets to a yellow at the end of the trumpet. So that's why there's six different letters on this one.

- [April] Wow, that's a lot.

- [Jeff] That's a lot of letters.

- [April] It really is.

- [Jeff] It almost doesn't fit on a tag.

- [April] Seize the Day, that's beautiful, beautiful.

- [Jeff] Yeah.

- Jeff, can you tell me about this thing? This is gorgeous. What type is it and what's its name?

- [Jeff] This is an 11A daffodil. It's called Fire Drill. And it has a real split cup with lots of really cool frills on it.

- [April] Oh, that peach color is just extraordinary. Peachy pink, gorgeous. I've never seen one like that. That's amazing, yeah, and late too.

- Yes, we're near mid to late season right now, closer to late so it's nice to have stuff that's still blooming for this later space.

- [April] And where do you get bulbs like this for daffodils?

- [Jeff] We order from a lot of different places. Daffseek, PHS Daffodils, Brent and Becky's is a big supplier that we get from. And for historics, we get some from Joe Hamm.

- [April] Okay.

- [Jeff] He's out on Pennsylvania.

- [April] Cool. That's gorgeous, that's amazing. I'm gonna have to find that one for sure. So this is beautiful with this pale yellow. Can you tell me about this one and what its type is?

- This is an 11A and it's a split cup.

- [April] Oh wow.

- [Jeff] This one looks a lot like cyclamineus or a tazetta in the way it has multiple blooms per stem, so it's very nice. It's a late variety. It just started blooming about a week ago.

- Gorgeous. Wow, beautiful. We've got this beautiful bed of conifers mixed with Muscari and phloxs and other perennials. But I have to say, this daffodil right here is stealing the show. So tell us a little bit about it.

- [Jeff] Yes, the 11As, which are the split cups are, we're gonna see a lot of those today. And this is a fabulous white with the pink split cup. and it's swept back a little bit, which makes it a little more interesting since we're having a lot of wind today. It looks like this on a windy day or a calm day.

- [April] And look, and look at that throat. It's green in the throat?

- [Jeff] Yes. Several daffodils now, they're starting to accept green in the throats. For a long time it was looked upon, it was frowned upon. And now some of the newer daffodils, I think it really highlights the colors.

- Oh wow, this is absolutely stunning. I'm really impressed with how you have all these beautiful evergreen shrubs, in particular, this gold one. It looks stunning with these daffodils and the way these two play together is just so pretty and I really admire it. So can you tell us about this particular daffodil here and what type it is? 'Cause it really plays so well with this bed.

- Yes, this is Moonlight Sensation. It's a five, which is triandrus, and it's a yellow yellow. So what's nice about the triandrus is they have nodding flowers and multiple flowers to a stem.

- [April] Beautiful. Typically when you plant daffodil bulbs, you might get 'em in groups of five or 10, or maybe you buy a big sack. So I don't know how many bulbs you actually start with, but could you tell us how many you start with, how long this has been here, and how many you might estimate are in this single clump right now?

- [Jeff] So we typically plant between five and 10 bulbs in one spot of one variety. This one's been here for about six years now and it probably has about 80 to 100 bulbs in it. It's a really good multiplier.

- [April] Oh, that's beautiful. And then you would dig 'em up and spread 'em around some more if you wanted to and-

- [Jeff] Yes, when they start to get this big, they start to compete for nutrients and stuff. So they'll stop blooming as well. So when they stop blooming, you wanna start to divide 'em. And then this clump, when we divide it, we'll probably make about another 10 clumps in other spots around the yard.

- [April] Tell me a little bit about, you know, kind of how do you decide, A, if a clump of daffodils needs to be divided, and B, what time of year you would do that?

