Episode 3507

- [Narrator] This garden space is something special. There's a rhythm to this large sloped bed that features grasses, perennials, and a remarkable specimen plant. And these artful circular border beds are filled with a growing medium to support plants that need great drainage. And the stacked rock border wall is topped with a crevice garden, filled with colorful perennials. Phillipe Chadwick talks with the plantsman who designed and installed this impressive garden spot. Marty DeHart showcases a variety of plants that will create a highly effective habitat for pollinators of all sizes. And Sheri Gramer learns how to successfully use bamboo as a screen, whether it's planted in the ground or in containers. Join us. A diverse plant palette that's performing well in three distinct growing environments.

- Not all gardens look the same. In fact, this one is a really fun mixture of grasses, bulbs, perennials, and lots of different really fun niche rock gardens. So, let's go meet the designer. Wow, this agave is really awesome and quite a big size.

- Thank you. I just put these out here. They are cold hardy too.

- Yeah. I'm here with Dominick, the designer, and installer, and maintainer, and you name it-

- The garden man.

- Of all these things, plantsman. This is a really cool concept that you're using these raised areas, 'cause I know the agaves need a lotta drainage.

- Yes.

- And they like the rock too, so I guess that kinda goes hand in hand and evolved together.

- Yeah. Yeah, I've tried to grow agave before, and they will go through the winter here, but as soon as spring comes and it's really wet, they just rot away for me. So I got these metal rings at a scrap yard, and my intention was to use them as raised beds and kind of bring the soil up and mix more sand and better draining soil in there so I can have them come back. I hope they come back.

- Yeah, for sure. I love the way you've used these rocks kind of in a circular motif of different sizes, it's almost like a clock hands.

- Yeah. As I'm gardening anything, and now these rings, I really like to just flow with it and kind of break it up. And you could see there's rings on each side going down. And I didn't want them to all be, you know, all like a clock like this. I kinda wanted to make each one their own thing. I will alternate the clock dial between them just for, like, balance, and I have three of them. But I just, I'm obsessed with crevice gardens. And over the winter last year, I started Googling them, and just kinda for getting inspiration. Far Reaches Farm in Oregon or Washington, they're a big inspiration. I love their crevice garden. So, just slicing rocks together is mostly what I do here. I like the aesthetic. But it is really important to get a really good kinda draining soil, the kinda plants you put in them. You can grow stuff from New Zealand, you know, Asia, all kinda stuff from the Himalayas in these kinda gardens. And people wouldn't think that, but just the rocks and the soil in the raised bed and the thermal energy, and just that free draining soil, allows you to grow stuff you would never think would grow here. Our humidity and the rain in the summer is our biggest danger to these kinda plants. So this allows me to grow them.

- Right, so you're kind of creating its own micro climate. Its own micro soils, essentially.

- Yeah, it's like a little micro bubble, yeah.

- The important thing is, and I feel like the major thing is the drainage.

- The drainage is everything.

- That's everything, for a lotta plants.

- Because I've seen big, beautiful agave in certain parts of Tennessee and they just die for me all the time. And it really is just raising them up and giving them the soil and the sand and that gravel mixture, so they don't want to ever be sitting in water.

- So I also have to say this, as structural and as strong and clean line as these are, you've kind of flanked it with this loose flowing mixture of grasses, perennials, I see some lavenders here.

- [Dominick] If you saw all my gardens around the property, probably 80% of my garden is grasses. I love ornamental grasses. Mexican feathergrass probably is the most of any grass I have. But I really have been switching into more, over the last few years, native plants. But I'll never go fully native. Get outta here. I've got too much good stuff. But I'll first come through and usually overlay my grasses or put the grasses down, and then I'll start to patchwork in between. But, again, I put my own flare. Like I'll throw the monkey puzzle trees in, and then the rock gardens placed in kinda breaks it up so you're not just looking at a meadow.

- [Phillipe] The monkey puzzle tree is obviously a major focal point. I really wanna go over there and touch that.

- [Dominick] You can, just be careful.

- Yeah. So this monkey puzzle tree, I mean, it's just fascinating. Tell me about this.

