Episode 2602

- [Announcer] Coming up, fiddle-leaf fig, zz plant, and a new spin on a snake plant, what? Indoor foliage has turned a page. Matt Kerske introduces us some green decor. Plus, Sheri Gramer takes us along to a well-planned garden that has the right plants in the right spots. And did I mention hardy orchids? We've got a full lineup so settle in. First, dramatic decor that's easy to maintain and long-lived too.

- What we're gonna be talking about, well, the wide world of foliage and interior plants. It's really caught a big trend here in the last couple years in our store, picked up a lot more popularity, it's not so much the grandparents and parents doing it anymore, we gotta inspire the younger generations, i.e. me and my friends and really get 'em back into bringing the wide world of plants indoors. So everybody's familiar with the old mother-in-law's tongue or snake plant, it's kind of a newer variety in that world, this one's called Bantel's Sensation, they're really getting creative with some of the varieties down in tropical nurseries, this one has a variegated white creamy margins, gets up to about three to four feet, maybe even larger if you have the space for it inside, very hard to kill plant, low light, medium light if you have it, biggest thing you wanna avoid is over-watering with these and I have no doubt you will have success with the snake plant and some of the newer varieties. Another variety in the Sanseviera world or mother-in-law's tongue or sanseviera cylindricas, these are about as modern and contemporary as you can get, they come in all different shapes and sizes depending on how the growers are propagating them down in the nurseries. These are reminiscent of a bit of a starfish that can take all shapes and sizes. Again, keep the watering light, keep the light exposure low to medium, you're gonna have a lot of success with these. Let me introduce you to the most popular house plant in our store right, it is sweeping the social media world, magazines, it is the fiddle-leaf fig or the fiddle-leaf ficus, ficus lyrata, giant leafs on this variety, everybody cannot get enough of the ficus lyrata. However, it does come with a few grower tips, it is not a plant that you can just grab and stick anywhere in the house. No, you want to be keeping it in a south-facing, southwest, southeast-facing window, it loves to have some direct light on its leaves, do not try to attempt to grow this if you do not have the light. You're gonna be hard to be successful with a plant like this, but if you do have the bright light coming in through that window and you wanna keep it near that window, go for it. Keep light on the watering, maybe once every three to four weeks, depending on the media that you have it in, feed it once every couple months and you're sure to have some success. So what I'm holding here in my hand is pothos or devil's ivy as it is sometimes called. It is a tough houseplant, most people are familiar with the plain green variety, it has a great trailing habit to it but this one has become really popular over the years, this one's called satin, great for hanging baskets or in pots that you wanna trail down pieces of trim inside the house. Medium to low light, let it dry in between waterings, really great variety. Another twist on an old favorite is the Aglaonema plant or the Chinese evergreen, most people are familiar with the plane jane green, maybe there's this little silver variegation in it, but now they're coming out with some red Aglaonemas and they are incredibly popular, they're also at a real pop of color into kind of lower light medium light areas of the room and they're low maintenance. Medium to light watering is all it needs, doesn't get much taller than 18 inches by 18 inches wide, let it dry out between waterings, you're gonna love this plant. Another great plant to keep in mind, everybody's familiar with the maiden-hair fern. It's a real popular fern that you might see in magazines and it's a real delicate type fern, lot of people have a hard time growing a maiden-hair fern, it likes to stay average and moist pretty much all the time so if you forget to water it, it's not too friendly. Why don't you go ahead and do yourself a favor, pick up a rabbit's foot fern, you'll be happy that you did, tolerates drought and stress a lot better than the maiden hair, has beautiful delicate foliage up top, and then it gets its names from these hairy little roots that'll kind of grow and cascade over the pots. Another one of my favorites here and what I'm holding is a zz plant, it's in the cycad family and really hard to kill plant, we get that question all the time up here at the Gardens of Babylon as far as what can't I kill, zz plant, I would say is in that category, doesn't get too much taller than what you see here, go light on the watering, can go very low light in the house, kind of has a little bit of a modern, contemporary structural look to it, just love it. You know another trend I think is here to stay in the world of houseplants are cactus and succulents. You can be very successful with cactus and succulents and there are some key points to remember here, start with some of the varieties that are just easier for the amateur and then as you develop a skill with it, you can get a little bit more in-depth with some of the more unique varieties. Starting with some of the harder varieties to grow, I'll start with are the echeveria, now these always catch people's eyes in the nursery, they almost have an iridescent to them but if you're new to the world, maybe lay off 'em a little bit, stick back and stick with a little bit more trusted varieties, some of those being the jade, jade plant will either come in a solid green or a variegated color, very easy to care for, very low maintenance, keep it light on the watering, and of course, medicinal, aloe of course, very popular, very low maintenance, usually it only fails if it doesn't get enough light, filtered light or if it gets over-watered, some of the medicinals or the spider aloe, great accompaniment into your aloe collection, little bit more colorful, little bit more sassy. So in the world of cactus, we have very popular varieties which are called the barrel cactus, they come in all shapes, sizes, spine lengths, they can get pretty ferocious so be careful but again, you wanna just forget about them, set 'em up on a ledge, maybe water them once a month, strong filtered light is all they need. Cactus, cereus peruvianus, night-blooming cactus, comes in all shapes and sizes as well, can easily get up to the four- to six-foot mark, you can place a couple of these in a container or grow them as single. Last but not least, this is something funky, you got your firestick pencil cactus, these are gonna have reddish new growth coming off the tips, kind of a modern, again very structural type of plant, they can get up easily into the two to three, four, I've even seen 'em five or six feet tall if you properly stake 'em and keep 'em in a container but again, maybe watering these once a month, keeping them in medium light, most cactus and succulents don't have to be in full sun all day long, they just like a good strong filtered light. So as we've seen, containers come in all shapes, sizes, and colors for houseplants, choose the one that speaks to you, get creative with it. Some things to think about when it comes to picking out that right planter is what kind of weight is it? If it's gonna be a big plant, maybe choose a lighter weight container, maybe something made out of wicker or plastic or rubber and if it's a smaller type planter, go with something ceramic or even metal. Beautiful shapes and sizes to everything, there's no limit to what you're capable of doing. Drainage, key issue here, does it have holes, does it not? Your watering is gonna be influenced by whether or not there are holes in that container. And again, when it comes to containers, get creative, you don't have to buy new, expensive planters off the shelf, go to your local antique market or vintage reclaim store, find some for just a couple bucks. Get really creative, you'll add a new little spin to your houseplants and makes a big difference.

