Episode 2740

- [Narrator] If a single daffodil can make you smile, then prepare yourself. Troy Marden is at the Annual Flower Show of the American Daffodil Society where thousands of stems are on display from all across the globe. These daffodil enthusiasts have brought their best. Then we'll tour an urban home landscape that truly is low maintenance. It's about the plant palate. Stay tuned.

- [Narrator] First, the flower that symbolizes new beginnings and hope.

- Today we have a unique opportunity to visit the American Daffodil Society's National Convention and Show here in Nashville. This is the first time the show's been held here so we're really excited to show you all of the flowers that have come from, actually, all over the world to be presented here today.

- [Troy] Neil, what brought you to the U.S. for a daffodil show?

- [Neil] I think probably the first time, I was slightly reluctant, I've never been to America before, so it was a slightly nervous step but that's back in '99 back in Pittsburgh to an American Daffodil Society convention. I suppose I fell in love with America and I fell in love with the American Daffodil people. It's a wonderful family and it's good fun.

- Okay, so when you prepare to bring your flowers from Northern Ireland all the way to America, what's your process? How do you go about getting your flowers over here?

- Well I suppose the first thing, the most important, particularly as far as the U.S. is concerned is that we're inspected by our Department of Agriculture. After we cut the flowers and bring them in, we personally make sure there's absolutely no bugs or anything on it. Then our inspector comes and looks at them. Once he okays them and gives us the documentation to bring them in, we then start to pack them. We pack them dry and we pack them flat in a box, we pin to the bottom of the box. The box has to be aluminum because if you have a wooden box, you need certificate for that as well.

- [Troy] Right.

- [Neil] We use a metal box and tightened to that, closed up and sent, brought off in the hold of the plane.

- [Troy] So they actually do go in the belly of the plane

- [Neil] They go in the belly of the plane.

- [Troy] Inside of a box, and

- [Neil] Absolutely

- [Troy] Shipped over here, without any water

- [Neil] No water

- [Troy] No water at all

- [Neil] As dry as possible. If there's dampness in it at all

- [Troy] Begin to rot

- [Neil] They can start to rot

- [Troy] Yes

- [Neil] Which is a problem

- [Troy] Very resilient, very tough flowers

- [Neil] Very tough

- [Troy] Both in the garden and

- [Neil] Absolutely and

- [Troy] For your purposes

- [Neil] Particularly modern ones as a cut flower it can last you know, quite a long time in the house. Obviously if we have high central heating it's going to be not so long but, you should be able to get two, three weeks out of a flower in cool conditions. I am primarily a hybridizer.

- Okay

- So everything I've got here now is of my own breeding.

- Of your own breeding

- Yeah, and

- And do you have a particular focus?

- Health

- Health

- That would be mainly

- Okay

- And also smaller ones, people's gardens are getting smaller.

- [Troy] Right.

- [Neil] Sorry, yards you say, but because of that, I'm trying to shrink the flowers and shrink the plant.

- [Troy] And shrink the plant

- [Neil] Yeah, so that you can have a nice clump of daffodils in your garden which you can put more than one variety. Some of the older varieties are very big.

- Exactly, exactly.

- So, it's quite difficult to do it because of the genetics of the daffodil, it's quite hard to shrink the plant as well as the flower.

- So, if you shrink the plant then for the smaller gardens, that means that the foliage, as it

- Smaller.

- Dries and decays it's smaller as well

- Absolutely

- And you don't end up with that big clump of leaves in the garden, taking up space for many weeks.

- But there's a way around that as well. When I do my talks, I tell people, this is the argument everyone has. I don't know about America but the old thing was to tie them in little knots.

- Right.

- Worst thing you can do.

- Worst possible thing you can do?

- Waste your time and damages the plant.

- Right.

- So what I say is plant them in your borders with a perennial in front so as the daffodils are dying down, the perennials are coming up in front. I'm a lazy gardener. Forget your dead leaves

- Right

- Rake them up the rest of the time when you're raking up all the dead perennial leaves as well rather than spending hours and hours tidying your garden.

- Sure, I completely agree. This booklet, all 40-50 pages of it are the different divisions of flowers that can be entered in the show here today. So class G-5 is a collection of flowers. So flowers can be exhibited individuals, or collections. So there are many different divisions that can be entered in including flower arranging, photography, and this is what a flower show looks like. I've been fortunate enough to attend flower shows all over the world, England, France, and we have them right here in America too. And this is a great example of one. Well, for having crossed the Atlantic, these flowers look beautiful so tell me about the process now, getting them ready to exhibit.