- They don't seem real. They almost look like a giant cactus. And that's kind of a little bit why I like them. They look like an arid kinda rock garden plant. But these do grow in our zone. I think they can go as far as six. And they're from Argentina. Their scientific name is araucaria araucana. And these get huge. They start off really slow, so I don't really, or haven't planned for maturity. Like, it could get big here, but they grow so slow that I'm just hoping I can have it at least get, I don't know, 30 foot tall. Maybe it'll be bigger in my lifetime. But they stay green when they're small, but once they get larger, they look like a pine tree when they get larger. But the branches kinda bare, fall off, and they just have an umbrella. I don't think they're beautiful when they're big, honestly.

- [Phillipe] Definitely a specimen plant that everyone's gonna wanna know about.

- Yeah, people always ask about them, and when I go to pick them up at the garden center, they laugh at me because they're like, "Be careful." And I'm like, "This ain't my first time at the rodeo." I pick them up, but you have to swipe up to grab them or they'll stab you. If you just grab it, that would mess you up.

- [Phillipe] Yeah, for sure.

- They're like, "How do you know how to handle that?" I did get some puncture wounds prior to this.

- Yeah. So the really fascinating thing to me about this is the mixture of different things you've got in here, from bulbs to grasses to succulents, some even, like, cactuses and stuff and, you know, a cat.

- And my cat. She's the garden cat. She Protects it.

- [Phillipe] How did you kind of pull your plant palette together for this? Or did you just kinda go along?

- [Dominick] A lotta the plants now that I grow, 'cause we've been in Tennessee seven years, I really select for what I know does good, that is like not gonna die. They pull through. And this rock garden, I built this year, like just a few months ago. Like a month ago, actually. And I know phlox thrive. After I put them in and water them, they'll never need any more water. They just will be fine. But all of this stuff is just so tough, resilient, and has proven itself. And the color this time of year is just amazing.

- [Phillipe] Right, so I see phlox, dianthus.

- Creeping thyme.

- Creeping thyme.

- Veronica.

- Veronica.

- [Dominick] Speedwell. Candy tuft.

- Candy tuft, yeah.

- And all of these, when they're not in flower, another beautiful thing about them is the creeping thyme always looks good. Even the phlox, it looks like a beautiful evergreen mat. So they kinda just form and cushion the rocks, and I just love the way that looks. It becomes like literally a living wall. So I like diversity, like with the flowers, and then you have rock gardens. It's almost like a piece of art to me.

- Yeah, for sure. And I know, you know, it's kind of like the bulbs and things are kind of the show right now. And I see a lot of small things that are emerging that are, you know, of course gonna fill the space later.

- Of course, we need the spring bulbs. And these have really been taking me through spring so far. They're beautiful, but a lot of this is underplanted with natives. We have Amsonia, a lot of Amsonia along here. I love when those fill out. They're beautiful. The mulley grass will fill in. What are these big leaves? I can't think. The silphium. The big meadow plant. They get huge leaves. Maybe 12 foot tall flower spike with yellow flowers, but they don't take up a lotta space. The leaves only stay two feet, but the flower spikes are, like, 12 foot tall. We have liatris.

- [Phillipe] Liatris, yeah, the natives.

- [Dominick] Prairie dropseed and native grass. But just a lotta native grasses and perennials that work together so beautifully.

- [Phillipe] Yeah, it's fun that, you know, the things that kind of grow in the winter and fill the space now, and then during the summer, they kind of get smaller, die back, and then the summer things fill the space, so they kind of take their turns-

- Yes, yeah.

- With the space.

- There's a lotta flowers now too. But my whole goal as a gardener as well is I don't rely on flowers. They're the cherries on top. This has to look good when there's no flowers. And over the winter, when... I mean, that wasn't here, but even my hillsides, when there's no flowers, the grass and just the evergreens make it look so alive still. The flowers, when they come in, they really add a punch, but I really try to plant for evergreen grassy look so that it always looks pretty.

- [Phillipe] So this one looks a little bit older to me, this rock garden. Was this your first?

- Yeah, this was the first one I built. After sitting on my phone over winter, staring at crevice gardens, this one I threw out. And I mostly did this because there's a wall here and I didn't know how to clean the back of it up. I'm like, "Should I just throw dirt there?" So I built the wall, and then when I planted everything, it just did so good, and that's what inspired me to do the rest. But you can see how big they'll get, just after a year.

