Episode 3319

- [Narrator] Plant Delights Nursery is a retail mail-order business that specializes in collecting, propagating, and sharing unique, rare, and native perennials. Troy Marden sits down for a candid conversation with its founder, Tony Avent, to learn about his many international plant explorations and the extensive plant collections here. Fascinating. One of their largest plant collections is Trillium, a particular favorite of Marty DeHart. She brings us a showcase of these sought-after native perennials that can vary in bloom color, foliage pattern, and habit. Join us. First, enjoy the unique insight into plant life across the globe from a well-respected horticulturist and plantsman.

- About 30 minutes south of Raleigh, North Carolina is what is arguably one of the most famous mail-order nurseries in the country. And I have the good fortune of being at Plant Delights Nursery today, and the even better fortune of being at Plant Delights with the founder, Tony Avent. What I would love to know is how this dream started.

- Wow, with all things, it's sort of a circuitous path. When I was a young child, I started buying plants mail-order when I was five years old. So the idea of being able to order all these rare plants, even if they weren't available in your area, was fascinating to me. And so after college, I got the idea, I wanted to start a nursery, realized I knew nothing about running a nursery. So I went to work for the state for 16 years and learned there how to do electrical, mechanical, carpentry, plumbing, all the things that you have to know to run a nursery. And I sort of got this started on the side, and it's been an interesting adventure. The nursery and gardens were started in 1986, and I kept working for the state for another eight years. But we began slowly developing really the gardens in the nursery at the same time, because our model, we wanted to figure out how to have the plants, not just sell them, but have them and grow them where we could learn as well. So we came up with an idea of 15% of everything sold went to fund the gardens and our plant exploration, which started right as I left the state. And so plants are propagated from the gardens once we trial them for the nursery, and then the nursery sends money back to run the gardens.

- [Troy] You just mentioned some of the traveling that you've done, and you have done a lot of plant exploration all over the world. Any place that you love the most or that really sticks out as an adventure?

- [Tony] Wow, all of them are an adventure, whether it's here in our backyards or anywhere in the world. We've done a hundred trips around the world. A lot of those are in the US. Every one, you have different adventures. You meet all kinds of interesting people. You have dangerous, probably the most dangerous trip, and I've had several, was when I had a very long gun pulled on me down in Texas.

- [Troy] And while you're traveling the world, you are collecting plants, you are collecting plants and seeds, and you're bringing them back to North Carolina to trial them here, as you mentioned, and see what their performance is in this climate. And whether they're a good plant for this country, this region, or anywhere really.

- [Tony] Yeah, we started out really with the idea of let's just accumulate a collection of cool plants. Then when you start going in the wild, you realize that plants are going extinct at alarming rate. The latest numbers by the people who know these things, 36.5% of the world's plants are endangered or threatened. That is incredible.

- More than a third.

- More than a third of the plants in the world are in danger or threatened. So we switched our gears to become more of an ex-situ conservation garden. We really, having seen plants going extinct in the wild. So when we go, you don't leave any footprint that you were there. You take seed, you take cuttings, you take a division. If there's one plant, you leave it alone. You just, you've got to respect nature, and hopefully that plant will survive. Now if it's something that's variegated in the middle of a population of non-varigated ones, that one's gonna be selected against. So yes, you grab that and you bring that back. But it really has evolved into let's get the plants back, let's preserve them. But for us, preserving is not the end point. I know so many ex-situ conservation gardens, which means preserving offsite, are more like museums, and they're actually hoarding opportunities. These people come up with all kinds of legal agreements that they can't share of plants. We're the opposite. And that came from both my upbringing from the late JC Raulston, it was all about sharing. So for us, when we bring in a plant, especially a rare one, we study it, we document it, we photograph it, we take notes, then we propagate it and share it. Because the thing that can happen to a rare plant is one person has it or it's not shared.

- Because if that one person loses it, it is gone.

- It's gone. It's gone. We've got 1 Trillium here in the garden that there is one site on a nuclear plant, only place it exists. The wild hogs have devastated the populations. We have the only one offsite that exists. Those hogs could destroy the plant tomorrow. It has not even been named yet. That is imperative that we keep these things and preserve that and spread it around.

- [Troy] When I came the first time, it was just this garden that we are sitting in. And several greenhouses, but it was a much smaller operation than it is today. So tell us a little bit about the growth of the nursery and the gardens and how you've expanded.