- [Jeff] So we have two basic criteria for when to move and divide our daffodils. One is when they stop blooming and they're too tight to get enough nutrients for each bulb to have enough energy to bloom to next year. That definitely needs to be moved. And our other problem is when our shrubs and conifers get too big and they start to overshadow the daffodils, then those also get moved. But a great time to do it is when they stop flowering in the late spring and you can dig them up and divide 'em and plant them the same day.

- Okay, and it's easy to dig them up because you can still see the stems so you know where they are.

- [Jeff] Yes, 'cause I noticed when we waited for the foliages to die down and the wind blows it off, then we end up cutting too many bulbs in half. So we like to do it when the stems are still up.

- [April] Okay, thank you. Now this is a different type of daffodil. Am I correct in that?

- [Jeff] Yes, this is a jonquil. This is a seven. And they're usually multi-headed. This one looks like it might need to be divided so it blooms better as we've talked about before. But the jonquils are extremely fragrance. This seems to be our jonquil bed. We have, I think of the 20 varieties in this bed, we probably have seven jonquils.

- [April] Wow, and they do well, obviously.

- [Jeff] They do very good in Tennessee. This one started off as five bulbs, and over five years we're probably up to 70 or 80.

- [April] Wow. That's a happy plant.

- [Jeff] Yes.

- [April] So I see that this daffodil, these right here in this group are a lot different from the others we've been looking at so far. Tell me about this particular type.

- [Jeff] This is the poeticus varieties. They're nines. They're characterized by real small trumpets. This one's called Snow King, but they're really neat 'cause they look like little windmills. I really like them. And when the poeticus start blooming, we know we're at the end of our season. So it's coming to a close.

- [April] It's kind of bittersweet then, isn't it?

- [Jeff] Yes, it is. They're lovely, but I do hate to see 'em come.

- [April] Yeah, I get it. They're beautiful though. And I kind of like how it has this little bit of an orange, you know, sort of pickety at the very tip of that little tiny cup, it's so pretty.

- Yes, this is a really cool one, and believe it or not, it's before 1900, so it's a super old one.

- [April] Oh wow. Definitely historic daffodil.

- [Jeff] Yes, yep.

- Now, we've talked a lot today about the types and 11As in particular 'cause you've got some stunning examples of those. But this one stopped me in my track. So we have to talk about it again. I believe it's called Latin music based on your tag. But talk to me about this because look at that. That's extraordinary.

- This is fabulous. Most of the split cups are real flat and real close to the petals, but this one just has frills and a body to it. It's just amazing. It's super heavy. There's a little bit of fragrance to it. It's just fabulous.

- [April] It looks like a flamenco dancer's skirt. It's incredible. I've never seen a daffodil like that in my entire life.

- [Jeff] It's definitely unusual.

- Oh, it's amazing.

- It's very sweet.

- [April] Here we have a bed full of what I assume are double daffodils and they're way different from some of the others we've been looking at. Tell me about that one first 'cause that's extraordinary bloom.

- [Jeff] Well, the doubles are some of my favorites. And every now and then I'm allowed to buy some. This one is called Milena. And this is really neat because the double is all in the trumpet and yours is very different from the one I'm holding.

- [April] Yeah, you can't help but have your eyes drawn to that. And what's the variety for that one?

- [Jeff] That one's Sun Catchers.

- [April] Oh, aptly named.

- [Jeff] And what's really nice is the petals and the trumpet all kind of mix together and you get all the variegation of the petals and the trumpet color, which is really eye-catching.

- And they're both beautiful. And there's numerous gorgeous daffodils, doubles in this bed, but wow, these are amazing. And this is a new planting or a newer one?

- This is a planting we just did last year. And you can see how we keep to like between five and 10 bulbs, the initial planting. And then with all luck, we will be able to divide these in four or five years.

- Will they be a big, huge clump like some of the others we've seen, you think?

- Yes. When that gets to the big clump, it's gonna be incredible.

- That's when you need to invite me back.

- For sure.

- That sounds great. This is a small cup daffodil. I believe it's called Coral Light.

- [Jeff] Yes.

