Wayside Gardens Voices

Sun-Loving Shrubs For Hot and Dry Gardens

South Carolina Summers can be hot and dry, especially in August and July. My mother has an exposed south-facing wall where the sun beats all day in the driest months of the year. She has the hardest time getting anything to grow there. I thought I might make a short list of shrubs that she could use for the hottest driest places in the garden, and I am sharing it with you.

Boxwoods
The old hedge standby, boxwoods love the sun, and they will tolerate some of the driest climates. Water deeply once a week in the driest times, otherwise your shrub should hold up to the elements. The will hold their leaves and color when others would fade.

Buddleia
The butterfly bush, this bush fills with beautiful, colorful blooms throughout the summer. It will also attract pollinators, especially butterflies, which will make all of your plants more productive. It loves full sun, and stands up to warm dry weather.

Dogwoods
More a tree than a shrub, but it provides the bonus of eventually adding a little shade to those over-baked patches of your garden. With beautiful blooms and changing foliage, dogwoods provide three season of interest. They also really love full sun.

Camellia
This shrub is the real rock star of drought tolerant plants. With beautiful bright blooms and evergreen foliage they provide 4 seasons of garden interest. They are drought tolerant, heat tolerant, and really love those all-day sunny spots.

Growing Viburnum for 3 Seasons of Color

Viburnum are shrubs and small trees primarily used for their showy fragrant flowers, seasonal leaf color, and ornamental fruit. These deciduous shrubs provide a wonderful three-season show that creates a dynamic quality for a year-round interesting garden.

They will pollinate, bloom, and fruit individually, but they are much more productive if planted in groups. They make excellent borders and separating pieces for large landscape layouts. They also work well along driveways and fences.

If given full sun and periodic deep waterings Viburnum will become a very low-maintenance staple in your garden layout. They are worry-free, hardy shrubs that are not attractive to grazing animals like deer.

The Richest Helleborus Colors Yet

It seems strange to look outside in the green heat of summer and picture the barren coming winter.  However, your garden will soon be dieing back in the face of coming winter yet again (it really does sneak up on me every year).  However, your winter garden doesn't have to be devoid of color and life.  There are a variety of plants that are just as, sometimes even more, beautiful in the winter.  Helleborus is one of my favorites of these, blooming in late winter to very early spring.

I'm especially excited about our new collection of Winter Jewels Helleborus. These have the most vivid, intense bloom colors I've ever seen on Helleborus, and they look absolutely amazing.  These American-bred Helleborus are vigorous and heavily budded, and the flowers stick around for as long as three months.  They really add something fantastic to the winter palette without losing any of the easy gardening of other Helleborus. 

Sweetshrub-Sinocalycalycanthus 'Hartlage Wine'

I was just looking around over in our Wayside Gardens Garden Center, and I happened upon some fantastic Sweetshrub.  I asked one of our helpful Master Gardeners about the plant, and she told me that it's x Sinocalycalycanthus 'Hartlage Wine,' a crossbreed of Chinese Sweetshrub and our native Carolina Allspice.  All of these shrubs are descended from a single plant bred at the Raulston Arboretum in the early 1990's.  The plant is named "Hartlage" after the undergraduate student, Richard Hartlage, who was in charge of the experiment ("Wine" comes from the blossom color).  It really is a rare find, because it is a hybrid with all of the best traits of both stock plants from which it was bred.  Like the Carolina Allspice, it is a hardy, vigorous shrub, but it has the large blooms and leaves of the Chinese Sweetshrub.  The buds that start to come out in spring burst into large, brilliant red blooms that will be the envy of your neighborhood, especially against the backdrop of the shrub's lovely glossy foliage.  That foliage changes to a soft yellow in fall, which can be almost as beautiful as the flowers themselves.  Plus, because it's an unusual shrub, you'll most likely be the first on your block to have one!

Harry Lauder's Walking Stick

If you're looking for a plant to add interest to your landscape in the winter, you can't do much better than Corylus 'Contorta.'  This interesting shrub takes its unusual common name, Harry Lauder's Walking Stick, from the crooked cane that the legendary Scottish entertainer, Sir Harry Lauder, often used as a performance prop in the early 1900's.  It's a well-deserved moniker, as the Contorta produces some of the most interestingly twisted, corkscrew-like branches of any shrub I've ever seen.  It is an interesting and unusual shrub when it's wearing its leaves in the warm months whose berries are very attractive to birds, but it really comes into its own when it sheds the leaves in the cool part of the year, and those pig's-tail branches are unveiled.  The Contorta looks its best when featured as a specimen, especially when its silhouette is contrasted strongly by a backdrop of snow.  It's a good thing, then, that this unusual shrub is cold-hardy all the way to Zone 3, where the snow is plentiful and the need for winter landscape interest is greatest.  This shrub is a quick-grower, too, that will generally reach a height of around seven feet tall. 

Planting In November

It will be November in less than a week, and many of you may have given up on your gardens for the winter. When most gardeners think of november, they think of raking leaves and cleaning out for the spring.

But, if you have a garden project you are just itching to finish, don't wait. The horticulturists around here stress that fall is the best time to plant. This may not be safe for some of the colder parts of the USA, but for most of us, the weather is mild and the soil is willing. Actually, it's even a little warm here in South Carolina today.

This is a great time to get those shrubs and trees in the ground. For most plants. as long as they are listed as hardy to your USDA hardiness zone, then you can plant them most any time of the year, unless the ground is frozen. Planting in the fall will allow more time for good strong roots to develop before spring. Your trees will perform better than if you wait until it warms up next year to plant them.