- We are in a grand location with a gardener's gardener. Go grab that pencil and that notepad and get ready to take some notes. Rhonda, this is beautiful here, the view is spectacular. How long have you lived here?

- 17 years.

- [Sheri] And you've been gardening all 17 years?

- Oh yes.

- Never ending.

- [Rhonda] Never ending, never will, it's a passion and the plants have taught me everything. They'll say, no I don't wanna be here, I wanna be somewhere else.

- And so why do you have all your parsley here, what kind of garden is this, what's your theme?

- Okay, my theme here is butterfly garden. I have tropical milkweed, I have Florence fennel, the triple-leafed parsley, I have a little bit of dill, I have the menarda and yarrow and all these are perfect for the butterflies, it gives them their own special habitat.

- Why did you do the parsley?

- The black swallowtail butterflies love to lay their eggs in the parsley.

- [Sheri] And I see a beautiful blue-green herb, it's rue, and it's grown a lot for the flowers but it's also a dangerous herb, isn't it?

- That's right, do not, I don't even get near it. It's beautiful and I love its placement but if you have rue, you better put your gloves on and just stay away from it because it can give you an ugly rash. These are the oak-leaf hydrangeas and they start blooming early and then it's about time and I see now there's some shades of pink coming on and it'll all gradually become pink blooms and then in the fall, more of a burnt orange, so it's absolutely beautiful. Sheri, where are you?

