Episode 2702

- [Announcer] With the guidance of a talented and knowledgeable teacher and a supportive school community, this area of Davidson Academy campus is now an arboretum and prayer garden. Matt Kerske learns how it all came together. Plus, pretty peonies. And common-sense pest prevention. Stay tuned. First, a place for discovery. A place for prayer.

- Well, it's no secret that a well-designed garden space can offer feelings of peace and tranquility, sometimes even encouraging times of respite or reflection or even inspiration. I'm here at Davidson Academy, where the community has come together for just that very purpose, to create a beautiful prayer garden right on the side of the campus here. That's also a certified level one arboretum. And I'm here with Alice Vestal, a beloved, hardworking parent of the community school here, who has now turned into landscape designer, who was brought in as kind of ushering in the first initial design phases to get this project off to a start from concept to construction.

- [Alice] Thank you, Matt. This is a wonderful place. I am so pleased that we're to this point now. It's a great stopping point. We've worked really hard on this. I say "we": a lot of people have worked on this. Probably about five years ago, I started leading an afterschool program, and extended care program and its garden club. And so I have a degree in horticulture and landscape design, and I was very pleased to get that opportunity. I have two children here. I've been here as a parent for nine years, and I love this school. So when I was at UT, I saw how Dr. Sue Hamilton and others, Mr. Williams, built that garden. And it was class by class and season by season, and really project by project. And so I thought, what can these little garden club participants do? I want them to do something big. I want them to know that they have little hands, but they can accomplish something amazing. So I thought, why don't we try to build an arboretum? And this all was just grass. Originally, this was all farmland. And the soil out here is so rich and wonderful. I mean, I think this must have been a cow pasture, maybe a feeding lot area, because the soil is wonderful. And we planted this tree. It was pretty effortless. This one is planted in honor of Dr. Baldwin's three children, Dana, Drew, and Dawn.

- [Matt] An American linden.

- [Alice] Yeah, American linden.

- [Matt] Beautiful native.

- [Alice] And when they're on the playground they ask me, Miss Alice, how is the linden tree? How is Linden doing? They know these trees. We walk and we look at each one. The birch, the Yoshino, the katsura, the Forest Pansy redbud. There are trees named for the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell.

- [Matt] Wow.

- [Alice] There are trees planted here in honor of teachers that have retired, Kathy Chasen.

- [Matt] Beautiful sarvis berry, great native.

- [Alice] I love this tree. It bloomed beautifully just a month ago.

- [Matt] Now, Alice, I realize you're pretty fortunate in that you have some existing beautiful shade maple trees here on the property as well, overhead, casting a little shade garden here, but it looks like a lot of these plantings are fairly young. Talk to me about the age of the arboretum as of right now and some of the plant choices and planting considerations that you've given.

- Yeah, we're very fortunate to have these trees. I made a point to tell everyone at the dedication that I feel like the garden, it looks like the garden was started a year ago, but I really think when Lois Jones and Drew Bratcher planted that first October Glory red maple at the front door, I think that really established our arboretum.

- [Matt] That was the start.

- [Alice] Yeah, that was our start. And now we've just picked up, and now we've got all these trees. It's casting this wonderful shade for us and it looks very mature. The magnolia behind the cross, that's another one that was a sixth grade gift, I think planted in 2002. It's done beautifully. And that's the backdrop. We need that maturity. I think it makes the garden feel established.

- [Matt] Some good bones, of the, yep, some good existing structure, and then into the newer plantings. And how long ago were these planted?

- [Alice] These were planted, I wanna say, three weeks ago. One of our new families to DA stopped by, saw me workin' out here, and said, we'll be back at five o'clock to help you. And sure enough, she brought extra family members, and they all got this in really fast. Ann planted the verbena over there on the berm, and we've got great, great families here. Great teachers, it's a wonderful place.

- [Matt] And just an incredible mix of planting, some natives, some non-natives, great space for the garden. I see a lot of people making the mistake early on in perennial plantings of just taking everything way too close. You have a really good spacing on all this stuff, and in two to three years, it won't require a lot of pruning. It's just gonna naturally lush all in. Tell me about some of the plant choices and some of the plants that we see around here.