- [Neil] Right, these were probably out of water for about 36 to 48 hours, something like that. So the first thing I do when I get home, get home, get into the hotel

- Yeah.

- Cut the base off, stick them in water and they quickly revive

- Let them drink.

- Let them drink. Overnight, they turn fairly fresh. A lot of these were picked in bud, simply because there's a very late

- Sure

- Season and they're bolting quicker than they should. So they're a big rough. But as I was saying earlier about shrinking flowers, that's about what I'd call a standard daffodil.

- Right

- And there's one I shrunk. So you see the two together, they are very different.

- [Troy] So almost a perfect little double

- [Neil] A little double

- [Troy] In almost miniature form

- [Neil] Absolutely, but it's unfortunately so far this one the plant isn't as small as I would like, but it is smaller. So what we're basically trying to do is impress the judges.

- Right

- There are many ways of doing that, buying them a bottle of whiskey isn't the only one.

- What we do is we just gently dress it and what we're looking for is perfect symmetry. This double is not actually a good one to show it on, but if I hold this one up, basically in a show flower you're looking for a line from the point of that petal through the stigma which is

- [Troy] Kind of center of the flower

- [Neil] Center of the flower down through the bottom of that and it should be if you folded that over it should perfectly meet on top of the other one.

- [Troy] Fold in half.

- Absolutely, so that's what you're looking for in a show flower. Obviously a garden flower you're looking for something spectacular in the way of color, which might be something like this which I suppose for Nashville is a good one. It's called Rockin' Goose. It's got very dramatic color.

- Right.

- A lot of these would show up fairly well in the garden.

- [Troy] That really really brilliant orange

- [Neil] We also want a fairly round cup so we fiddle around with it.

- [Troy] Right

- [Neil] There's lots of tricks to the Trade

- [Troy] Sure

- Then we have double daffodils which we saw the miniature, that's the larger one. And again, you're looking for symmetry. So, basically everything is symmetry and in breeding we're looking for, particularly in a double, strong stems.

- [Troy] Strong stems that will hold those heads up.

- [Neil] Strong stems, absolutely. Otherwise, they're like a sponge, they fill with water and just head down into the dirt.

- [Troy] I know I have a few in the garden that got rained on the other night and they're face down.

- So Mike, you and your wife actually were the co-chairs of this entire convention.

- Yes

- And the flower show portion of it is just one piece.

- Right

- So there's education going on and all different kinds of things this weekend

- Right

- But I want to talk to you specifically about the flower show and this judging process.

- Right

- That you go through.

- [Mike] At a daffodil show you have single stems which are on the back wall over here, vases of three

- [Troy] right

- [Mike] So similarity of the flowers is important

- [Troy] Okay

- [Mike] And collections of five and upwards. Collections of five are on that table there, they have a common theme, same division, same country of origin, same color.

- Okay

- These are even bigger collections

- Right

- These are 12, 15, there's one over there that's 36

- Sure

- And, the idea behind these is that they also have a common theme but a lot more challenging because each one of these individual flowers has to be blue ribbon quality.

- Right

- So if there is one second place flower in this whole thing

- [Troy] Then it's not going to qualify for first place

- [Mike] Right. So in terms of what kind of flower we are looking at, this is R. Tempo and you can see the rim there is really nicely, nicely formed. Some of these orange rims if they are out in the sun too much, will burn.

- [Troy] Right

- [Mike] So you can see that the petals are really flat, for them to be bent back a little bit is okay.

- Right.

- So that's a really good flower. Right next to it is a flower called New Penny. That's a really good show flower also. Both of these are division three flowers that have flat cups.

- [Troy] Right

- [Mike] This is a one, and it's a trumpet, so it has a longer cup and then next to it is a two that kind of has a medium size cup.

- [Troy] And our cool and overcast weather this spring has been kind to the flowers.

- Yeah, so the colors you can see are really vibrant. You can look at that one and say, that's red.

- Right

- You don't see red every year.

- You get into those reds and pink colors

- See there are some more reds here

- The cooler weather intensifies them.

- [Mike] Here's a good example, that one's Sugar Rose, that's beautiful flower and you can see how that cup starts white and just fades very gradually up to pink.

- Well, thank you so much

- You're welcome

- For giving us little insight into the judging process.

- You're welcome.