- [April] And what I found interesting about this that caught my eye immediately was the fact that this fresh bloom that's just opened, the cup is actually yellow in the interior with kind of a pinky coral color on the end. But as it fades, it gets more like the one that you're holding and kind of the center of the cup is more of a pale pink white. But yours also looks different from mine in another way 'cause mine's petals are sticking out and yours are reflex back a little bit. What's going on?

- [Jeff] So what you can do is when they start to reflex and cup, if you're going to a show, you can take your fingers and the heat from your hand kind of irons the petals. So they'll become flat like that. So you can do that all the way around.

- [April] And that's something that they're looking for at a daffodil show.

- [Jeff] Yes, they like to see the petals flat, and at 12 and six o'clock, 'cause you see how the petals align. So the top one and the bottom one, they always want it at six or 12 and six o'clock.

- [April] Okay, I've just learned something new. Clearly I have a lot more to learn.

- [Jeff] It's a little trick to daffodil shows showing daffodils, but you can twist the head around a little bit too and it'll straighten out the 12 and six o'clock position.

- Wow. I've learned so much today and I really thank you for sharing this beautiful garden with us. It's stunning, and I wanna hope, I hope you'll invite me back. Just, you know, just make sure that you do it when you're dividing some of these 'cause I can help.

- Yes, for sure. Thank you for coming. We'll have you back against soon.

- I would love that. Thank you.

- Thanks.

- I'm very happy to be standing in the Lath House at the JC Raulston's Arboretum in Raleigh, North Carolina. And in here, we're gonna find things that probably we cannot even acquire for our home garden. And I want you to think of this as we start, we're about to enter what could be like an art museum. And Greg, I know that you're the director of horticulture and you can give us the history behind the richness of where we're standing in history. Even back to the original man who started this and some of his plants.

- Yeah. Welcome.

- Thank you.

- Glad to have y'all here. Glad that it's a little bit overcast and cool. It's been a really, really fast and frivolous spring. But we're at the JC Raulston Arboretum and the arboretum opened in, started about 1976. JC came from Oklahoma to begin teaching here. And they gave him this 10 acres to kind of plant things and used as a demonstration arboretum for students. JC was very involved with a mission of kind of reinventing what the nursery industry was doing. He was all about diversity. And at the time that he came here, there wasn't a lot of diversity in the nursery world. So he wanted to change that. And the best way to change that was to go abroad and bring plants in. So he spent a lot of time in Asia and in other places looking for things that would be diverse and would be good landscape plants for homeowners and for the nursery trade in North Carolina and abroad. Tied into that history, they built this lath house a number of years ago. It was redone in 2010. We're in the process now of redoing it. But the idea behind this was, you know, you think of a lath house as a shade structure. Well, this was designed with the lath so that it would allow minimal sun at different times of the day. So that things would grow with a little bit of protection. It's also a good area for a temperature inversion. So if we've got tender things, we can put them and tuck them in here. And the temperature's gonna be a little bit warmer than it would be outside of here because that lath is creating a bit of an inversion. You are dead-on with your analogy of an art gallery. An arboretum by definition is a museum of plants, a museum of trees, and we're a modern arboretum. We have trees and shrubs, herbaceous things, bulbs. There are things here that, in the spirit of JC, Mark, the director and myself both have traveled abroad and nationally to collect plants. So things that we have collected, we'll grow them on and we'll tuck them in here so we can kind of evaluate them. The plant right behind you is a lilac daphne, Daphne gengkwa. very unusual color for a daphne and has a little bit of fragrance. Not what you would think of with traditional daphne.

- It's good though.

- It's good.

- It's sweet.

- And we have propagated that and we use this in some of our plant sales and our auctions and things like that. And we've shared it with other interested nursery room men. So there's a lot of behind the scenes stuff going on here. Yes, it's for pleasure and to walk through and get ideas and enjoy being in nature and plants. But we're evaluating pretty much everything that you see all the way through the garden to see how they're gonna perform as landscape plants.

