Episode 2815

- [Announcer] Create a floral arrangement like these two pros. Troy Martin and J Schwanke share some basic how-tos that can have you creating awesome centerpieces. Julie Berbiglia tours a home garden that features an espaliered orchard row and a handsome herb spot. Plus, keep those hydrangeas performing up to their potential with good pruning. Come along! Whether you're using fresh cuts from the garden or a store-bought bouquet, the key is in the arrangement.

- I love to have flowers indoors. I love my flowers in my garden, but I also like to cut them and bring them inside. Today I'm with J Schwanke from "J Schwanke's Life in Bloom," which also airs on public television. And he's gonna show us some tips and tricks to creating beautiful flower arrangement.

- Absolutely. I think that sometimes people get intimidated. And when they think about flowers, they're like, "Ugh, I really want to buy them, "or I want to bring them in the house, "but I want to make sure that I don't make a mistake." And so I think we need to make people feel more comfortable. And the art of actually arranging flowers helps reduce stress for us. Being surrounded by flowers, even more important for us because we have happier thoughts, in the workplace we're more creative when flowers are around. Seniors who are surrounded by flowers will enlarge their circles of friends, and are more apt to seek medical attention for things.

- If they have flowers present.

- If they have flowers around. So there's some very interesting studies done by Rutgers University, Boston University, Northern Florida University, have been doing research over the years about how flowers help people. Interesting fact, if you're sick and you get flowers, you get better faster. If you get yellow flowers, you'll get better faster still. So I think it's that powerful for us to have a few flowers around the house. Houses without flowers in them have less arguments. This is a great start, okay?

- There you go.

- So right, right, right, so--

- That's a reason to have flowers around all the time.

- Exactly. So one of the things that I think about is, when we have flowers, we may get a bundle. I love creating a bundle of flowers. The thing that I do is, I usually try and think of a story that goes along with them. I've been working on these. This is one of the bouquets that is in a line that I'm designing, but it's called Hidden Garden. And the reason that it's called Hidden Garden is the colors and the flowers in it remind me of when I was a little kid. And I grew up in a greenhouse family, and our family, we had seven acres of greenhouses.

- [Troy] Oh, wow.

- And I could walk through the rose house, through the carnation house, where we grew the hydrangeas, and I had--

- So you were growing greenhouse-grown cut flower crops.

- Cut flower crops.

- Got it.

- Not potted plants?

- Both, we did both.

- Both, okay.

- We did bedding plants, too. So we had success with all of those. And the cool part about it was, when I had those flowers at any point in time, even in winter in Nebraska, I could walk through those hidden gardens, hidden meadows, every day. And in our, we were on a four city blocks, and there was no road that went through. And in the middle was an acre of property, and that's where we grew our gladiolas and our delphinium, away from the street view. So it was part of that hidden meadow that I could sneak into.

- Right.

- So I like to think about that, and have a story behind the arrangement that I'm gonna make. Now the other thing, so when we start to look at this and we think, okay, what's gonna happen here, you know, this is not gonna work, right? So I'm gonna have to do something.

- Short container.

- Right, right. I also love that there are people who make these green bouquets. And you'll see them at flower sellers all around the country, and the thing about a green bouquet is it provides structure. So what I can do is I'm gonna take and make a short cut on this green stem, because I have a short vase. And I'm gonna drop that bunch inside there.

- [Troy] So this is something that you could pick up at any floral place that's open to the public, or even at your grocery store.

- Absolutely! Certainly, or we could go out into the garden.

- And just--

- And we could grab a few stems of whatever foliage. I love hostas, I have, I have too many hostas. Maybe 600, okay.

- Oh my gosh.

- I know, wherever there's a space, I plant one.

- But with that many, you can go out and rob a few leaves here and there.

- I rob more than a few.

- And not notice.

- Right, so I will add those, I'll bring in some fern, I'll use my viburnum, I'll cut pieces off of trees. And I can create that structure inside that vase.

- Right.

- So now, you know, I think when we think about it, you know you sometimes think about the foam. The flower foam that we have, well this is very similar. We have a structure inside this container that will allow us to place our flowers in there. So we can then take our other flowers. Now the other thing that I love, just as a side note, this could be an arrangement. We could stop right now.