- [Alice] I really like the Praying Hands hostas at the beginning of the garden. As soon as you enter through those columns, it's symbolic, it works with the shade, and then behind that, we've got the variegated Solomon's Seal, some brunnera, astilbe, Jacob's Ladder, and I'm only starting out with nine hostas right now. Gotta start somewhere.

- Okay, I know it gets a lot higher than that. But you gotta at least start, you can't get too crazy just in the beginning. Now, Alice, I notice kinda walkin' around, we have beautiful elements of water feature in the garden, which is great for the wildlife, the pollinators, to kinda attract 'em in, mixed with an assortment of perennial that are in bloom on and off throughout the whole season, gathering places for the insects and the wildlife, and teachers are using this as a community resource to educate the children, no?

- Definitely, yes. I made sure to tell the teachers, please use this space. This space is an extension of your classroom. We're doin' plant ID out here, we were recently certified as All-America Selections Display Garden, so our seventh grade high school teacher, Jim Garrett, is interested in plant genetics, and he's workin' on getting a greenhouse of some sort, and so we're hoping that he can grow the seeds from AAS, and we can put them in the garden. There are classes out here daily. Sometimes it's too crowded. It's great success. We've got other things coming. I'm working on grant writing. We did receive an award from Whole Foods Kids, and we received money to build an edible food garden. And then our librarian just donated this new library, so we'll have reading. We have literature in the garden, we have art in the garden, definitely science. The science teacher teaches out here often, making simple observations, using our senses to really engage with everything we see, hear, and we've got the bones in, we've got the structure, the infrastructure, and now it's just only gonna get better.

- [Matt] Sure. A little bit of time. I'm here with Mr. Jim Garrett, one of the science and biology teachers here for a couple of years at Davidson Academy. Mr. Jim, we have a lot of kids working in the garden here today, doing an activity that you use as a resource. Tell me a little bit about how you use this space as a resource for the children.

- Yes, so what we're doing with this being the first year, it's sort of like, if you notice, they got a piece of paper in their hands. It's like a scavenger hunt, right? So some of the plants that are in here are listed in there. So they're goin' around looking to see if they can find the plant. And then also, this is where we teach them about the common name and the scientific name, and so they get to see, well, yeah, I knew that was a fern, and that was a fern, but now they understand why the scientific name's important because that helps us to make sure we're both talking about the same plant.

- [Matt] Bingo. We're talkin' about how as these children progress and age through their classrooms that they're starting out here in the elementary school, and you're working with some high schoolers, and how that knowledge and the respect of the garden progresses through the years.

- [Jim] Yeah, and as I use this and learn the value of it, then they can also then continue to be contributors and help with it, and it will continue to grow.

- [Matt] And keep it within the family for their children in the generations to come after that.

- [Jim] Exactly.

- [Matt] That's fantastic. Well, I must say, I've had a fantastic visit out here at Davidson Academy, walking the grounds and seeing their prayer garden and arboretum space on the campus. You know, it's been just very refreshing to see what can happen with the synergy of parents and the community and the teachers and the children coming together to create just such an amazing space, it almost serves as a blueprint for other schools or organizations to create something similar on their property. I'm just really amazed at what can happen when many hands come together.

- We're in a gorgeous little shady nook of the garden of Leslie Matthews and John Douglass in Nashville, and this is John, and John is gonna tell me all about his miniature hostas, which just really caught my eye. John, I just love the way you've displayed these here.

- [John] Thank you, Marty. I saw this little pot. It has eight holes on the outside and then one in the middle, and it just called for miniature hostas, 'cause I don't have very many of those. We have the larger hostas, giants and medium size. But I love the arrangement of the hostas 'cause there's so many different forms. And these are fully mature plants, and this is where they live, and it's just great to be able to display 'em.

- [Marty] I love the fact that there're so many different forms. You've got ruffled leaves and these long linear. I've never seen one like this.

- [John] This, actually, is a species that came to us from Korea, 'cause all the hostas that we use and work with over in this country all come from Asia, be it China, Korea, or Japan. And it is an actual species, so it's nice to be able to display it in the hosta, in this, I call it the nine-hole miniature golf.

- [Marty] John, here's another pot. And I'm noticing some of these are not exactly tee-nincy.