- I'm over here!

- Oh, I'm coming!

- I couldn't resist, I heard the water, I wanted to check it out, and it's magnificent, everything, everything, just absolutely everything, the babbling brook, the plan, the view, you did great.

- [Rhonda] Thank you, it's hard to leave home. These are irises that bloom bright yellow and they're so tall and then I have apple mint all through so after a rain, it's so refreshing. Which I have to have layers of flowers that bloom all throughout the year.

- [Sheri] Japanese maple and ewes and pines.

- [Rhonda] So all through the year, the winter, we still have color when everything else is faded.

- [Sheri] I just love how the maturity of your plantings have just kind of rolled and rambled together and it's beautiful but the different chartreuses and the deep greens, I love it, I just love it, it's beautiful, wow, it's amazing. Alright, I guess we can go back and look at the vegetables. I love the babbling brook, though, and it's beautiful.

- [Rhonda] Oh, well thank you, so glad to have you.

- [Sheri] Alright Rhonda, I see some vegetables here and I love the paths that you put in, why did you do that?

- Well my husband Mike said, Rhonda, we need to create some paths so that therefore we won't trample everything and so he got a piece of paper and he drew it out and he carried the stone and made the placements.

- [Sheri] So this is the first year for this section, correct?

- For this section, it used to be just day lilies, and I said, Mike, day lilies just bloom once a year, I want a place to plant some vegetables along with my herb garden.

- [Sheri] Tell me about your companion planting here, explain that a little bit.

- With the tomatoes, if you'll see dark reuben basil and you'll see other types of basil, the sweet basil, and those are great companion plants for the tomatoes.

- And when you say companion plant, do you mean to make it grow or for insect benefits?

- Oh they benefit each other, basil will keep the insects that will get into your tomato plants away, maybe you'll see the tomato horn worm which if you want to take some cheesecloth and just count on losing that one tomato plant and just watch what happens because the sphinx moth which is one of the best pollinators in the whole world comes from the tomato horn worm and that would just be a great experiment to do with children, just watch what happens.

- [Sheri] And what about the marigolds?

- The marigolds are great too, actually when my dad had the marigolds, because of their scent, it'll keep the squash bugs away and cucumber beetles and I just dead head 'em and toss them over into those different areas.

- And explain your sunflowers.

- Oh my sunflowers, well my birthday happens to be in May along with Mother's Day.

- Lucky lucky lucky.

- [Rhonda] So my son for Mother's Day, he started me a little bucket of sunflowers, so what you see is my gift and every day I look out, think of my son, what a wonderful.

- He knew his mama, didn't he?

- What a wonderful gift, yes, he knows his mama and he's even into gardening now, which I didn't know that would ever happen but it has.

- It's infectious, yep.

- [Rhonda] Onion chives, you can plant those anywhere in the garden.

- So are you self-taught in all this companion gardening?

- [Rhonda] Yes, I am.

- [Sheri] Winter months you're reading huh?

- Yes, I have a stack of books always by my bedside table and it's always a course, a constant course for me but I love it.

- [Sheri] And I noticed your lettuce hasn't bolted yet either.

- No, well we had that for lunch today but it won't be long and then that'll come up and I'll feed that to my chickens.

- [Sheri] And I cannot believe that that is squash there. What did you do to make it so big?

- [Rhonda] Well, we keep wondering, it's such a pretty plant, we hope there's gonna be squash in there. I peeked under and the nasturtiums are under there which if you look, those leaves are so healthy, there are no insect holes, so the squash bores are staying away so I know that's working.

- [Sheri] And that's why you put the nasturtium there.

- [Rhonda] Yes, there are squash blossoms under there so I just keep looking and another thing that's good is to plant radish and just let it go to seed because the radish is a great companion plant to squash as well.