- Well, we started out with just two acres. And we had a house there that my late wife and I lived in. And after about nine years, our next door neighbor was getting a divorce and called us up and said, "I'm leaving." And we're like, "We're on the way with a checkbook." And so it was, all right, that took us to seven acres. And then after that, it was slowly, one neighbor at a time, we'd scare them away. So we picked up another 11 acres here and another four acres here and another six acres here. And we're now up to 28 acres. And so now, we're beginning to look at what happens in the future because 38 years later, I'm a lot older, I'm officially old according to the government now. So we have to look at what's gonna happen to all the plants we preserve. So several years ago, we gifted the entire property to North Carolina State University and we said all right because we've always felt that we were sisters to the JC Raulston Arboretum because JC and I came to NC State the same year. And the missions of the Raulston Arboretum are the same, collect, study, propagate, and share. And so the university said "We'd be delighted to hold the gardens, but we have no money. So we're gonna set you up this endowment fund and we're gonna give you a hat that says fundraiser. And your job is to convince people to put money in there." And we create an operational endowment so that when something happens to me, the university will take over, and they will have the funds because the way we work, it takes more hours than a sane person would want to spend. So we have to have something sustainable to preserve.

- [Troy] That's true for all of us who are in the horticulture world. We do it because we're passionate about it and because we love it. And yes, there are people who have been very successful and who lived good lives and lots of them, and that's great. But we do it I think because of the passion for it. So you've expanded now in the 28 acres. How many greenhouses are on site today?

- 30 greenhouses on site.

- 30 greenhouses. And you're shipping plants certainly all over the United States and lots of other parts of the world.

- We are, I think last year, we shipped to 41 countries, so if your country, as long as it's not at war with the US or pissed them off in some other way, we can ship. We had a customer right this spring from Ukraine, wanted to know where their order was. They really needed the plants. That speaks volumes to how important plants are to the humankind that here you are in a country that's getting bombed and it's just being destroyed and they're worried about their plants. It's pretty incredible. So literally, some of our biggest countries are places like Japan, Thailand. So all of these countries have incredible plant collectors now. And because now of social media, we can connect with those. Years ago, you had to write these long letters. It may take a month to get there and a month to get back. Now you just get on Facebook or whatever and send a message and you immediately got an answer and you've got a new friend that you've met. And some people talk about the bad parts of social media and the bad parts of the internet. It's incredible what it's done to connect people to plants.

- Doing these tours that I do all around the world, I've made so many connections through my years in the horticulture industry for one thing. But then, you can just, like you said, zip a message off to somebody and say, "Hey, do you know any gardens that we can come see in your area? Or do you have any seeds you'd like to trade?" Just depending on which end of the business you're in, I agree, we all have this kind of love-hate relationship with social media, but for me it's opened so many windows and doors and other things that I think it's kind of a great thing.

- It has, we start groups, Facebook groups for specialty plants. And one guy had posted a fern a few years ago that we had not grown. And we emailed him, it's like, "Do you ever have any spores?" And it turns out he's a retired professor in Siberia. And he goes plant collecting all over Russia, surrounding territories. And so we were able to get spores sent. And the plants are growing beautifully here. That's pretty amazing.

- It is pretty amazing. It really is. What does the future look like for here? More expansion? Are you kind of to your limit?

- [Tony] Well, expansion's always lovely because you got more plants that you need room for, but we always, we don't expand until we're able to maintain the gardens. I think so many gardens I've seen are getting into expansion, but they don't think about maintaining. And maintaining is the most important part of any garden. I see people collect but can't maintain the collections and they kill the plants, well that's sort of self-defeating. So we're not currently expanding until we have more financial base. So as the endowment grows, that would allow us to then expand if we get it to a certain point.

- The most important thing you wanna do is be able to maintain what you have. And that doesn't matter whether you're Plant Delights and Juniper level, or whether you're me at my personal garden. It's a hard call to say "I can't maintain anymore." But this is the limit.

- Yeah, as a collector, we want everything that we haven't grown. That's just what collector mentality does. And that's who we appeal to. So yeah, it's really hard when you have that wiring, that sort of obsessive compulsiveness about, "I haven't grown this, this looks cool, this will grow." And then how do we take care of that? And we've been very blessed. We've got an incredible staff of incredibly gifted, knowledgeable people that are able to maintain the things that are very high level. And that's what we don't wanna lose. So love to expand, but gotta be financially feasible.

- We've known each other for several years and I've been here several times, and I know I've seen Baptisia collections in breeding. I've seen Aracema collections and some breeding there. I've seen like Acorus. What's your favorite thing of the moment?

- Oh my goodness.

- What are you focused on kind of at the moment?