- [John] Well this is lemontini. It's supposed to be a miniature, but somebody forgot to tell it that it's supposed to be in this container and it has taken off. It loves it in there, and it's pushin' others away, but they'll hold their own, 'cause hostas, they claim their territory and that's where they're gonna stay.

- [Marty] Just for contrast, folks, I wanna, these, even lemontini is small compared to this elegance next door. This is a large hosta, and you can see how huge hostas can get when it's one of the larger varieties. Talk about its diversity in form and size for your garden. Let me ask you this, John. I notice you've got a lot of hostas in pots. Tell me about gardening with hostas in pots.

- [John] Putting the hostas in pots, they seem to like it better. They don't have any competition with roots from the trees. We do have a lot of trees in our yard, which makes it ideal for growing hostas, yes. But they do have to compete with the tree roots, and the tree roots generally are gonna win out. So by puttin' 'em in a pot, it's easier to control with your watering and the feeding of the plants, and it controls the different critters like moles and voles--

- [Marty] Right, voles can't get into the pots.

- [John] Voles can't get into the pots. So it makes it easier to maintain, so, and if you wanna move 'em, if they're not workin' good in one place, you can move it somewhere else.

- [Marty] How often do you feed your hostas? They look so great.

- [John] Normally we do it just like we talked about before, with the 10-10-10 in March, and then in April we'll use that tomato plant food, the Miracle-Gro tomato plant food, and when the leaves start comin' out, then just spray the leaves once a week--

- With a full layer, full layer of feed?

- Yeah, right. And that's what we'll use that, and that's about it.

- Well, they sure like it.

- And then you keep 'em watered.

- Yes, they love water.

- They have to have it.

- Yeah, they love water. Well thank you so much. This is such a delight, and it's such a lovely place, just this lovely little shaded grotto you've got going here.

- [John] We love it back here. We can sit and look either way in our gardens and just see it all, and it's just, it's fun.

- [Marty] It's delightful.

- [John] It makes it all worthwhile.

- [Marty] Thank you so much.

- [John] You bet.

- Ants, termites, roaches. What are we gonna do about them, but still protect all of our bees and ladybugs and praying mantis? Well, I think I'm going to talk to a professional and find out what's what. Well, some of our insects are great, but sometimes they wanna crawl in the house and cause damage. So I'm here with Greg McCauley with Orkin to find out more about what we need to freak out about, and what we can do to prevent problems. Hi, Greg.

- Hey, how are you?

- I'm doing great. So let's just jump right into the tips I need to know when I'm getting my garden ready for the spring. What are some of the biggest things I can do to keep all those ants and termites and other things out of my house?

- Well, certainly one of the things is to keep the mulch away from the house. We do have a tendency sometimes to pile the mulch up a little heavy against the house. It does hold temperature, it does hold moisture, and it is a food source for the termites in particular, so keeping the mulch away from the house is something that is one of the keys to keeping the termites from gettin' in the house.

- [Julie] All right, well it's been raining a lot this spring, which is great, and I have been looking at my downspouts. I'm putting in a rain barrel. Anything I need to be careful with there?

- Certainly always keeping the water or channeling the water away from the house. We wanna keep the water from coming off the downspouts to get it away from the house so it doesn't collect there at the foundation.

- [Julie] Fantastic. So the ants, I figure, they might come in, they might go back out. I'm not gonna worry too much about them. But termites. So, I've looked around, and I'm not seeing termites. So am I okay?

- Certainly not; we never know. Even a professional pest control company, we do a thorough inspection, and we still are only doing a visual inspection. We're looking for things that are conducive for the termites because many times we don't see the termites themselves. We only see the damage or the conditions that are conducive.

- [Julie] What about ants and roaches? What can I do, is there a treatment for them?

- Well, certainly. We have a little over 4,000 species of ants here in middle Tennessee, and many of them are just a nuisance to you when they get to the house. But there is one in particular, the carpenter ants, that can do som structural damage. And they're looking for moisture around the foundation, moisture at a window, maybe a plumbing leak, again, the mulch stacked up against the house, the firewood, and that's how they'll gain access to the house. They don't eat the wood; they bore into the wood to colonize and lay their eggs. So they can do the same type of damage as termites.

- Wow, I don't want that. And I imagine that there's something that we can use to treat for that?

