George's Current Ramblings and Readlings

Gold Medal Plants of 2021

December 22nd, 2020

   One of the best resources for making wise plant picks in Pennsylvania gardens is the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s Gold Medal Plant Program.

Redbud ‘Appalachian Red’ is one of seven Gold Medal award-winning plants of 2021.

   Each year, a panel of regional plant experts gets together to hash out what are some of the best trees, shrubs, evergreens, and perennial flowers that deserve greater use in our landscapes.

   The criteria is that the plants have to be hardy in Zones 5 to 7, have to be solid all-around performers, should be attractive in more than one season, and preferably be resistant to deer browsing but beneficial ecologically.

   The deciding factor is that they’re under-used and/or under-known.

   The PHS Gold Medal panel has been making picks since 1979, originally starting with just woody plants but expanding into perennials six years ago.

   Plants are nominated from submissions by home gardeners, garden designers, horticulturists, landscape architects, nursery owners, and propagators.

   I’ve been on the panel a dozen years now, and I can tell you a lot of thought and input goes into the selections. More nominees get rejected than selected. Even one significant drawback can be enough to derail a plant.

   Sometimes we pick a whole species, if the straight species is a superior performer or if multiple varieties of a species are all pretty good.

   Other times, a particular variety is singled out as a Gold Medal-winner.

   PHS just announced its new set of seven winners for 2021 – two trees, a flowering shrub, an evergreen groundcover, and three perennial flowers.

   Those and all of the Gold Medal winners over the years are posted on a newly interactive PHS website that lets you zero in on best plants by their attributes, see images, and read profiles of each winner, including key stats like bloom times, light needs, and mature sizes.

   The new site also lets you sort plants by the year they won or by particular traits you’re looking for, such as deer resistance, attractiveness to pollinators, and whether they’re native plants.

   All of that is posted on the Best Plants for Your Garden section of the PHS website.

   I’ve also grouped all of the winners since 1988 in a category-by-category listing under the George’s Handy List section of my website.

   Here are the 2021 Gold Medal plants:

New Digs for the 2021 Philadelphia Flower Show… Plus Other 2021 Garden Trips

December 15th, 2020

   The Philadelphia Flower Show is going to happen in 2021, but for the first time in the show’s 192-year history, it’ll take place outside.

FDR Park will be the site of the 2021 Philadelphia Flower Show, the first one ever to be held outside.
Credit: Pennsylvania Horticultural Society

   The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic prompted the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, which produces the show, to rethink what’s always been an indoor show – long taking place in late winter.

   To accommodate social distancing and other virus-prevention steps, PHS plans to make the 2021 show a nine-day, nature-themed, outdoor event taking place June 5-13, 2021, at South Philadelphia’s FDR Park.

   Admission will be limited, with guests required to buy advance tickets for specific dates and entry times.

   Tickets are to go on sale in January at the show’s website.

   PHS members will get first crack before then at reserving tickets.

   As we’ve done for years, Lowee’s Group Tours and I plan to run bus trips to the show each weekday, June 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11. Admission will be included, and we’ll take you from two pickup points in the Harrisburg area to the show venue, just west of Philly’s stadium complex (Lincoln Financial Field, Citizens Bank Park, and the Wells Fargo Center) and not far from the city’s Navy Yard.

   The cost is $95, including your show ticket. Details are on my George’s Talks and Trips page or you can sign up and get more details by calling Lowee’s at toll-free 1-888-345-6933 or visiting Lowee’s website.

   The Philadelphia Flower Show is just one of the 13 garden-trip offerings Lowee’s and I are planning for 2021. We’re hoping that COVID-19 will be just a bad memory by then and that we’ll all be able to get out and about again.

   Keep reading for more on the rest of the 2021 lineup.

Giving Gardeners

December 8th, 2020

   It’s no secret there was a huge boom in vegetable gardening this year – whether it was because people were worried about the food supply or because they were stuck at home and looking for productive things to do.

Sean and Stacey McNicholl harvest produce from their Philadelphia-area GreenHorn Garden.
(Credit: Pa. Horticultural Society)

   The green industry estimates some 16 to 18 million new gardeners dug into the soil this pandemic year with the vast majority planting edibles.