- [Sheri] Rhonda, I wanna tell you thank you very much for sharing your home, your gardens, the view, the wonderful knowledge that you've shared with us on companion gardening, your knowledge of insects, thank you so much.

- Oh well thank you for coming, I've enjoyed it so much and I enjoy the Volunteer Gardener, I learn so much from your program.

- Well we love people like you that let us come into their yards and enjoy the beauty.

- Come back any time.

- Thank you.

- You're welcome.

- Isn't that just gorgeous? You're looking at a hardy orchid growing right by the front door of my guest today and I'm so happy to be here talking to him, this is John Tullock who is a plant lover extraordinaire and a specialist in hardy orchids and he has even written the bible of hardy orchid growing in this part of the world, it's got his name on it and look at that beautiful cover, that's a native lady slipper on the cover. John, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us.

- Oh, it's my pleasure.

- And hardy orchids, everybody knows about all the tropicals and growing them in bark and everything but with hardy orchids, you're talking about orchids that grow in the ground.

- That's right.

- Yep, I mean, right there like any other garden plant.

- [John] Absolutely, most people don't know they exist.

- I know there are hundreds of types of orchids, are there any hardy terrestrial orchids that make good garden subjects?

- There are probably dozens, I don't think that there are that many that are maybe available but there's dozens of hardy orchids that could be used as good garden subjects and there are lots of available kinds, my favorite being the Chinese ground orchid. They're really easy to grow, you can get 'em almost from any bulb catalog, bletilla.

- [Marty] I've seen 'em, bletilla striata is the name of that plant.

- [John] They come in several color varieties. And the best advice I could give you is grow them like daffodils, morning sun, well drained, that's about it, they'll tolerate any garden soil. No special care, I treat 'em like any other perennial. Those plants I have had, their parents I bought probably now 20 years ago.

- Wow. Orchids are long-lived, aren't they?

- Yes, they live a very long time and probably would outlive us easily.

- Wow.

- They are thought to be in some cases hundreds of years old.

- My goodness, that's like some of the blueberry, wild blueberry colonies and stuff that live that long. And how about the natives people know about, like say pink lady slipper?

- Well the pink lady slipper is notoriously difficult to grow and it's not something I would recommend trying as a first attempt.

- Just plunking in the garden.

- [John] And plunking it in the garden, it will certainly die, they like to grow under pine trees and so if you don't have pine tree, you might wanna find another variety to work with.

- Well that means acid soil.

- Very acid soil.

- And well drained, typically.

- Yes.

- [Marty] With a lot of duff, that kind of pine needle, part decomposed pine needle?

- Exactly.

- I gotcha.

- That's what they like to grow in and the of course all orchids, whether they be the tropical kind that people are familiar with or all of the hardy orchids, that's the number one growth requirement is good drainage, if water stands around their roots with the exception of the ones that actually live in bog conditions.

- [Marty] Yeah, there are a few swamp orchids.

- There's a few swamp orchids but if the ones that most people are interested in, that's the way to kill one is to have the roots stay wet all the time.

- So you're saying, is that true of all lady slippers, not just the pink but the yellows and everything, and are they typically fairly difficult, if you've got the right conditions they'll grow?

- [John] If you have the right conditions, they will grow, it's pretty easy to create a bed, if you're working with any kind of raised bed situation in the garden anyway, you can build a raised bed that they will grow in, which is what I have here although I don't have any of the cypripediums in there. But they, what they want is for the, they want constant moisture but plenty of air around the roots.

- Right, lot of oxygen.

- Lot of oxygen around the roots and so the way you do that is you have a reservoir of water standing below the orchid bed and then have more growing mix, have your growing mix piled up above where that water level is going to be.

- So it's drier up here and then moisture down there.

- Yeah and the water can just, as the sun evaporates the water, it can just wick up through that moss and sand and peat moss is what people use.

- So in your book, you describe how to build.