- [Troy] So a few tips for growing any kind of bulbs really, successfully in Tennessee, most of them need good drainage, daffodils are no exception. They do like well drained soil, they'll do better if you mix maybe even a little gravel or something into the bottom of the planting hole so that the bottom of the bulb is not sitting on wet clay all winter long. They want to be primarily in full sun, but the nice thing is, especially with spring flowering bulbs, they come up early in the season so you can use them in shadier parts of the garden especially where you have deciduous trees because the sun is streaming down through the branches early in the spring when the daffodils are coming up. You want to feed them once or twice a year. I feed mine in my garden just as the foliage begins to emerge, just as they push through the soil in the spring and again late in the fall as they're forming roots under ground. I find that's an important time to feed them also. It's been a real honor to be here at the American Daffodil Society show in Music City. As you can see, daffodils don't just come in yellow, they come in a wide variety of shapes, colors, and forms and so many of them will grow well for us here in Tennessee.

- Well the challenge in an urban neighborhood like east Nashville is to create a garden that is not only beautiful but also gives you that privacy that you adore.

- [Julie] Well, Matt, this is what, about a quarter acre site?

- [Matt] It's a quarter acre lot, it's one of the bigger yards in east Nashville right now.

- [Julie] Well, it is really fantastic to see what you've done in about 2 years.

- [Matt] Ah, thank you.

- [Julie] Now, as we come around here, I can't help but notice you have some beautiful trees. So what were the bones, what did you start with?

- [Matt] Well, some of the trees were existing here already. The Purple Smoke tree was here, and I kind of used that as the color palate basis. Also, the Magnolia and the big Honeysuckle over there, they were all here to start with, so that kind of set the foundation for everything that we did here.

- Well, it really is nice, you've got so much privacy and the trees give you so much shade.

- Absolutely

- And one of the things I really like is the way you have not only a water wise landscaping here, but also something that I imagine doesn't really require a whole lot of extra work.

- [Matt] Yeah, well I think the trend in landscaping right now is to go to the low maintenance. I say I have about 80% of my clients that say, I want low maintenance, I don't want to do any work out there. So I try to pick water wise perennials like the Sedum and the Stonecrop and then hostas which don't require a lot of maintenance. And then, easy ground cover, the 'Creeping Jenny' has a nice chartreuse color.

- [Julie] They're so pretty, but that's not to say you can't get a lot of color in your garden as well.

- [Matt] Yeah, so we've got the burgundys, a little light blue with the blue spruce conifers, got the iris here, of course the Tennessee state flower. Everybody loves an iris. And then added chartreuse and of course green make everything kind of go together. A weeping white pine and then several different varieties of Sedum, Stonecrop. One of my favorite plants, the Thunderhead pine which can grow, none of them are exactly the same, they just grow crazy everywhere, so.

- You've got some great movement in there.

- Yeah.

- Of course you have some 'Delicate White' peeking up there.

- Absolutely, the Heuchera, the lovely 'Coral Bells' in the burgundy. Some more of the 'Creeping Jenny' over here. Of course the hostas.

- Well and all of this also not only gives the different subtle colors but you're also getting really nice movement in your garden as the wind comes through, you get a little breeze, and all of those little flowers are moving in different directions.

- Absolutely, it creates just a great relaxing environment, kind of a little sanctuary back here.

- Well you've done some really interesting things with some plants I didn't think I could grow so let's come over by the side area.

- Oh, let's do it.

- [Julie] I know you have a little trick with this rush.

- [Matt] Oh the rush is, I just think it's the coolest thing ever. It's a highly aggressive plant, Horsetail rush. Equisetum hyemale And what I did is, I planted it in submerged pots with no drainage because it's a bog plant and it likes to be constantly wet. So those are submerged down in there they have no way of escaping which is great because they'd take over the whole yard if they did.

- Ah, so they stay nice and wet but you don't have to actually have a pond for them.

- Absolutely.

- I like that idea. Now, with your rocks that you've used, all the different types of stones, and your choice of plantings, you've created a really natural looking, I don't know, to me it almost looks like a seascape.

- Oh, well yeah, my company Mad Landscapes, we use all natural stone, perennial shrubs, trees. So this is limestone which I actually got from a local construction site. The foreman at the site said, take as much as you want, so I did. So that's the limestone, and then of course, we've got the decorative gravel and the flagstone, all natural products. And then that piece of wood I found right across the street at my neighbors, they had it out there for the city to take away so I sanded it down, gave it a little coat of water seal, and there it is.