   But not all of the produce that came out of those new gardens went to the gardeners themselves.

   Many gardeners – new and veteran – donated their tomatoes, peppers, cukes, zukes, and such to friends, neighbors, churches, food banks, and anyone else who could use it.

   One couple who gave in an enormous way was a young Philadelphia-area couple named Sean and Stacey McNicholl.

   These Upper Darby thirtysomethings used their urban-farm land and their greenhouse in a cemetery (once a stop on the Underground Railroad) to churn out more than 15,000 pounds of give-away produce.

   That amounted to nearly half of the 33,000 pounds of total produce that thousands of other gardeners donated through the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s Harvest 2020 initiative.

   PHS announced that food-donation program in the spring as a way to encourage gardeners to help their Philadelphia neighbors in need.

   PHS, best known for running the Philadelphia Flower Show, wrote a piece about the McNicholls’ efforts at season’s end. I got PHS’s permission to share it with you.

   Here it is. May it inspire us all for next year:

What Gardeners Think about Gardening

December 1st, 2020

   The National Garden Bureau, the non-profit education and marketing organization that came into being during the original World War I “Victory Garden” surge, is celebrating its 100^th anniversary this year.

The National Garden Bureau surveyed nearly 2,000 gardeners and professionals to mark its century birthday.

   To mark the occasion, the group surveyed nearly 2,000 gardeners and green-industry professionals to get a feel for what’s on gardeners’ minds – and where those thoughts are headed.

   “Our main goal was to ask consumers about their vision of what their kids’ and grandchildren’s gardens will look like over the next 100 years,” said Diane Blazek, NGB’s executive director.

   The survey unearthed some interesting findings.

   A big one this year is just how much of a rebirth we’ve had in vegetable gardening.

   For years, this was a lost art. In my many yard visits doing redesign consults, I rarely saw vegetable gardens – often not even a single tomato plant among the azaleas, barberries, burning bushes, and big lawns.

   That’s been changing in recent years, largely fueled by younger, first-time gardeners.

   All of a sudden, edible gardening skyrocketed this spring as stuck-at-home people saw empty grocery shelves and figured that a pandemic year might be a good time to grow their own food.

   Many also were looking for ways to limit trips to grocery stores, and Blazek adds that “more people were cooking at home instead of going out, so they wanted their own fresh produce to try.”

   The Chester County-based Garden Media Group estimates that 16 million new gardeners took to the soil this year, primarily COVID-fueled food gardening.

   The main question now is whether this food-gardening trend will stick or whether we’ll all go back to buying everything at the store once COVID fades.

   “Many of those who had a good experience will keep at it,” Blazek believes. “Some who failed will keep trying, and others will give up. Overall, we’re saying that even if just 10 percent of the new gardeners keep gardening, it’s good for everyone.”

The 10 Worst Plant Names

November 24th, 2020

   Most plants have fairly pleasant names, such as love-in-a-mist, moonflower, glory-of-the-snow, and sweet william.

   Then there are those with such disgusting or beastly names – bladder fumitory (a poppy-family annual) comes to mind – that you wonder why anyone would plant them.

Stinking hellebore really doesn’t smell that bad.

   Here’s my list of 10 of the worst-named plants…

   1.) Stinking hellebore. Like so many bad-name plants, this semi-evergreen perennial flower really is a decent plant (so long as you don’t try to eat it… it’s poisonous).

   It’s related to the Lenten rose and produces hanging, bell-shaped purplish flowers early each spring.

   Weird thing is, it doesn’t blatantly stink. The name apparently came from what someone thought was an unpleasant smell when the leaves were crushed.

   2.) Joe Pye weed, butterfly weed, etc. Any plant with weed in its name is at a big disadvantage on the garden-center benches.

   Who wants to take a chance on something that sounds like kin to dandelion, kudzu, and poison ivy?

   Too bad because “Joe Pye flower” is an excellent, long-blooming native perennial, butterfly “flower” is the must-have plant of the monarch butterfly, and sneezeweed (a.k.a. Helen’s flower) is a colorful late-blooming perennial (not a weed) that isn’t any more sneeze-inducing than most any other flower.