- It's hard to pick one. We still do a lot of work with Baptisias. We've got a tremendous breeding program there. Our Epimedium work is pretty incredible. Those are just coming into peak flower. The Acoruses, as you mentioned. We've got the largest Acorus collection in the world. We've got probably the largest or the second largest Solomon's Seal collection, the second largest Aspidistra collection in the world. Definitely the largest Trillium collection. We have over 2,000 selected Trillium taxa. So that's been a big feature of ours, including in that, 10 unnamed species. They have yet to be described. That's pretty incredible. Agaves, we've got, again, probably the largest or most diverse collection of hardy Agaves anywhere in the world. We're breeding Yuccas. That's a big interest of ours. Just a lot of things going on at once. So it's hard to pick one. Each season, they rotate in. We generally don't have two at exactly the same time. So you can focus all your energies on one, and then a week later, here comes another group and another group.

- Well I wanna thank you for taking a few minutes out of your day to regale us with some stories about Plant Delights and the garden here.

- [Tony] We have many ways for people to follow us. Obviously we've got Facebook, both the gardens and the nursery each have their own Facebook. We blog from the Garden every single day, and you can find that at jlbg.org. And again, for the people that can't come every day, there's something with, you know, our collections right now are 27,000 taxa. There's something happening every single day. And that's what the blog allows us, is to share some of those things for people that don't live next door. The nursery, if you're interested in that end, they have their own newsletter, they can find that at plantdelights.com, and be glad to have you follow and they'll show you all the cool things that are happening in the nursery.

- It's always a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for letting us come.

- One of the most desirable and sought-after spring perennial plants is the native Trillium, of which there are many kinds. And today, we're here at Plant Delights with Zach Hill, who is their specialist in Trilliums and their taxonomist. And we're gonna talk about all things Trillium. Hi Zach.

- Hi.

- And I appreciate you sharing your wisdom with us. And let's just start off with Trillium lifecycle because people see them in the woods, but I don't think they really understand what they're looking at and what it takes to get them to that beautiful plant. And I can see you've got babies.

- [Zach] Yeah, so the first pot, this is first year seedlings that we collected last summer in July, we collect the pods in the garden, we do a flower inventory in the spring, and then go back and collect seeds on all of our plants in the garden in the summer. These germinate in the spring, you can still see the seeds on the tips of their first leave, they're cotyledons.

- [Marty] Yes, I can see these little brown tips are what's left of the seed.

- So that's what's left of the seed after they germinate. And so they need to be dark to germinate.

- Okay, so they're photosensitive, and you cover them.

- We cover them lightly with the PermaTill. We take them, we hurriedly write a tag that has a shorthand name of what the plant is.

- [Marty] Right, I do the same thing.

- And where we collected it and the date, then we take them and sit them under a bench in our greenhouse,

- Which is not heated.

- Which is not heated. So it's cold over the winter.

- It gets a warm treatment because it's July. So it's being watered all summer. It's staying moist. They generally start to germinate in late December, early January, we can stay at that stage for months until sometimes even July.

- [Marty] Well that brings me to the observation that Trillium are slow-growing.

- [Zach] Yes, for the most part, most Trillium species are slow growing. We found the exceptions to be the lancifolium group, Trillium foetidissimum and Trillium ludovicianum, which we've bloomed in as little as four years from seed.

- [Marty] But typically it can take, what, five to seven?

- Five to seven years at the earliest for getting material to bloom. I've seen rhizomes almost a foot long. So I mean, that's gotta be 40 to 50 years old of a single rhizome.

- So they're extremely long-lived.

- They're very long-lived plants.

- Okay, so once you've got them, you've got them unless you do something very wrong.

- Unless the voles eat them or the deer browse them, they're susceptible to both of those things.

- [Marty] Tell me about this one you've got coming into bloom here.

- [Zach] So this is Trillium lancifolium Whitfield. This is a population from southeastern Tennessee. These were grown from seeds collected in 2019.

- So it's five years ago.

- Five years ago. We've got at least two blooms in this seed pot.

- [Marty] And you said southeastern Tennessee. And we are blessed in this part of the world because this is the center of the Trillium universe, is it not, southeastern United States?

- The southeastern US is one of the largest centers for diversity, especially in this Cecil group. There are a few outliers on the West coast, but by and large, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, the Carolinas, and Northern Florida are the center of diversity for the sub genus Sicillium, which these are in.

- [Marty] Well let's go out and look at some more Trillium in the garden. Zach, Trillium can be pretty weird. And here's a great example. Tell me about this.

- So this is Trillium decumbens. This is a Trillium that creeps along the ground. It has a stem, but it's actually-

- It's like under there somewhere, oh yeah.

