Episode 2551

- [Narrator] A gorgeous garden design that's been plotted on paper also has to work once it's planted in the ground. Troy Marden allows us inside the world of a garden designer to see how knowledge of the plant material is vital in making the design work for many years. Plus, we'll learn the effects a mild winter will continue to have on our landscape. Join us. First, garden designer, make me a garden.

- I've been designing gardens for 30 years, and while I can honestly say that all of them have been enjoyable, there are a few that are truly special. This is one of those. Special because of the garden, special because of the clients, who have actually become friends. There was a lot to consider on this property, and I was lucky to get in from the ground up. One of our most special trees on the property is this Kentucky yellowwood. It was only seven feet tall when we planted it just five years ago, so you can see how much it's really grown. Obviously it's in full bloom now in early May, and the pollinators, I don't know that you can hear them, but the bees are just buzzing in this tree. No threat to me at all, but this is one of the most pollinator-friendly trees that we have on the property. I chose Kentucky yellowwood for this spot because we have a limited space to plant in. Obviously this is a planter that's built into this patio, and I needed a tree that has deep roots that don't run across the surface of the ground and that won't buckle the patio eventually. So in the design process I had a lot of great things to work with. Including great hardscape, like this stone arch, which we have covered with wisteria, and I needed plants to create the feet of the wall and soften all of this hard stone that we had. So we've chosen ferns, iris, things that will thrive under these conditions, with full to part sun. And we're here at just the right moment, because we've caught it this year where the wisteria and the iris have peaked together. One of our many goals on this property is to become a certified arboretum. And since we don't do anything small here, not only are we going to become a certified arboretum, but we're sort of shooting for the highest level, Level Four, which means we have to have 120 different species of trees on the grounds. So while we were blessed to have quite a number of large trees here before construction began, we've also planted quite a number of new species. So one of the new species that we have planted is this Chinese fringe tree, which you can see is really spectacular here at the beginning of May. This show goes on for about three of four weeks, also popular with our pollinators, and very very fragrant. This is the asian cousin to our native fringe tree. Or sometimes called grancy graybeard, or American fringe tree depending on which part of the country you're from. And behind me we have this magnificent American holly that was part of the natural vegetation here on the property originally. One of the most fun parts of this project from a design perspective for me was creating this woodland walk at the back of the house. We had slope to deal with, so we were able to build a beautiful meandering stone staircase and walkway that comes down the side of the hill. And then the goal was to recreate the woodland effect. And I would say that we're not 100% native back here, but we're about 85 to 90% native, and the non-native species that I chose are species that I know will not end up down at the bottom of the canyon 20 years from now. They're well-behaved plants that I don't have to worry about escaping into the woodland. One of the most fun parts about this project for me has been the ability to use these native wildflowers in a setting that is very natural and conducive to their growth. And we're even now seeing the wildflowers beginning to spread, so while in the beginning this was a planned, designed landscape, our goal in the end is to just have a carpet of wildflowers, and we're really beginning to see that effect. One of the fun things in this garden has been to experiment with some things that are a little rare and unusual. And one of those is this hybrid between our native sweetshrub, calycanthus, and its Chinese cousin. And if you're familiar with calycanthus, you know what our native looks like, with little thin maroon petals. But as you can see, this one has flowers, probably four times the size, 2 1/2, three inches in diameter, big wide petals. Unfortunately it doesn't have the fragrance of our native sweetshrub, but it certainly has a more spectacular bloom. So as we let this staircase and stone pathway meander down the side of the hill, it was important to me to soften the edges of it and be able to have plants that cascaded over the edges of the rocks, plants that grew in between the cracks of the rocks, I didn't want it to just look like a stone runway down the side of the mountain, but something that really incorporated itself into the garden and kind of became one with it. One of the really important things in this garden was to take advantage of all of these sweeping vistas and views that we have here. From every point on the property there is something to see. We really tried hard to take advantage of that. On the list of challenges here on the property, about a year ago we had big windstorm, and we had one of our largest trees come down. And in a very fortuitous move by Mother Nature, she laid it down right across the end of the garden, without hitting anything else. And so we cleaned up the root ball, we had a gentleman come in with his chainsaw, clean up the root ball, and we've decided not to take the tree out, but to just let it be the endpoint to a beautiful, natural garden.