- [Julie] Well, it is just so beautiful. And as we walk into your seating area, the privacy just really becomes apparent.

- [Matt] It really is great and it stays shaded most of the year. Its great for gatherings with friends and family, sit around the fire pit on a cool night and just hang out and chat.

- [Julie] Well, and the benefit of having all this shade is that you've got a moss garden growing.

- [Matt] Absolutely, the moss was actually transplanted from the north side of the house which is where moss grows, the north side of trees, north sides of houses. So we took that out with a rock chisel and you want to get the moss, just after a rain, cause it's nice and moist and you just get under there and take the full little sheets, about a handful at a time and just place it. And just before you came, I misted it, it takes a daily misting and a little more maintenance to keep it looking great but yeah, it turned out beautiful and I'm going to add some more ferns here shortly. I really love this part of the garden.

- So the Asian area that you have over here is beautiful. Tell us some about this plant choices.

- Well, we started with what we call the specimen which would be the Japanese maple, that's a 'Crimson Queen', to give it the burgundy color and then some other structural trees. My favorite one is the weeping hemlock over there and then Hinoki cypress conifer, you want like one third of your landscape to be conifers so you can get that winter interest as well. And then of course the Hakonechloa just pulls everything together, the Japanese forest grass with the chartreuse color. The delicate details of the dwarf Mondo grass and the sedums kind of tie everything together as well.

- [Julie] Well, it's very lovely and I guess except for the occasional plucking out of a weed here and there

- [Matt] Exactly

- [Julie] It's pretty low maintenance

- [Matt] It's very low maintenance

- [Julie] So, Matt, one of the things that really strikes me here is that you have these beautiful patterns that play off of each other.

- [Matt] Well I started with the color palate, burgundy, green, chartreuse and the 'Creeping Jenny' over here, the ground cover and of course we have a sedum variety here which is also the chartreuse color and then I matched it on this side in the Asian garden with the Hakonechloa. So that kind of ties everything together color wise and then the placing of the limestone everywhere. The limestone rock garden here, again over there in the Asian inspired garden and then the decorative gravels there and the decorative gravel here to kind of fill in the rock garden.

- [Julie] So you're matching your plant material, you're matching your rocks and then also I see that there are a lot of the same lines running through almost like rivers.

- [Matt] Absolutely, yeah, it's a great idea when you're landscaping your own home to use the curved lines because most houses have the straight lined edges. The curved patterns kind of compliment that well. Repetition of plants is important too to just get the cohesive energy flowing.

- [Julie] I really really like this table, this is a gorgeous piece of wood.

- [Matt] Thank you. It's actually hackberry, one of my neighbors cut down a huge hackberry tree. Again, I just took what I could, what he gave me and sanded it down, gave it a little coat. Makes a nice table. We've got another little side table over there made out of it. Another interesting thing is these chairs, I actually made them from the pallets that all the stone came on. So it's kind of, try to use everything that was delivered to the house.

- [Julie] Matt, tell us how you made these beautiful planters.

- [Matt] Well, I started out with a chainsaw and hollowed them out and then to get deeper down in there, I used a wood chisel and kind of hacked it out.

- Well, it really really looks great. Now you still have some room, and actually since this is such a nice compact garden it almost looks like you have a huge lawn.

- Oh yeah.

- On this quarter acre.

- This is my blank canvas. We're planning on expanding everything. I refer to this lovingly as Wonderland. Mad Landscapes is kind of a reference to Alice in Wonderland, so eventually we're going to do a chess board over here behind the Arbor Vitae, kind of a big floating deck seating area, kind of a mad tea party kind of setting. And probably some kind of water feature, like lagoon type area behind the chess board. So, a lot of things going on, my mind is always turning with new ideas.

- [Julie] Well, Matt, this is all very inspiring. It makes me just sort of want to sit here and relax.

- [Matt] Hey, I invite you to come by any time, I'll leave that gate open for you Julie, you come in bring a book, and chill out in the garden anytime you want.

- [Julie] Alright, thank you so much, I am so inspired by all of this.

- [Matt] My pleasure, I'm glad you like it.