- We certainly can. Again, we do a thorough inspection. And depending on the level of activity or the level of infestation, we'll customize a treatment based on your home in particular.

- Okay, now I especially like to grow vegetables and fruit. You know, it's all the rage now, growin' your own food, and so much fun and yummy. Are there anything I need to know about if I'm gonna have my house treated? Can I still grow something?

- [Greg] Well, you certainly could. We would recommend any edible vegetation to be planted at least three feet away from the foundation. If for some reason you can't get it three feet away, then at least get a raised garden. Because when we treat for termites, we're treating down into the foundation and down into the soil, so you wanna get that vegetation either up and/or away from the house.

- Okay, well that's very doable, and it sounds like I need to keep those plants a few feet away from the house anyway.

- Three feet.

- Okay, so that'll also help prevent me from watering too much right against the house.

- Exactly.

- [Julie] Well, speaking of carpenters, I have some interesting little holes in my deck I wanna show you.

- [Greg] Let's take a look.

- [Julie] Well, Greg, I've seen these wonderful large bees floating around, and I know they're good pollinators, but I'm wondering if that might have any connection with these holes that I'm finding in my deck.

- [Greg] Well, they certainly are. It's a carpenter bee. It's a very large, almost looks like a bumblebee. And they can and will bore into wood that is not freshly painted or stained, and when they bore in, it's about a dime-sized hole, and it typically will turn in and make a sharp 90-degree turn. They will lay their eggs, and that's when the damage occurs. Again, it's not significant structural damage, but it certainly does some damage to the railing of the deck.

- [Julie] Well, as we're doing some new planting, like this bed here, starting to put in some new flowers and things, I'm a little concerned about making sure I don't get the pests all excited, so what if I run into a bunch of ants?

- Well, you certainly could. And you could run into ants, you could run into termites. The thing that you wanna do is, if you have any type of granulars for ants, to go ahead and get them around that area now so that you don't allow the ants to spread or split the colony and get closer to the house.

- [Julie] Aha, very good. And what about over the winter, is there anything I can do to sort of help eliminate some of these pests ahead of time?

- [Greg] Keep the debris, keep it clean, keep the leaves off of it. If you have extra grass clippings, make sure that you get those pulled away.

- [Julie] All right, that sounds really good. And now I'm wondering about some of the instructions on things like those granulars. Is this something that I can handle? What type of thing should I look for on the packages?

- Certainly natural products, but any of the granulars themselves, typically you would like to wear rubber gloves or cloth gloves but you don't, because you're not really worried about the contact to your skin more so than the smell on your skin. If you're a smoker, or if you wear a heavy perfume or cologne, that will deter the ants from coming to the granular.

- Aha, which is the bait that you want them to get into.

- Right, so it's the odor that's the issue.

- All right, now I imagine the amount I use, when I put it down, whether or not it's going to rain.

- Yeah, all of the labels are gonna be slightly different, so it's very important that you read and understand the label prior to applying anything.

- Fantastic, and now what about if I'm near a creek or a natural spring or something?

- Certainly you're gonna have to be very careful. Some of, most of the granulars that you're going to use will not penetrate into the soil, so you'll not have any issues. But if you're using a liquid of any kind, it can penetrate into the soil, so you'll just have to read the label and be safe.

- [Julie] All right, make sure it doesn't run off into my stream, and disturb any of the wildlife there. Well thank you, Greg, so much, for taking your time today to spend with us and let us know what we can do about our pests and how to be careful with them.

- [Greg] Great.

- Peonies are an old-fashioned garden favorite, and one of the best places to see them in bloom is here at Iris City Gardens in Primm Springs, Tennesseee. But what I really want to show you today is a peony that is not your grandmother's old-fashioned favorite. Joining me today is Greg McCullough from Iris City Gardens, one of the owners here. You and Macy have had this for how long?

- [Greg] It's been 20 years now.

- [Troy] 20 years. And in front of us, these two rows, this is a peony called Bartzella. And this really is the peony that sort of started it all as far as commercial popularity for what we're looking at today.

- That's right, this was introduced in 1986 by a hybridizer named Roger Anderson. And this has been probably the most popular intersectional peony ever.