- For some reason, flower arranging can be very intimidating for the homeowner. I'm gonna give you a couple of tips and tricks to utilize the flowers that are around your house and a few things that you could pick up at a local grocery store. This is an orchid that I picked up for less that $10. These little hair clips and things, I like to remove those, just 'cause I think they're kinda tacky. I'm gonna spruce this up and make it more of like a $100 orchid than a $10 orchid. So just taking these sticks out, and you can see the stems, they pretty much still stand up, so you don't necessarily need those stakes themselves. Remove this pot, kinda loosen up the roots themselves too. Be really careful on the orchids, because when you break the roots, just kind of massage it out of the pot. If you snap them, they're gonna die. So if you just kinda wiggle it a little it'll pop right out. Putting a little moss in there first. For the bottom. So we've covered all the roots with moss as you can see, some care on this is, don't over-water it, just keep it a little moist. It's kind of created a little atmosphere of its own so you don't need to water it excessively. The orchid should live longer in this too, and also don't have it in any direct sunlight, that's gonna hurt it, so it'll be a really good houseplant. Some alternatives for an orchid would be a bromeliad, or any low light plant like begonia, or a philodendron vine or something, works really well in this kind of environment. You don't always need a vase to have a nice cool fresh flower arrangement. One really interesting variation on that is just utilizing a piece of wood, and some moss. This is just a thick piece of bark that came off an old tree, and just kind of stuffing some live moss in some of the crevices to create a little more depth and texture to it. And a few flowers, like sunflowers and Gerber daisies, can just be placed on there, around it. These are flowers that do really well with no water, too. Sunflowers, Gerber daisies, eryngium, or thistles. Something like this would last a few days on a tabletop. Sunflowers are a great thing that can be grown at home or bought at most grocery stores as well. They make fantastic cut flowers, they have a very long life. Dahlias are grown a lot around here as well, and they have a very long vase life, really big flowers. These are some vessels that you might find around the house that you might not think of typically. A pie pan right here, kind of an old dish, and then just a simple cereal bowl with the blue color. And I would float flowers in these, and that would be really easy. So what you're gonna wanna do is get real close to the flower head and cut off right there. And then simply just drop it in the water. So dahlias are a really great cut flower as well, they have a wide variety of colors and the flowers are just spectacular. You only need one in a vase, something clear like that is really nice, or if you put it in something blue, you kind of have a more exciting contrasting color. It really only needs one flower per bowl. A good sized container for a dahlia, since they're large flowers, is something six inches or larger, and you don't want anything really tall either, you want it maybe three to four inches off the table. A very simplistic modern approach is to use just one type of flower, and a really angular vase, and then a really neat, interesting, unexpected element like gears, these are just bicycle gears that I've cleaned up and gotten the oil off of. You'd want to spray them with a clear coat as well so they don't rust in the water. But I'm just gonna simply put few of these orchid sprays, kind of at an angle in the water. These are dendrobium orchids, they're just simple and clean and pretty and white. And then you're gonna wanna drop these gears around it. Kind of space them apart so they're not all on top of each other, like so. Very simple. This should last up to a month or so, orchids last a really long time in water. This is what I call let the flowers do the work. Something as simple as a bunch of roses massed together is really easy and beautiful. This is something anyone can do. Just cutting them real short and putting them in a vase. So the most important thing is just to try. You might be surprised at what a beautiful creation you can come up with.

- Every spring we go through these motions of getting our gardens ready. We wanna mulch, we want everything to be pleasingly beautiful. But I believe that there are other ways that we can mulch. Why do we use mulch? Well number one, it makes things look pretty. But underneath is what we need to be thinking about. We mulch because it conserves moisture. We mulch because it keeps down weed infestation. And then we mulch because it can enhance the soil. But I'm just gonna reverse that whole list there, and say I'm gonna mulch because it's gonna enrich my soil. I have brought in all of these leaves. They sit over winter, and when I would put my fork into them, here we go, see a lot of them come out just like this. Even with nightcrawlers in them. But anyway, I'm using that in this area right here. I do have things planted underneath. Now, another thing that was here, there were already little seedlings of weeds and whatever else coming up in this area when I put this coating of leaves down, and they've been down over three weeks I think. But it smothered them out. So I don't have to worry about them, and if a weed does come up, you know, it's so thick, their roots are very shallow and it doesn't take any effort at all to pull them out. Now I wanna take you to an area where I have used this principle for at least five years. This is an area that I spend a lot of time in, a lot of money and labor. I would bring in maybe six loads of mulch and completely mulch this area, until I decided there was a better way to do this. First of all, I have in this area a blackgum tree. So I wanted to preserve that tree. So with that in mind I began to, what I call, circle the wagons. In the fall I would ring around this area of three trees, and keep continually blowing in the leaves and the grass. There are leaves in here, not beautiful black mulch. I have cut down on weeding, I have enriched the soil. This area is pretty maintenance free. And I do have the lenten roses in here, and as you can see, they're in abundance here. Because they are happy. I think they like these leaves, I think the seeds come out, and they don't bother me at all, some might call them invasive, but they're evergreen and they're doing quite well in here. So I believe that, again, I have enriched the soil, I have made it easy to maintain, I don't have the expense, so why would we wanna take away from Mother Nature the abundance of the earth and the beauty of using leaves?