- Oh, the phloxes, for sure.

- Yeah, they're so beautiful.

- So I know a lotta people probably don't have the time or the space to build something like this, but these little miniature ones you've built are really cool too. And I feel like that's a very approachable thing for someone at home that they could do, you know, playing with the rocks and kinda standing them up and filling those spaces with different succulents and whatnot is a really fun thing.

- Yeah, you could get rock, obviously, from, like, a rock yard or wherever, but this specific kinda rock, I like the way... I don't know if it's shale or something, the way it's very slicey or pieced. I get this, like, alongside the highway where they blew the highway out and all the rock is just pieces, 'cause I don't see it anywhere else. And you just throw dirt in there and lay them how you want. Throw more dirt, more gravel, and put, like, hens and chicks are really easy. I see some people do, like, maybe five containers of these and do different sizes on the side of their porch is a really cool idea. But, yeah, you could totally bring a small version home if you don't have the space to do something bigger.

- [Phillipe] Well, I really appreciate you showing us around your rock crevice mixture garden, it's awesome.

- [Dominick] I appreciate you guys coming out.

- Pollinator gardens are super popular these days with good reason and they're very needed. I wanted to talk a little bit about different kinds of pollinators and being sure that stuff is planted that services more than the big showy pollinators. This is mountain mint. But you can see the flowers are tiny, they're in these little congested heads at the top. But the leaves around the flower heads are what are called bracts and they are covered with this whitish hair, which makes this silvery green effect, which is extremely showy in the garden. I mean, this is a really nice garden plant. One thing about it I would say is that it wants to spread. It spreads by stolons, which are little, like, root runners, if you will. So don't put it someplace where you want a super controlled plant, because you'll be fighting it. But it is a major plant for small pollinators. You'll see this covered up in sweat bees, little flies. They love these little tiny, tiny flowers. You can see there's a little guy right there, working the flowers. These are little tiny tubular flowers that are in these congested heads and the insects just love 'em. The small pollinators are just as important to us as the big ones. Another native worth thinking about for a pollinator garden is gaillardia. This one's been blooming for a while. You can see seed heads coming on, but you can also see buds. It's a short-lived perennial. And it blooms for a long, long period. It's called Indian blanket, or blanket flower. And it's really this beautiful, bright, vivid color, very Southwestern looking to my eye. They're easy to grow, sun-loving, very drought tolerant, both large and small pollinators like these composite blooms. This gorgeous thing is Monarda fistulosa, which is the native, commonly found all over Tennessee, bergamot. And it is a wonderful, wonderful pollinator plant. As you can see, just by looking at it, it is crawling with bumblebees. And we just had a pipevine swallowtail pass through here too. I've also seen silver-spotted skippers and fritillaries and various other butterflies on it. It's a gorgeous, gorgeous plant. The mintiness of it, you can smell in the air as you get near the plant it's so fragrant. This is a plant that services large pollinators. Notice you're not seeing any little bitty bees or anything on here. That's because the flowers which occur in these circles around these congested heads have long tubes. And the proboscis, basically the tongue, if you will, of the pollinator has to be long enough to reach the end of that flower tube to get the nectar it's after. And that means it has to be a bigger bee or a butterfly. The little guys can't get in there. This specimen here is maybe a little shade over five feet tall. They run from four to five feet typically. They like sun. Poor soil. I mean, they are not picky about soil at all. Easy to grow. Like all Monardas, it makes a spreading clump, but it's not as thuggish as some, which spread wildly with big runners all over the place. This one is more constrained, and blooms in the height of summer. Gorgeous flowers. I mean, the color, the head is this kinda smoky purple with these lovely lavender pink ring of florets around it. And it's just really beautiful. Rudbeckia hirta, which is black-eyed Susan, and you can see this is just a regular wild form right here, looking with its black eyes. It comes in several named varieties. And this one is called Prairie Sun. Rudbeckia are, once again, great pollinator plants. Butterflies love 'em and bees. And with these little, all the cone flowers in here, all the little fertile flowers, they serve as both large and small pollinators. This Prairie Sun is a really beautiful, large flowered variety. These are a little beat up. They've been blooming for quite a while, and we had a torrential rain yesterday. This is another one that blooms for a long period of time. Starts in May, continues on until late summer. So, you get a lotta color. I really love the sort of the gradations of its almost ombre kind of, from very light yellow at the tips to a deep golden yellow at the center. And it's a really great plant. Easy to grow. All of the black-eyed Susans, which are native to Tennessee, are super easy to grow. They self-sow all over the place. I highly recommend them, and pollinators flock to them. Echinacea is a pollinator plant that everybody knows about. There's so many varieties of echinacea out there, coneflower, usually called purple coneflower, that there are quite a few species, and they hybridize with each other readily. And that's why there are so many cultivars out there now available. This is one called Cherokee Sunset. And the reason I love it is not only does it come in this range of gorgeous colors, it's a seed-grown strain. So, you get everything from a yellow through these sort of pinks, mauves, and into these gorgeous, deep, saturated oranges and reds and rubies. It's a great, great strain. One of the things about echinacea is that, especially a lot of the modern ones, you put them in, they look great, then the next winter you go, "Where'd it go?" at the next spring, because it rots out over the winter. They seem to be very touchy about how they winter over. And if it's a wet winter or something, they often rot out. This one does not. In my experience, Cherokee Sunset lasts, and the colors are just tropical. They're just gorgeous if you like yummy hot colors like I do. One thing about pollinator gardens is you don't need a lot of space. You may think you need a vast and expansive, bright, sunny yard or something, but you don't. A lotta pollinator plants work really well in containers. So even if you have a couple of tomato plants and you want to put a pollinator plant near 'em, put that mountain mint in a pot nearby. Tomatoes are pollinated by small bees, like sweat bees, believe it or not, and that mountain mint will draw them like magnets and pollinate your tomatoes really well. You can have Rudbeckia, famously do well in pots, and many of the other things that I've shown you. So, you can have these plants wherever you want, no matter what you're setting, unless you're in the deepest of deep shade. So, have at it.