- [Zach] And it's got a weird sort of vertically held rhizome as well. It grows on really steep slopes in Alabama and Tennessee.

- [Marty] Okay, and it's just about flat to the ground.

- Yeah, decumbens means flat.

- Flat, yeah, exactly. And what spectacular leaves though, these humongous wide segments with this silvery pattern on it, really gorgeous.

- [Zach] It's one of my favorite Trilliums to have seen in the wild.

- [Marty] Yeah, that is quite the-

- It's like little flames on the forest floor on these really steep slopes that are amazing, amazing plants. There are some plants that go dormant by the time the leaves come out.

- [Marty] Right, it's spring ephemeral behavior.

- [Zach] They're an ephemeral. And this one even moreso than some of the others, like cuneatum, it will drop its foliage by the end of May.

- It's just fascinating.

- It's a wonderful plant.

- [Marty] I just love this silvery foliage on this.

- [Zach] These are silver selections out of the Oconee strain of Trillium cuneatum. We selected these out of other blocks for having silver foliage. And it's somewhat heritable a trait. So I mean, you can get silver seedlings out of silver plants, but sometimes not.

- [Marty] It's really pretty spectacular plant. And it looks like it's pretty free-blooming. I mean, you know, in a lot of ways.

- [Zach] Yeah, these will be blooming for three to four weeks looking at peak.

- [Marty] That's really beautiful. So no pattern at all on these selected plants on the leaves. And then there's, in contrast, this leaf.

- [Zach] Yes. Very much patterned. This is Trillium ludoviciatum Rankin. It's a seed strain out of Mississippi that we've grown here on the property for years.

- [Marty] It's just fabulously gorgeous. And I notice a lot of these sorts look a lot alike. And you're saying it's how the flowers are formed?

- [Zach] Yeah, the narrow petals and there's anther differences between like this and cuneatum, and some pollinator differences. These are pollinated by what are known as freeloader flies. They're these long legged little flies that they really love the ludoviciatum group. There's one there.

- Oh, little tiny guy.

- [Zach] Little tiny flies that only pollinate one group of plants, they don't really visit cuneatum. They're usually only like ludoviciatum group and then one from along the Savannah River.

- So this tiny fly's life is built around working with the pollen of this particular species?

- Yeah, it seems to be attracted to this one. There's sort of a yeasty smell that they're absolutely in love with.

- Nature is amazing.

- Nature is very amazing.

- [Marty] And like I was saying, this is one that I've grown extremely successfully. It's a very vigorous plant.

- [Zach] It's a very vigorous plant from seed. I mean, we could bloom it in up to four years from seed.

- [Marty] Yeah. Good one to go after, guys. Just to show people that there are things besides white, pink, and burgundy Trillium, there are yellows.

- [Zach] There are yellows and greenish yellows. Like this is a form of Trillium cuneatum from Oconee station area in South Carolina where yellows are pretty common. It's lacking all red pigments.

- [Marty] So this is what else is in the flower besides when the red pigments are gone?

- [Zach] Yeah, so you can see that the anthers are all yellow and green and the ovary is green as well. It's just missing the red pigment, the anthocyanins that make the other Trilliums burgundy.

- Right. That's a really beautiful, subtle, lovely little plant. And once again, the beautiful patterning on the leaves. Here's another lovely group. My goodness.

- [Zach] Yeah. This is a Trillium recurvatum. This is native to Central Tennessee as well.

- [Marty] Yep, it's beautiful.

- [Zach] Bloody Butcher is one of the common names.

- Isn't that a weird thing to name something that looks like this?

- Yeah, I don't know why they decided to name it that. But this is a really good, it's related to lancifolium, and has a nice little petiolate stem on the leaves.

- [Marty] And I love the burgundy kind of stem that elevates it, it's really lovely.

- [Zach] And it's super easy to grow and offsets really well.

- [Marty] This is another one that's really nice and vigorous.

- [Zach] Yeah, it's a very vigorous plant.

- Zach, I just wanna thank you so much for sharing your vast knowledge with about Trilliums. Tell me, Plant Delights has how many?

- We have over 1,800 clones. It's about 40 species. Not all of them are identified or have been described as a good species yet, but we're still working with them.

- And I love the fact that you propagate and grow them and no wild collection, obviously.

- Yeah, no wild collection at all. We grow all these from seed here for sales.

- That's wonderful. Well thank you so much. It's just been a super pleasure.

- It's been a pleasure.

- [Narrator] For inspiring garden tours, growing tips, and garden projects, visit our website at volunteergardner.org, and find us on these platforms.