- Well for several winters now, we've had some nice mild conditions. I personally have enjoyed it, and I've gotten some early gardening out of it. But I'm wondering what about the bugs, what about the weeds, are they really getting worse? Well I thought I'd come talk to the expert, so I have David Cook with UT Extension Service to tell us about it. So bugs?

- Weeds, some diseases. We had what I call a natural season extender. We had a very mild winter, so generally we tell people do not put out our warm season vegetable plants till around the first of May because we're always afraid of a frost, freeze injury, we didn't really get that this year. Not Davidson County, outside counties got a little freeze injury, but Davidson County we were spared. But, that allowed, actually, vegetable growers and people who desire to put out early tomato plants, to successfully put out tomato plants and they didn't worry about frost injury, and I can't remember when the last time that ever happened. So, natural season extender, what did that mean for insects? Yes, we probably have more insects. We know we've had more activity with ticks this year, our office has had a number of calls, the Health Department's reported on ticks. We've seen more occurrences of Rocky Mountain spotted fever even in this county, which is very unusual disease. Ticks lay eggs in the soil and debris in the soil, and so with the mild winter all those eggs survived and so we had an abundant population of ticks early. Also, a very unusual thing happened. It was predicted by one of our plant specialists, Dr Steve Bost, of a disease that he thought would be very common this time of year, and sure enough it showed up, it's called tomato spotted wilt virus. And why did that show up? Well, due to the mild winter, warmer than normal temperatures and lack of abundant rainfall in the spring. Generally in the spring we have too much rains, so farmers have a difficult time getting into their fields, even a homeowner, grounds too wet. Dr Bost realized that these little insects called thrips, and it's always plural, it's never a thrip, it's thrips, they feed on wild plants too that are hosts for a viral disease we call tomato spotted wilt virus. Then when they go and feed on tomato plants they vector a disease, there's no control spray for a disease. So if a homeowner sees some of their tomato plants unusually wilting after they've watered them, and not all tomato plants will be this way, it'll be very sporadic, and you water more and they don't recover from that wilt, they probably have tomato spotted wilt virus. And it shows up at the top of the plant, not the bottom. Fungal diseases, leaf spot diseases show up for the lowest part of the leaves and work their way to the top because of the soil-born diseases and then the fungal spores that move up. But this disease is spread from the top because that's where the thrips feed, at the top of the plant. So we started seeing more of this and our office got more calls on it, and Dr Bost is very accurate in his prediction: warm winter, less moisture, warmer temperatures during the spring and we had an outbreak of tiny insects called thrips which the human eye, they're almost invisible. So that became a problem this year and that doesn't occur every year in this area. With weeds, we have abundant weeds. Weed seeds, what we call our winter annuals, germinate during the late summer into fall. And then the summer annuals germinate generally in the spring and late winter, and the weather was very warm, we had just enough rain, and these are pretty drought-tolerant plants. So together we had more ticks, more thrips, we had more tomato spotted wilt virus, we had an abundance of weeds and insects in general have been kind of a nuisance this year. I've also had a lotta calls on ants, tremendous amount of ants. And a lot of ants are soil nesting, and they're not harmful. But, things can be a nuisance sometimes when they enter your home.

- Now, I know we had a lot of flowers that came out beautifully, so it was really nice, strawberries lasted a long time, peas lasted a long time,

- Early season.

- It's been wonderful. But all of those flowers that were out early that usually are coming out when my tomatoes are blooming, when some of the other things are blooming, I guess I need to look hard to make sure I really have enough flowers for the pollinators.

- Yes, the bees and the pollinators are honey bees, due to the early emergence of blooms on plants, bees didn't coincide their activity to get nectar, and get pollen and provide for their hives and their population in the hives. So I talked to a number of beekeepers and some of them have actually given away tremendous numbers of bees, not the queens, other bees, to repopulate other hives, because the bees could not find, when they were active, enough pollen and nectar to bring back to the hive. So I thought it's unusual that the weather is great for us, and people were outside more, we were wearing shorts and T-shirts during wintertime here, and we didn't think about the impact and the big picture with beneficial insects. So bees were having a harder time finding a food source to supply their hives too. Sometimes what you think is good for everything, it's not good for everything. So it impacted the bee population in this area again, and they've been having a hard time for a while.