- We're in Almaville Bamboo Farm. We're with Chris Buker today, and he's gonna tell us, or maybe show us, why we would want to choose bamboo over some other choices, maybe some shrubbery, or perhaps some trees. Chris, give me some attributes of why we should choose bamboo.

- One of the reasons people select bamboo is because they're interested in disguising or hiding something that's offensive. It might be a school bus next door. It might be a particularly offensive neighbor. And the bamboo does this, number one, effectively, number two, inexpensively, and number three, with almost no maintenance. If you put up a privacy fence, with most HOAs, you're limited to six feet. You can go 20 feet pretty easily here in a narrow band. And that's an issue too. If you were using a Leyland or an arborvitae, they're gonna grow in every dimension. You can have bamboo provide a nice screen if you only got two or three feet. In fact, I had a customer last week that did it in a nine-inch wide planter, because all he was trying to do was soften the edge of a barn.

- That's not very wide, is it?

- That's right, it isn't. But what he was looking to do was to soften a sharp edge. It does that nicely. It's virtually completely disease resistant. And in our soil up here where you're standing is really a great big rock with a little dirt on top of it. Bamboo will thrive in that condition, whereas that would kill a tree. That's why there weren't any trees on this property, well, before we started to grow bamboo.

- And so you were mentioning that you trim some of your bamboo. Can you talk about that to us?

- Yes, most people don't have any idea that bamboo can be trimmed to virtually any height you want. And what you'll see here is not specific to this species. You can do it with any of them. We're standing in an area that's mowed with the lawnmower, but it's got rhizomes underneath here. We're right next to a portion that's 20-something feet high. This is 20 years old, and we had an issue. Right overhead, we have some power lines. So the power company, which has a 20 foot right of way, came in here and that's their right, they cut everything to the ground. I decided we better make lemonade out of this lemon. So what we did is we came in here and began to groom it. The area behind me is trimmed at four feet high. That's all we do is take a hedge shear.

- [Sheri] The one directly behind you is what you trim to four feet?

- Right behind me.

- Okay.

- We trim that with hedge shears one time a year. Very simple. And it stays that way for 10 months.

- It Doesn't produce new shoots to go up, it just stays there where you- It just stays that way

- It's a perfect hedge.

- until the following spring.

- Yeah, perfect hedge as well.