- All on its own, right.

- All on its own.

- Yeah. Because you've got

- We could just stop with foliage.

- Color, form, texture, all right there.

- Absolutely, right?

- All of the elements of design are right there in those leaves.

- And in those leaves, we're probably gonna have an arrangement that's gonna last three weeks.

- Right.

- Four weeks.

- If it's well taken-care-of.

- We might be able to drop in flowers from the garden and then pull them out when they expire and drop in a few more. Even people who like permanent flowers, I suggest that we use the greenery, the foliage, with it, and then we have something like that. So it's a great background for 'em. So the shorter cut that I make on these stems then allows it to go down inside. And I think that that's one of the things that people think about, too. Now the other thing I like to do in my bouquet is you'll notice, I used those two here, I used this one here. I didn't make patterns.

- Larger masses of flowers.

- Yeah, that, my grandma used to call it the polka-dot effect. "Oh, you're making a polka-dot arrangement." So I try not to think about it being a polka-dot arrangement. I try and think about the flowers being grouped in different places. And by putting them together and gathering them together, it reinforces their shape and their form and it allows them to be more attention-grabbing.

- [Troy] Right, and you get to appreciate each type of flower a little bit more.

- Absolutely. Right, right, right.

- Rather than having just a mixture of things. It's this same kind of concept in garden design, which I spent most of my career doing, you know, it's...

- Absolutely.

- If you have one of everything, your eye never knows where to stop.

- Exactly.

- It gets very busy and your eye just kind of bounces here. Whereas if you design gardens in bigger masses, as we all know, your eye is going to follow more. And it's the same concept in flower arranging.

- I think it's fascinating, though. Because, you know, people tell me that I make flower arranging look easy. You make garden design look easy.

- [Troy] Well, thank you.

- And I always try and figure out, you know, how come that is so, it shouldn't be different.

- It shouldn't be that different.

- But it is different for me. But I'm always amazed when I see someone that has that skill and that talent. So we're adding these. Now I think the other thing that I love, I love carnations. But the fact that we have such unusual different tones now and different colors. I have so many people who ask me, many times they'll say, "Now what is that flower, is that a peony?"

- Exactly.

- And I'm like, "Nope, carnation."

- Carnation.

- But okay.

- In all of our flowers, carnations, roses, everything, so much advancement in breeding over the last, I mean, when I was a little boy, there was a place where my mother used to drop me off when she would go grocery shopping. And I'd want, they did the same kind of thing your family did, growing cut flowers. And I would wander through. And there was a house that was nothing but carnations that they used. But they were pink, they were yellow, they were red, they were white. And once in a while you'd get a fancy one that had a little edge of some kind. But today we have these beautiful tones and colors

- Oh, amazing! So in talking about that, this is Scoop Scabiosa. So scabiosa is relatively a fragile flower.

- Right.

- But the company that has bred this has made this scoop scabiosa, and these will last 10 to 14 days.

- Wow!

- Amazing. And they call them scoop because they look like a scoop of ice cream.

- I see, okay.

- Okay, so yeah.

- There you go.

- So I like that. And so typically, I'll go in with those last because that's gonna make a little statement. And you'll notice that I kind of bring it into the center of the bouquet, because we have a little bit of a focal area that's gonna happen inside there. And you know what, if I don't like something where I put it the first time, I can always switch it around.

- Just take it out and put it somewhere else.

- Nothing's gonna happen to it if we do that. So yeah, so a simple arrangement like that can be easy. And I encourage everyone to do it. A, let your children assist you in doing this. Children arranging flowers, this is a safe way for them to cut. They don't need a knife, they can cut with a bypass cutter. Guys, guys should make bouquets and give them to their wives and make the statement that "I made this for you "in the garage, and I'm bringing it to you.

- Here it is.

- And chances are you might get pie or something like that, I think, you know, there's that type of thing. So I think people shouldn't be afraid of it, and that flowers can be very forgiving, and it can be fun for us to create something.

- Well, and that there's no right way or wrong way.

- Absolutely.

- If you're happy with it at the end, I say the same thing about gardens all the time. If it brings you joy, then you've done it well, so.

- Absolutely, we are on the same page. The thing I always say is the person that this should please first is you.

- Is you.

- And that's wonderful.