- Growing a garden is one of life's great joys but one of the first things we have to decide is whether we want to plant our garden in rows or in beds. They both have advantages and disadvantages. It may be just the size of your garden. If it's a small backyard garden, beds may make more sense, but if its a large garden, you might want to put the rows farther apart in their spacings so that you can get through it with equipment like a tiller or a tractor. Keeping the soil loose is of paramount importance in gardening and raised beds and gardening in beds have the advantage that we don't ever walk on the beds. This lettuce is planted in a bed four feet wide, and that allows me to be able to just reach over and not have to walk in the bed to tend the lettuce. This is about ready to harvest. One of the deciding factors in whether to grow in a bed or in rows, is the size of the plants at full maturity. These potatoes are in rows but they're taking up about the size of a bed because they're so big. I like them in rows also because I can get in there with my hiller, and hill them up. Potatoes love to be hilled up, that keeps the sun off of the potatoes where they don't turn green and also keeps the moisture in around the plants so that they can make lots of potatoes. I usually grow leeks in the single row system because I can get the hillers, like I use on the potatoes, over them and hill them up so that the long green stalk then is covered with dirt and it will turn white. People like to have the bottom portion of the leek to be blanched which is done by hilling. So with the bed method, the leeks are doing fine but I can't get in there with my tractor to hill them and I don't want to spend the time it would take to hill them like this so next year, I bet that the leeks go back into the row. We've grown onions in the row system but it seemed like a waste of valuable garden space. So, this year we decided to try growing them in beds. These again are four foot beds that we've got the three rows of onions so they're 18 inches apart. And then, onions are one of these crops that you can plant them four to six inches apart but it's hard to get a hoe in between that, so what we've done is we plant them two every 10 to 12 inches apart. And they grow up and sort of out from each other and when you harvest them you can barely notice that there was a little flat spot where they were touching. We've grown beets in single rows for years, but this year I decided I wanted to try them in beds. So, we have the three rows of beets in a four foot bed. That puts them about 18 inches apart which is a good spacing for beets. This is our main crop of beets and they don't need as much hoeing as the earlier ones. Their leaves will shade out the weeds a lot better. And just as a side note, an interesting thing happened. On May 4th, I planted these three beds of beets and then the very next day, May 5th, I planted these three beds which don't look near as thick as this May 4th planting. Well, I looked it up in a calendar and the May 4th planting was done when the moon was in Scorpio. Well as the May 5th planting, the moon had shifted to Sagittarius which isn't as good a planting sign. So, this is just an interesting thing that I look at. The real test will come when we harvest and see how good they did in the long run. Let's go look at the celery. The way we harvest our celery was the determining factor in wanting to grow them in beds rather than in single rows. If I was going to cut the whole head after it had grown to full maturity, I would probably just grow it in single rows so it could have gotten bigger. But the way we like to harvest the celery, is we just take the outside stalks and the inside of the plant keeps growing and we can harvest celery all summer long into the fall. We just simply take the stalks and pull them off like that and leave the plant to grown more stalks. Squash and cucumbers because of their sprawling nature are better to do in rows where I can straddle over them with the tractor. In truck farming like we do here, we're going to use a lot of row cropping simply because of the ease of keeping the cultivation going which checks evaporation, adds air to the soil and keeps the weeds down. Beans could be planted in beds, I could probably get two rows of beans in a bed but we like to plant them in between our cucumber rows. So these beans then will mature in 55-60 days and we'll get a couple of pickings off of the beans before the cucumbers crawl over to here. So beans and cucumbers are known as companion plants. The stuff that flows off of their roots, similar microbes like them so they always thrive well when they are planted next to each other. Even when we do grow our crops in rows, we look upon the rows as being a bed. And we only walk in the path that's halfway between each of the rows. This is the path and then we reach over to pull the weeds or hoe the crop, this is butternut squash, that's in the rows. This way the moisture is below and doesn't evaporate off. It also adds air and holds the moisture in the soil up to an inch and a half of rain per week. Simply by just having these hoed and loose. If we do happen to step on it, then we'll scratch over where we stepped. Parsley and Swiss chard could be grown in beds, but we grow them in the single row method primarily so that we can cultivate them frequently. These are crops that will be in this spot until probably past Thanksgiving and we just keep cutting them and they come back again, up until the big freeze comes in the wintertime. As you can see, we're experimenting here with both beds and rows. Every year we learn something from our successes and we probably learn even more from our failures. The row method really is probably best for market gardening but if you just have small plants in a small bed, then the bed method is probably the way to go where you can keep it mulched and do something real small in your backyard. These are awful long rows to hoe so I think I'll just go make a bed and lie in it.

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