- So you're the curator of this art gallery in here, so-

- So to speak.

- [Annette] This is certainly beautiful next door.

- [Greg] Yeah, didn't have to go far.

- No.

- [Greg] And another example of something that's kind of unusual, this is a Rhodoleia. It's related to witch hazel. And if you look at the flower closely, you can kind of see that relation, but a pretty unusual plant. You see this growing in gardens in the Pacific North West. The first place I ever saw it was in Portland. And this is an Asian selection, Takeshiki, and I'm butchering that name. But it's typically a very bright red flower. And this one is, as you can see, a light pink. Very, very tender, gets burnt very easily by our crazy swings in temperature. And usually, you don't get a good bloom like this because it was so mild this winter. This thing has really been blooming its head off for a number of weeks. The red one, I like a little bit better. The flowers just more saturated and stands out. But this is really unusual and pretty and happenstance that it goes well with the lilac, I think. It pulls the colors out out of both of those.

- [Annette] It's delicate and pretty.

- [Greg] Mm-hmm.

- [Annette] Okay. This sort of reminds me of a little bit of sunshine on a cloudy day.

- [Greg] We need that today.

- [Annette] Yes.

- Since we were talking about daphnes, This is what most people think about when you say the word daphne. This is Daphne odora. This is a Japanese cultivar called Mae-jima and was covered with the most fragrant flowers that the Japanese garden borders this. You'd come in the Japanese garden and you could smell this and it would pull people in. And the entrance to the lath house, the same thing. The fragrance just waft all the way through here. So this also very typical in what they look like from a form perspective. A nice kind of round globe with this really, really pretty variegated foliage. You can see that it's done flowering. I think I pulled the last one off for us to smell.

- [Annette] Yes.

- And you can see the new growth coming. It's green, but it'll take on those yellow edges as it matures. We've not pruned this, it maintains that shape. We'd like to recommend this because of that fragrance. We like things that, you know, have multiple seasons of interest. You had this evergreen color all through the growing seasons and the winter. And then you had that fragrance in the late winter, early spring. So it checks that box for us. And Mahonia's have been looked at for a long time to be a good plant for the landscape and for the nursery trade. This is Mahonia. It's a cultivar called Skylark. You can see the pretty flowers right now. It's a much smaller leaf than most people think of when they think of Mahonias. It's not nice to touch, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But again, the thing I like about this is multiple season of interest. You have a nice evergreen, broadleaf evergreen shrub, kind of low growing. You have a really nice green shiny leaf on it. And in the spring, slightly fragrant flowers, really bright yellow color that brightens up kind of a dark corner. And this is one of those plants that's considered kind of low maintenance. It doesn't need a lot of care. Good soil drainage, you know, moderate pH, more in the acid range. But there's a lot of work that NC State has done and some of our plant breeders looking at different species of Mahonia and doing some breeding work with those to find good ones for the landscape. We talked about the Oregon grape holly, and there's some other ones that can be a little bit aggressive. Not as nice coarser texture. And those are the things that we're looking at are ones that aren't invasive, ones that have nicer texture and are more friendly in the landscape.

- It has one other attribute. They bloom so early, it's some of the first food for the bees.

- Exactly, exactly, that's a good point. So the tall plant there is a Camellias and it's a species Camellias. We're lucky to have some local nursery folk here that do a lot of work with Camellias and have been benefited from that by getting some of them. Typically the species Camellias are, have pretty simple flowers, but I like that because as you can see, this thing is absolutely loaded with buds. And in another, you know, another couple days, it's gonna pop open. These start out kind of a rosy color and kind of fade to white. But I just love that lacey appearance. I love all the flowers that it's gonna have on it. And it fits kind of nicely in there. And then scaling down to the ground level, we've got several different types of ferns here.

- I see that.