- Absolutely.

- Well good, thank you for allowing me to come and share my passion for flowers, so.

- Thank you for being here with us, and again, "J Schwanke's Life in Bloom" is your PBS show, you're also on YouTube.

- I have a J Schwanke channel on YouTube, yes. And then I also have a website called ubloom.com. And we have the PBS player there, too. So you can watch the show, if it's not airing in your local area.

- In your local area.

- You can watch it there on the PBS player, so.

- And it does air on our local station in Nashville, but across the state you should check your local listings and see where you can find J, and "J Schwanke's Life in Bloom."

- Ah, Bermuda grass, lots of concrete, glass shards in the dirt. Now how do you transform all this into a pollinator and people-friendly, beautiful space? Well Ian and Deb Dawe have figured it out, and they're gonna show us how. Well Ian, this bed here certainly looks to be very friendly to our bees and our lightning bugs. And I understand this is where you started.

- Yes, when my wife and I moved into this house, nothing was here apart from the concrete slab and two areas of lawn either side. The very first bed I dug was this one, aiming to be a vegetable bed. The biggest challenge was removing the Bermuda grass, but also the glass shards. Just out of this area of soil I got approximately three pounds of glass shards. We had to sift the soil, and we had to do that for most of the beds you've seen so far. When we're not using the beds for our own produce, as you can see, we plant some annuals. And this year I've just allowed borage to grow up, and just allow the pollinators to enjoy life there. Just come visit, do their thing.

- [Julie] Well pollinators are certainly something we all need to have around, and you're using a lot of natives to attract.

- Yes, our garden is approximately 60 to 70% natives. We do use some nativars, and I've got approximately 45 species of American native plants. Most of them are native to Tennessee, but I have used a few which might not be native to Tennessee, but the pollinators are enjoying them and they're living, they're loving life here in our yard.

- Well, let's take a look at some of the things you've done with all these great pollinator plants.

- Excellent.

- Ian, I'm a little surprised to see this beautiful purple beauty blooming for us here. Don't we usually see this in the fall?

- We should do, theoretically, it is New England aster and I bought it as a pollinator favorite to fill in fall blooming. But this one, for some reason, blooms for us every June, maybe into July. So it's a little early, the pollinators are loving it. I don't know why it's blooming early. It's one of those things it's doing.

- Well if it works, it works. Now it's going really lovely with these beautiful yellow flowers that I'm seeing, all kinds of bees and other insects all over.

- Yes, this is shrubby St. John's wort. As you can see, it's a great profusion of yellow flowers, and the pollinators love collecting the pollen. Doesn't supply much nectar to pollinators, but it does provide a lot of very protein-rich pollen.

- Now a plant that we see a lot of places that people love, and I always love seeing it, are our beautiful coneflowers.

- Yes, I do have two varieties of coneflower in our yard. The Echinacea and the Tennessee coneflower. It used to be a rare coneflower, the Tennessee, but through management and people caring for its environment, it has come back from the edge of extinction, as it were.

- [Julie] I know that you all have been sort of cross-pollinating, as it were, in the garden, and Deb has a whole other take on things.

- Yes, and we both work closely together, and come up with our own solutions for different areas of the yard and garden.

- All right, well we will cross the concrete divide and see what Deb's got going.

- [Ian] Excellent.

- Well Deb, I like the way you're using every square inch here by planting herbs in between the flagstones.

- Yeah, we're real close to the kitchen, and it makes it great for when we actually want to use them. Also, when they do bloom, they are pollinator magnets.

- Wow.

- I know they're not native, but I don't know, something about culinary herbs, the pollinators love them.

- Nothing like a dual-purpose plant. Food for everybody. Now you also have this wonderful, dual-purpose fruit trees that you're growing.

- [Deb] This is the fifth year for our espalier. And it's sort of a experimental thing. We're learning as we go. They take five to seven years to produce fruit. So hopefully in a couple years we'll start getting fruit. It's a long process, when you keep cutting them back like you have to do with an espalier.

- Well they're gorgeous, and why did you put them here on the property?

- Well as you can see, there's a lot of trees all around this area, and we actually made a map when we first came here, and mapped out how many hours of sun we had every day in every square foot of this property. And this one was the most beneficial for fruit trees, which needs the most sun of almost anything.