- [Troy] Right, so you call it an intersectional peony, and I know some people call them Itoh peonies also. Explain to me what that means.

- [Greg] Well the first, this is a tree peony crossed with an herbaceous peony. Your grandmother's old peony was the herbaceous, and the trees are much more difficult to propagate. This one, these are crosses between the two, and they die all the way to the ground in the winter, just like the herbaceous. But they've got real strong stems from the tree peonies. The first person to do these crosses was a Japanese gentleman, Dr. Itoh, and so these are also called Itoh hybrids or intersectionals. Dr. Itoh, from what I've read, made 20,000 crosses with different tree peonies and herbaceous peonies till he finally got a cross that took.

- [Troy] Something that was viable.

- [Greg] Yes. Those were introduced in the U.S. in the '60s. I've had yellow dream, yellow emperor, and a couple of other yellows, but it wasn't until Roger Anderson did Bartzella that they really took off.

- [Troy] Certainly before, we never had yellow.

- [Greg] That's true. There were never yellow in the herbaceous, and the first five or six that were hybridized were yellows. And they have this beautiful rose-colored flair, is what those are called. That comes from the tree peonies. And that's in all of the intersectionals, you'll see those flairs.

- [Troy] Right, so there were yellow tree peonies, and that's one of the reasons people loved them so much. Not only yellow, but just those really rich, intense colors.

- [Greg] Yes.

- [Troy] And that's been passed on now to what essentially grows as an old-fashioned or herbaceous type peony.

- [Greg] That's right, yes.

- [Troy] Of the many varieties that you grow, Cora Louise, obviously, is a paler, lighter colored flower, almost white with the dark blotches, but what are some of your favorites that you've got out here?

- [Greg] Well, New Millennium is a newer one from Roger Anderson, and it's close to our favorite. It is just gorgeous. I've got one that's nearly black that's from Mr. Anderson. I've got just a range of colors because the tree peonies just really had more color in the blooms than the herbaceous peonies.

- [Troy] Right. You know, it almost seems like with this line of breeding that we could almost compare it to what people have done with the purple cone flower recently. They used that yellow of that Echinacea paradoxa to sort of expand the color range of a plant that really came in shades of pink and purple and white. And now the same thing happened a long time ago with peonies, but they're becoming popular on the market now. This is the tree peony foliage that's come along with the flowers. It's much less disease-prone. It doesn't get botrytis like the herbaceous peony. It stays much healthier and greener all growing season and all, really till the fall, where the herbaceous peonies look pretty beat up.

- [Troy] Right, and these plants seem to be very strongly upright, very shrubby and--

- [Greg] Yes, they get very strong stems from the tree peonies, so they don't, where you had to tie up the old fashioned ones, you don't ever have to tie these up. They're strong.

- [Troy] They hold their heads up high and don't hang their blooms in the mud and all of that.

- [Greg] That's correct, yes.

- [Troy] As we get out of the kind of yellow and apricot color range, which is one of the reasons I think some of these are so popular, we also get into some beautiful pinks, and what other colors do the intersectionals come in?

- [Greg] We've had some nice reds. We have one that's beautiful purple, and one that's nearly black. And then we have multicolored ones that have pink and yellow in them, that will from a distance look almost orange.

- [Troy] Uh huh, so a nice blend of colors in some of them, really.

- [Greg] Right, there's lots of different colors coming out of the tree peonies, moving over into the intersectionals.

- [Troy] So things like Rosy Prospects, which is a nice soft-colored one, and then on up into these beautiful plants like Scarlet Heaven that have those really rich, deep tones in the blooms. Well, and our little time together here has brought the wind and the rain out, but that's all right, we need it. If you will, speak just quickly for us about the culture of these peonies.

- Like the herbaceous, you plant with the eyes, just below the surface. They don't wanna be covered. We do a little mulch around 'em to hold the moisture in, to keep the weeds down. We use a balanced fertilizer, usually a triple-14 slow release fertilizer, and they wanna stay moist. They can take full sun or half-day shade. But pretty much like the herbaceous, you grow 'em exactly the same conditions. But it's a rich, slightly acidic soil that they're in.

- [Troy] Okay, very good. So be on the lookout for some of these new, unusual, and very beautiful peonies, and Iris City is a great place to come and see them.

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