- And are there some plants that we as gardeners could especially put out in our gardens that would help with the bees?

- Yeah, in this garden, this demonstration garden, we have actually a food nectar garden for honeybees. And in that we grow a lot of herbs and mints, and there's a tree called a chaste tree, which could be used as a nice flowering ornamental tree in a yard, and it is a bee magnet. Bees hover over this, over the little tiny flowers. Now bees generally like plants with really tiny flowers. But if people would incorporate in their vegetable garden or in their landscape some nice mints, that would actuallly attract bees as good pollinators. So we need to be thinking about these insects that they're valuable pollinators for our fruit trees, and a lot of our vegetables. Because without them those food products would start to disappear. So enhancing the nectar food source for bees would be very important for homeowners.

- [Julie] And it sounds like we need to go ahead and allow some of those herbs to go to flower, so often we're cutting them back before the end, but to let some of them go to flower.

- [David] Yeah, because on herbs, you're growing them because you want to remove the foliage, because the foliage has the oils in them. But let some go to flower, and so you can just share. A bee probably doesn't need a whole lot. They work a tremendous amount of their life just gathering a little bit of nectar and pollen. So planting extra things for it, we do that for birds and other animals, so we need to do it for bees too.

- Are there some organic products that we can use if we find that the bugs this year really are sort of overpowering us?

- Particularly on this tomato spotted wilt virus, which we're getting again a number of calls on, I found there's a good organic product. Now organic products can be harmful to bees if they're applied at the wrong time. Apply these products early in the morning or late in the afternoon, and there's a product called Spinosad. And it's actually a bacterium, which is harmful to certain insects. And it's real helpful for controlling thrips on tomato plants. So that's a product I would think people need to look for. And there's certain garden centers that will sell these products that tend to sell more organic products. Very safe product to use, and it's a pretty effective control. Now, as with other pesticides, it's best to get 'em out early, but always read the label, and if it says avoid areas of water you need to do that, and if the bees are active, that's written on a lot of pesticide labels, do not apply when bees are active. So if we're good stewards of the land and plants we're gonna actually benefit the bee population by being a little more cautious with our pesticide use.

- Certainly. Well for more information on what you can do this summer and through the fall, and if we have another warm winter, nice for us.

- I'd like it.

- So would I. But to prepare for that, to learn more about what you could do, please go to our website at volunteergardener.org.

- Pancakes are one of those things where it makes it so that the family can't eat together at the same time. We're gonna change that today. We're gonna make a puffed pear pancake in the oven. So everybody eats together. Okay, let's go ahead and get started, we're gonna have our pears here, and what we're gonna do is just toss these pear slices with a little bit of sugar and cinnamon. Okay, that's just to kind of coat them really nicely, that's two tablespoons of sugar, some ground cinnamon, use your hands, your best kitchen tool ever, and just toss them pretty evenly and let them just kind of set aside. Now remember that pears will start to turn as you slice them so you might wanna coat them with just a little bit of lemon juice to keep that from happening. So now we're gonna make our pancake crust. So we've got 3/4 of a cup of all-purpose flour. We're going to add three eggs to that. Of course large, unless the recipe says otherwise. 3/4 of a cup of milk. A little bit of salt. And a teaspoon of either almond or vanilla extract. I'm gonna use almond today. Okay, so what we're gonna do is just whisk this together, and while we've been doing all this, we pre-heated the oven to 450 degrees. Now you'll need a large skillet for this, so about a 12-inch cast iron skillet works perfectly. And the little trick to this is to make sure that the skillet is in the oven while the oven is pre-heating. That gets the skillet nice and hot. Okay. We've got our pancake batter ready, let's get the skillet out of the oven. Okay, you can see how big that is. And we're gonna add our butter. You'll see it start to sizzle, and we're just gonna tilt the skillet carefully so you don't burn yourself. So that all that butter melts, just like that. We're going to add our pears to this. Okay, so you don't have to be crazy about this. And any extra I just like to add to the pan. Just make sure they're in a nice even layer so they're not piled on top of each other. And then we're gonna take our batter and we're gonna pour this over the top of it. Now the important thing is that you do not stir this after you pour it over the top. You're going to see a little few lumps in your batter, don't worry about that, it's okay it'll cook out. So we're gonna give it one more good whisk, pour the batter over the top. And then back into the oven it goes. And now you've got a breakfast that everybody can enjoy at the exact same time, puff pear pancake.

- [Narrator] For inspiring garden tours, growing tips and garden projects, visit our website at volunteergardener.org. Or on YouTube at the VolunteerGardener channel. And like us on Facebook.