- [Julie] Well, and it really makes a great divider between you and your neighbors as well. It's just a beautiful living fence for you.

- [Deb] It is a nice fence, yeah.

- [Julie] So I just love having a yard with fruit, you've got all your apples, you have, oh my gosh, peaches, and they're so darling, and they're growing, and wow, this beautiful area. This is a lovely little nook that you've created.

- [Deb] Thank you.

- [Julie] Now you've got some beautiful day lilies, and then you have a mixture of all kinds of other great pollinator plants.

- [Deb] We find that roses work really well for pollinator plants. That's a flamingo, and it's a single, and we find that pollinators really like singles. And so we've planted several single roses. I just love roses, period. We don't spray them, so what you see is what you get. They still are really beautiful. I also tried in this area to make a little nook, especially because we have a lot of apartments back there and everything, try to make this a little intimate place.

- [Julie] Well it's just beautiful. You've got the phlox, you have, oh, you've got a lot of bee balm up here.

- Bee balm, yes.

- For everything.

- And this right here is a native to the Southwest called, it's an Agastache, or hummingbird mint. And we have several varieties of that that will really come on in about a month.

- [Julie] Right, so you're getting something in every month, flowering for all of your pollinators.

- For both the hummingbirds and the long-tongued insects.

- [Julie] So, and I really appreciate the way you're using all these fresh wood chips that are recycled from a local arborist, right?

- Yes, and there's no way that Ian and I could keep up this yard weeding, if we didn't have something to suppress weeds. And that's what this is. Plus, it suppresses weeds plus over the long haul improves the soil.

- [Julie] Well it is just a gorgeous work in progress out here, and let's go this way and look at some of the pollinating insects. Deb, this welcome mat of a garden that you have for all the pollinators, this is great!

- [Deb] Ian and I first started with a smaller border, but we've increased it because of the hill. The monarda here is a pollinator magnet, and then of course the phlox that you see several places here are beloved to butterflies.

- Oh, they're beautiful.

- As well as the liatris.

- [Julie] Oh, and just the shape and the form show that you can do beauty and you can do good for the neighborhood as well.

- Yes, yes. That little helenium there, I found growing at a garden center and I brought it home and it re-seeded itself, and is a little annual. But the pollinators just love it. A lot of these plants are just because I'm a gardener and I love to garden. I love the lilies, I love the peonies.

- Well shade is certainly a challenge for a lot of people, and you have managed to get some pollinator-friendly plants in the shade.

- Yes, thanks to my husband. He has planted here the native geranium, cranesbill, and that's a celandine poppy. The cranesbill blooms in the spring, and it's beautiful, and the celandine poppy is blooming, pretty much most of the gardening year you'll see a little bit of bloom on it. This is an added challenge because there is a silver maple whose roots penetrate this. And so whatever we can find that will compete with the roots, we're glad to grow here.

- [Julie] Well whatever your challenges are, it might be a lot of glass in the yard, it might be a lot of concrete. Whatever those are, remember that you, too, can make a garden that is beautiful and friendly for wildlife.

- Hydrangeas, when to prune, how much to prune? Well, it depends, it depends on if you have an older variety, or perhaps you've gotten a newer variety. Let's see. If it blooms before June, don't prune in the springtime. This is a macrophylla Sister Theresa. She has set her buds in the fall, so anything that I will do to this particular variety, I will need to only tidy up, because it set its blooms last, starting in July. All of these blooms that are left on here, I can go ahead just to give it a fresh look for spring. And I can cut these off, because you would know that there's no bloom that's been formed there. This is arborescens Annabelle. Annabelle has a different story to tell. You know that you can cut this to the ground. I have even read where people can mow them to the ground. But you know you really don't have to prune this one. This plant is going to bloom on all the new growth. You can leave some of the thicker, stouter bloom stalks for support, and a staking for the new ones that come up larger. This is hydrangea paniculata Limelight. As you can see, this is a cluster of three very mature plants. The thing about the shape of the bloom makes it the paniculata, because it's sort of in a cone shape. This plant, I can come in and do numerous things to it. I can prune out the old wood, but it's gonna bloom in the fall, you know, late summer. So there you again with that rule, if it blooms, this is not going to bloom before June. So right now, in this early part of spring, is the time to come in if you want to cut it back, if you want to reshape it. You know, I'm really not gonna try to shorten it, because of it's a right plant in the right location. So remember, this one blooms after late summer, so cut it in the spring and it'll bloom on new wood. This is the matriarch in my garden. This is the beautiful oakleaf. This plant is approximately 18 years old. It has reached the point that it's mature, and basically all I really want to do is to keep it in bounds for where it is. This will amazingly bloom on old and new wood. They can freeze to the ground and then, amazingly, grow enough to bloom actually in the fall. So with looking at and assessing how I want to prune this one, because I want to use the undersurface for it, I'm really just gonna go in and give it some new shape under here, but what it needs is really this one. But for your own information, just realize that you can cut these back in the fall or you can cut them back in the spring. If you don't want to consider when to prune, let's look at some newer varieties. And I'm with Todd at Creekside Nursery in Nashville along Harding Place. Tell us what we should consider in looking into the new varieties.