- Polystichums, there's some Japanese-painted ferns. There's some Rhodoleias in here. Lots of different types of Ophiopogon, the Mondo Grass.

- [Annette] I love that.

- [Greg] That's a plant that we have a very strong interest here at the JC Raulston Arboretum. There's a lot of different species that are found all over the world from dwarf ones like this to really tall ones. And they're really, really good landscape plant. So we have a lot of those planted in here. The ground cover with the broader leaf is a type of Lonicera, a honeysuckle. And it is kind of meanders down and it's taking advantage of the stones that are in here. Some maidenhair ferns back in the back. Some Solomon's Seal-

- [Annette] I see those.

- [Greg] That have just started to come up. I came through here Monday and those hadn't even opened up yet. But with our warm temperature, they've already started to kind of bust loose. We have a lot of aucubas here.

- [Annette] That's unusual there.

- It is. I'm always joking with Mark, the director. He has an ordinate fondness for all aucuba. And I'm slowly coming to appreciate them and like them a lot more. So we're looking at a Japanese maple. And one of the interesting things that I first learned when I started here over a year ago is that, you know, this is the image that's our logo. It's a Japanese maple leaf. But this is something that JC was very interested in and was using this as a good example from a diversity standpoint and also a good plant to use and to share. And when he was planting the arboretum, he wanted there to be a Japanese maple any place that you stop to look in the garden. So us just standing here now, we're looking at one right now, you know, behind us. There's one over here to the left. There's one directly behind us going on to the Japanese garden. There's one over there in the corner.

- I love them, yes.

- They're scattered all through the arboretum. And I find myself now, whether I'm with a group doing a tour or even by myself, I'll stop and take a minute and look and see where they are in the garden so that I can remember that. And just kind of relive that really interesting story and history of him and his impact on the garden and on us as we walk through the garden. I love those kinds of stories that horticulture and gardening has.

- [Annette] You know, I find that the Epimedium is a collection of plants that are relatively unknown with some people.

- [Greg] They are and it's unfortunate because it's a really good garden plant. It's one of the few things that you can almost say you can plant it and forget about it. They don't require a lot of care. They thrive on tough love and less than hospitable situations. This is a species one from Asia. Tony at Plant Delights has done a lot of breeding work on these and has a lot of different cultivars and species. Barrenwort is one of the common names of it. It typically, like, it's herbaceous. It'll die back. This one's a little bit, has a little bit of a thicker leaf. So it's almost tartly deciduous. It drops its sleeves a little bit later than some of the other ones. But the flowers are typically yellow. This one is white, which I like a lot. And I like the bigger texture of that. The leaf has a lot of interest with, it's got a little bit of red blotchiness in it and the serrated edges. But a really, really good kind of dry shade plant that I think more people should be looking at this particular genus for their garden.

- As I've been standing here with you, there's a fragrance that's just sort of coming through occasionally and it's very sweet. And you think that behind us could be-

- [Greg] I think that's the culprit. We have a really good collection of magnolias here at the JC Raulston Arboretum and we're a part of a bigger garden conglomerate that has collections. And ours is recognized in that group. This is Magnolia Eternal Spring. It's an evergreen Asian magnolia. This was developed by David Parks at Camelia Forest. He's got a great big one in his yard. And I think they sell this, but I hate to keep saying I have, this is a favorite, but this has been a long-time favorite of mine because it blooms for such an incredibly long time. This has literally been blooming for weeks for us.

- I do thank you that you've taken time and come through here and explain to us some things that are just not out there on the market for the home garden and I appreciate what you've shown us and told us.

- [Greg] Well, thank you for coming, and you have to come back.

- [Annette] Oh, I will. I have a number of visits already under-

- [Greg] Good. We would love to have y'all back.

- [Annette] Thank you.

- [Greg] Thank you.

- [Narrator] For inspiring garden tours, growing tips, and garden projects, visit our website at volunteergardener.org and find us on these platforms.