Evergreen Shrubs Keep Gardens Beautiful

For a lasting impression and year-round interest try evergreen shrubs. We are all familiar with hollies and boxwoods, the classic short hedges, the ones that reliably maintain there deep colors all year long. The reliability of evergreens is great for landscaping because it reduces the amount of maintenance required to keep an aesthetically pleasing garden.

If you want something a little more interesting than the monochromatic boxwood, opt for a plant that flowers and produces fruit. For instance, hollies periodically produce those lovely red berries (which also attract birds). Gardenias and Rhododendrons produce large fragrant blooms, and provide a little more interest than your standard evergreen.

If you want an evergreen shrub that has interesting architecture, try a juniper. Junipers are amazingly hardy and their habit varies tremendously from one cultivar to the next. Juniperus 'Skyrocket' grows 15 feet straight in the air not getting any wider than 18 inches. In this area there is a common ground covers varieity. They are a related to cypress but are generally much shorted and have very interesting, gnarled trunks and a fairly unpredictable habit.

Euonymus, 'Winter Creeper' and 'Golden Splash'

Euonymus, also known as 'Spindle' was given this name because, once upon a time it was used in making spindles used in spinning wool into yarn. It is native to most of the continents in the northern hemisphere. It home gardening it is used as an ornamental, a groundcover, or a hedge.

The species and cultivars vary greatly. They can be deciduous or evergreen, trees, shrubs, or vines with shiny, leathery leaves, small flowers in the spring, and berries in the fall. Most of their appeal comes from the wide range of foliage colors.

Good drainage is very important. Plants may be pruned at any time. Keep watered, and lightly feed plants in early spring with all-purpose slow release fertilizer worked and watered well into soil surface.

A couple of popular Spindle varieties:

E. radicans Winter Creeper- Clinging Vine. Zone 5. Held to support by root-like protrusions. 1/2 - 2" evergreen leaves. Hardiest evergreen vine available.

E. fortunei Gold Splash- Compact Shrub. Zone 5. Most adaptable variegated Euonymus shrub. 2 - 4' tall. Uses: Foliage Interest , Hedge , Border , Containers. Additional Features: Fall Color , Bird Lovers , Easy Care Plants , Evergreen , Variegated.

Check out Wayside Gardens Shrubs to browse other shrub varieties.

John Durst
Wayside Gardens Voice

Flowering Shrubs and Trees, Can't wait until spring?

Winter's icy mitts still have a stranglehold on most of the country, and countless gardeners are tapping their feet and wearing out their gardening catalogs. So, for those of you itching to get some green on your hands, here's a little late-winter project that will brighten your home from Wayside Gardens.

You are going to have to prune your trees anyway, so why not clip off a few nice branches with some plump buds and bring them in the house. You can force these branches to bloom and bring a little springtime ambiance into the abysmal botanical breach of winter.

This is a simple little project that anyone can do, at least that's what the Wayside Gardens Horticulturist said. After your blooming trees have had time to overcome dormancy, usually around 8 weeks of winter weather, cut off a few branches that are a good length for displaying indoors, a foot or more. Make sure you get pieces with plenty of buds, and you will know when it's time to cut them because the buds will have started to swell. Make sure you cut the ends at a slight angle to ensure your branches will take up water.

As soon as you get them inside, put the ends in some water, and, if possible, submerge the whole branches overnight in a tub or sink to further force them out of dormancy. For the first few days keep the ends in a bucket of water in a cool place like a garage and make sure to keep misting the branches, keeping them covered with light plastic or burlap to maintain high levels of moisture. Change your water if it starts to look cloudy to prevent your branches from rotting.

After a week or so, when your flower buds are starting to bloom and show color, you should go ahead and set them out for display. Do not put them in full sunlight or a really warm area because they may dry up and you will lose your blossoms. Put them in a bright area and make sure they stay in a container with clean water, and they should last for a while. Moving them to a cooler place at night will also prolong their lifespan.

A list of shrubs and trees that you might want to try this with:
Magnolia, Hazel, Apple, Cherry, Pear, Wisteria, Puince, Forsythia, mockorange, and etc.

John Durst
Wayside Gardens Voice
jdurst@parkseed.com

Grafted Plants, Rootstock, and Scion

Many of the roses and fruit trees sold from Wayside Gardens are grafted plants. Grafted plants are simply your desired plants grown on top of a hardy rootstock. The top part of the plant, the part that matters, is called the scion. The scion bears all of the fruit, flowers, or foliage that we want.

Grafted plants are beneficial because they serve to increase variety, improve quality, and reduce prices. The extra hardy rootstock ensures survival for plants in zones that would normally be way too cold, allowing you to grow plants which would otherwise be off-limits. When a fruit tree is grafted to a mature rootstock allows fruit production much sooner than if you had to wait for the original roots to mature. You also know exactly what you are getting. Your plant has been cloned and will be exactly what you wanted. Clonal reproduction is also much quicker than growing from seed, making it more cost-effective.

Plants are grafted onto very similar plants, usually the of same genus. Most of Wayside Gardens' grafted roses are grafted onto 'Dr. Huey', a hardy old rose with flat blooms that are deep crimson with a golden center. You will see them often at old home sites where the scions have long died off, and the Dr. Huey rootstock has flourished. The Wayside Gardens fruit trees are often grafted onto strong, wild versions of themselves. For example, there is pear rootstock, which, left to it's own devices, would grow tangled branches with nasty thorns. Make sure you trim back the growth from your rootstock if you don't want it to take over. Sometimes, in a case where the delicate scion cannot take the extremes and dies back, the rootstock may take over completely. Make sure you pamper your young grafted plant until it gets established.

John Durst
Wayside Gardens Voice
jdurst@parkseed.com