- Well if you're not really concerned about pruning so much, you can do it whenever you want with these Endless Summer hydrangeas here. They bloom on new growth and old growth, which makes things a lot easier for most homeowners, so they don't have to worry whether they need to bloom in the spring, or after they bloom. The cool thing about these, it's a typical hydrangea where the soil will change the color. You know, if it's towards acidic it's blue, if it's alkaline it goes towards pink. So you can change the color, if you want to, on those hydrangeas. And you know, as far as the older ones, like the Nikko Blue hydrangea, you get the same color change in the soil, but if you trim these guys too early in the spring, you won't get any flower on them at all. They need to be trimmed after they bloom.

- So there we go back, it blooms before June, don't prune.

- That's right, do not prune it, yeah.

- So this is, and in today's world, from our winter, do you anticipate that there's gonna be some pruning to the ground on these? This has been hothouse.

- Right, that one's been hothouse. If it's been in the ground, probably not. Because these things are hardy to like 30 below zero. There were no leaves on them, so more than likely you would not have to clip them back. And that's the reason you see the leaves, is because this has been in a hothouse.

- Right.

- You probably won't see leaves on yours that you have at your house, not just yet.

- No, I don't. Well, in this Endless Summer collection, now there are different varieties in this. Do you have another one that, let's say, this is either pink or blue. Is this there a variety that might be white?

- There's one called Blushing Bride that starts off as a extremely pale pink color, and then it goes to white. And with that, your acidity, you're not gonna be able to change, you know, the color of it too much. But it will stay that almost white all of the time.

- So this one you can prune any time.

- Any time you want to. You don't like how it looks, you prune it, or if you want to cut a bunch of them off and bring them in your house for cut flowers.

- Okay, and this one we will prune in July.

- After it's through blooming, yes.

- Absolutely. All right, now this right here is a good example of a Limelight?

- That's right, Limelight treeform hydrangea, yes. This has been grafted.

- Grafted?

- So yeah, grafted to a rootstock with this stem here. You can kind of see where it's been grafted there. Kind of has a little nub, or looks like a ball there. So essentially what they do, is you have your stem there, and then you take the hydrangea itself, the bush, and you basically fuse it to that stem, that trunk. Yeah, so, but pruning.

- It's a transplant.

- You got it, yeah, but with, for you could prune one that grows so shrubby, it would be really hard to make a treeform out of one by itself. You know, you could probably do it like you would a crepe myrtle, where you trim all the leaves up to a certain point, but it would be more clumpy. So it'd be really hard to do that without getting one already grafted to a stem, to a trunk.

- Well, I think that probably other than there are just so many new varieties of all of these, it's hard for me to keep up with what I've planted in my own yard, and--

- There are lots of new varieties that come out every year. So the sales reps and the growers keep us on top of that, so we kind of have to educate ourself, you know, every year as well.

- [Annette] So do I hear you saying in that statement, I don't have to worry that I have to go back and re-educate myself every spring?

- [Todd] No, don't worry about it a bit.

- [Annette] Okay, well thank you for helping us clear the air on, you know, everybody wants to know.

- Sure, absolutely.

- When is it time to prune?

- [Todd] Absolutely, glad to do it.

- [Annette] Thank you.

- [Todd] Yes ma'am.

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