Good day, gardeners, and Happy New Year! The newsletter turns 4 years old this week! Yay! Thanks for joining me on this journey of learning about plants.
Here's some valuable things I wanted to share with you.
This month for The Plantastic Podcast, I interviewed Janet Draper, the sole gardener Energizer Bunny of the Smithsonian’s Mary Livingston Ripley Garden for 26 years. Janet shared the impact of internships at Mt. Cuba Center, Kurt Bluemel’s nursery, the famed perennial nursery of Countess von Stein-Zeppelin in Germany’s Black Forest, and Beth Chatto's Plants and Gardens. We discuss why it matters to know how to identify a plant from seed to flower, how she continues to create dazzling combinations in the garden after many years, and how friends helped restore the garden after it was trampled during an inauguration. Enjoy the show!
Anelise Chen wrote about her love of beeches and their demise due to the foliar nematode in Arnoldia. It was one of the most beautiful and touching essays I've ever read.
For the garden designers out there, Bentley Ruggles shared this gem of a video on LinkedIn from famous designer Mike Lin where did an entertaining demo of how to draw better.
A few years ago I shared in plant•ed about the Beal experiment at Michigan State where seeds were buried in the ground 140 years ago and are extracted every 20 years to see if they still germinate. The last time they excavated them in 2021, Verbascum (mullein) still were able to grow. Now research has shown that the seeds were a hybrid. This research matters because it gives people an idea of which weed seeds can last the longest in seed banks.
As we head into the new year, a good resolution for gardeners everywhere is to do better about keeping track of plant names and where they are planted. Scott Beuerlein shared his simple photo and folder approach on GardenRant.
As always, thanks for welcoming me into your inbox each week to share what I’m learning about plants.
Cheers, and keep growing!
Dr. Jared