- And I talk about how to build that and everything and it can be as simple as some pressure-treated lumber or you can build a stone flower bed and fix it up for the orchids but it, and you can find lots of, there's lots of mail-order supplies now for seed-grown cypripediums, so we don't want, of course we don't want anybody to go digging out in the woods.

- And since they're such specialized plants, they're not gonna live if you dig 'em up anyway.

- Pretty much, they need to be transplanted when they're dormant so if you see something in bloom, the chances are it's not gonna survive if you dig it up anyway.

- Right, now if somebody's gonna bulldoze the site, that's a different.

- There are plenty of situations, I talk in the book about a salvage that we participated in here in Knoxville and most of those plants have ended up at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

- [Marty] I understand you have had a big collection that you've donated to the Smithsonian.

- I did, I knew of course some time before I was going to move to this house that, I knew that I didn't want to leave all my orchids behind at the other place but moving everything.

- That is a big task.

- We had a lot of, as you know, it's hard to move anyway, so what I did was we sent the vast majority of the plants to an acquaintance of mine, Tom Merinda, up at the Smithsonian and eventually those plants, I believe the majority of them are in the greenhouse or grow-out houses now but eventually, those were going into the new national garden of Native American plants that they're building up there.

- How exciting, that's terrific. Let me ask you about a few folklore type orchid tales that I've heard, pipullary discolor called crane fly orchid.

- Crane fly orchid, yeah.

- [Marty] And they talk about it growing in a line.

- Yeah I have heard that the mountain folks used to think that that was a very bad omen, if you will, very bad sign, to see that straight line. But the reason they grow in a straight line is that they seem to like to germinate, the seeds like to germinate on fallen logs, on nurse logs.

- [Marty] Oh. Hence the line.

- As soon as the log decays, everybody just sits down in the same position that the log was.

- So you're seeing the shadow of the log basically in the organization of the plants, that's interesting. Now you see a lot of wild orchids growing on half rotten or almost completely rotten logs.

- Yes.

- Is there something special in the log?

- Probably there's two things going on, one is all orchids, whether they be hardy or tropical, need a symbiotic relationship with a fungus when the seed first germinates, and a lot of them maintain that relationships, helps to provide some of their food, even after they become green-leaved photosynthetic plants.

- [Marty] And making their own food with their leaves.

- Exactly.

- [Marty] So there's something special in that soil.

- Probably there's soil fungus but that chunky, nicely decomposed humacy soil is exactly what the wanna grow in.

- Oh it's that rich, well-drained soil.

- Yeah.

- [Marty] So do they need a lot of nutrients in their soil?

- No, it's better to just allow the normal decomposition of the compost, whatever you happen to be using, you can use, the beds that I've done, you can use the bagged, really, they call it Nature's Helper I think is one of the brands, you can buy it at any big box, retail.

- Composted.

- Composted pine bark.

- Pine bark, yeah.

- And that mixed with sand and long fiber magnum moss is what they love.

- That's that wicking and good drainage.

- Exactly.

- I know tipullary is really common and another common one that I've seen a lot is rattlesnake planting.

- Most of my friends who are not plant nuts like me do not know that that is an orchid but they have seen it everywhere hiking in the woods. With the white netting on the leaves, it's very easy to recognize and that is good yarrow, it is probably the most widespread native orchid, they're found all the way from Canada down here into the South.

- I've seen them in the wild here in Tennessee, yeah, just tell the folks where they might, if they're interested, be able to get some of these seed-grown orchids.

- Check online, that's the best place, there are several mail-order places, as we said, bulb companies usually have the Chinese ground orchid, bletilla, the cypripediums you can find, there is a website called cyphaven.com. There is a place called the Vermont Lady Slipper Company.

- Well that's a good name.

- There is a place called Rocky Mountain Orchids, several more, they're listed in the back of the book.

- Wonderful, well thank you so much John, for sharing the wisdom in your book today and your beautiful garden and it's just wonderful.

- Thank you, Marty, it's been my pleasure. Come again.

- Oh you bet.

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