- Perfect hedge, that's right. If this was privet, God forbid, you'd be trimming it all year round, just like we have to do around the edge of our pastures. In the distance, we have some that's much taller. That's hand trimmed once a year. It's as simple as pulling a piece over, taking your Felcos, clipping the top off, and you're done. It stops right there. There's no terminal bud. Bamboo only expands telescopically. No cambium layer.

- [Sheri] But you mentioned rhizomes.

- They're rhizomes. That's where the food is stored. So, it's stored underground. And if you change your mind, again, like we did right here, this area used to come out further. And I just simply cut it to the ground, so now it stays in that position.

- That brings me to a good point.

- Uh-huh?

- Say my neighbor planted some bamboo and it's invading my property. So you're saying that if you cut it back, keep it mowed, you can keep it contained that way?

- There's two answers to that. And I get that telephone call dozens of times.

- I bet you do, 'cause that's the worst thing you hear about bamboo.

- [Chris] That's what they're afraid of, some people are afraid of. And there's really no need to be, because they visualize bringing in heavy equipment and removing all that. It's not necessary. What you have to do is understand how the plant grows. It expands under the ground with rhizomes. And, yes, it can go a long way. But do you know when you-

- What's a long way?

- [Chris] 20 feet in a year.

- [Sheri] Wow, okay, that is a long way.

- That's right. So we have areas on the property where we have two groves of different species that are closer together than that. So how do we handle it? How do we keep 'em from mixing? I take a can of spray paint, I mark it in February of each year, and I have guys who weigh a couple hundred pounds with a special nursery spade, go along and insert that six inches in the ground. What you've just done is severed the rhizome and potentially those new shoots from its primary food source, which is the ground.

- [Sheri] How deep are the rhizomes then?

- They're normally in the top four to six inches of the soil, a little bit deeper with timber bed plants. So under normal circumstances, you're gonna catch those rhizomes simply by root pruning. And that's all you have to do. If you want to get rid of it on your side, you just continue to mow it, because there's a limited food supply in the remaining rhizome. Now, if you wanna go further than that. If you're right next to somebody's flower garden, then you want to consider putting in a tree root barrier. It's the same kinda root barrier they use for trees in an urban setting, and when that tree root hits it, it stops because it cannot penetrate 60 mil HDPE.

- [Sheri] What's 60 mil H-G-P-D?

- [Chris] High density polyethylene. I'm sorry. Nursing pots.

- [Sheri] Okay, all right, that's all I need to know.

- [Chris] And we keep lots of that on.

- [Sheri] I'm Learning here, so you gotta-

- [Chris] That's quite all right.

- [Sheri] Talk it down.

- And it's heavily used. The biggest installation I've seen is at the Creation Museum near Cincinnati. They've got a lovely botanical garden outside, and they've probably got 17 or 18 bamboo groves surrounded by flowers and shrubs. And you might think, "Why are these not mixing," until you see about three inches of plastic sticking up? So this is a large scale use of rhizome barrier, or tree root barrier, to contain the bamboo, very successfully done for many years.

- So basically two ways to contain it is what you've told us, correct?

- There's two. If you look around the other parts of our property, we just mow around it most places. It's only if you're close to something that you would want to root prune it. Where you're standing, we don't root prune that. We just run over it with a lawnmower. But if you've got a neighbor that's an issue, yes, you want to take more aggressive steps.

- Well, you've given me a lotta choices, some options. I'm still a little apprehensive, I have to say, but I think I might try container first because-

- [Chris] That's perfectly fine. There are many people who can't put something in the ground. They may not even have enough soil to do that.

- [Sheri] Correct.

- But you can custom make a planter. We've got some in Green Hills that are 20 feet long, custom built by builders. And you can Google corrugated metal planters and you'll find some lovely ones that would work just fine, and we carry some.

- Well, Chris, I want to tell you, thank you, I've learned a lot.

- Good.

- Kinda sparked some ideas running around the back of my head on things to do. I'm already thinking about where I could place some, so I appreciate that. And I hope our viewers, you know, getting excited about bamboo, as excited as you are. It's your life passion at this point, right?

- That's right.

- Yeah.

- [Chris] Just come out and walk the property, see what we do.

- [Sheri] Well, thank you very much for sharing, Chris.

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