What’s the fun of a garden show? Well after visiting the Northwest Flower and Garden Show a dozen times, I sometimes ask myself that very question. The displays are as usual fantastical, the marketplace has rare but pricey plants, the food is flat out mediocre. But there is one redeeming quality to a garden show: ideas. Continue reading
Have you ever gone on vacation somewhere tropical and fallen in love with the plants there? I have. I’ve brought home cactuses. I’ve hauled succulents. I’ve packed those goofy plumeria branches you get in any Hawaiian gift store. Once potted in soil, the plumeria stick will actually grow into a tiny tree. You don’t get many blooms, but the stalk will put on foliage and it’s a fun if not temporary endeavor. Continue reading
Cass Turnbull was an imposing figure, and I was a little afraid of her. She spoke in a point-by-point, professorial way, half-tongue-in-cheek, half-seriously, but never aggressively. She seemed comfortable in her own skin and secure in her mission. In fact, she wasn’t interested in apologizing for who she was though she liked jokes and had a heart of gold. She was kind of like the Carrie Fisher of Seattle horticulture.
Cass worked in the Seattle parks department while doing pruning consultation for years, progressively frustrated by the ignorant things she saw homeowners do to their trees and shrubs. Shearing, sawing, and topping their way into a yard of sick and sad plants, committing what she called “Crimes Against Nature.” Seeing a tree or shrub with branches cut bluntly and randomly motivated her to found, arguably, the most famous, horticultural non-profit organization in the Northwest: Plant Amnesty. It was a name she’d chosen because she knew better than to publicly whine about well-meaning homeowners who indiscriminately went at their plants in the name of reducing height or making a plant behave. Cass wanted to reach as many regular, tree-owning folks as possible to change their ways and save plants from suffering. She knew humor would do that more effectively than ranting.
I only knew Cass through my half-year in the Plant Amnesty Master Pruner program. After working a dozen years as a certified horticulturalist and having taken a few years off to raise kids, I wanted to formalize my pruning skills.
In class, Cass would stand beside the slide screen, remote in hand, showing before and after photos of trees that had been hacked at and then later grown hundreds of water sprouts. She’d talk the straight botanical knowledge about selective heading, auxins, and lateral buds, but then she’d also talk about “the Medusa effect,” and “chicken on a stick” and “leaf crud,” creating her own unique language for the common issues known to longtime gardeners and gardening professionals. She liked to slip some kind of lozenge or candy in her mouth every twenty minutes or so, probably dry at having to lecture for two and half hours at a time. That she often opened the floor to hear from gardening professionals on their approaches and experiences made me warm to her as a person.
I don’t really need to list the enormous amount of work she put into educating the public about appropriate pruning practices or her time at Plant Amnesty. Anyone can google the organization, her book, or the many interviews she did on radio and other media. There was no denying her extreme, lifelong dedication. Volunteers who worked with her for years can better speak about her interpersonal style and sense of humor. But what I can share is my memory of how Cass, on the day of the Master Pruner graduation, after leading the audience in a rickety version of Pomp and Circumstance with a knowing smirk as we students stood in goofy graduation caps, beamed a huge, loving smile as she announced each graduate’s name and shook each of our hands, reassuring us that we had nothing to fear from her one-of-a-kind, sharp-minded, and radiant personality.
Party at the top, business on the bottom
People often use bamboo to screen out their neighbor’s yard or an ugly building across the street or those lovely, brightly colored recycled bins of Seattle. This is a mistake. Let me repeat: this is a mistake. It is not a mistake to plant bamboo because you’re a bamboo lover and study different bamboos and can think of no other plant you’d rather wake up and see every day. In that case, I say, “Go for it,” because you well know what you’re getting into. But for the more common homeowner who knows little about gardening and just bought a property in which they’re trying to create privacy, I say bamboo is NOT the way to go.
You may be thinking, “Yes, well, that’s because bamboo runs.” And yes, bamboo does run, like crazy. It’s a grass. It will get into the cracks of your sidewalk, it will grow into your lawn, and most annoying of all, it will jump beneath your fence line into your neighbor’s yard. This will make your neighbor quietly sad and/or loudly frustrated. I have seen it happen many, many times. At clients’ houses and at my own. My neighbor, who is a nice enough person, has bamboo alongside her house and our fence line. Every year, without fail, and despite the bamboo barrier I had installed years ago, it comes across where the barrier ends. Give it a teeny bit of light and water, and boom, those goofy, pointy stalks are shooting into pretty perennials.
Does this look like a gardener’s dream come true?
Here’s another mild horror story. A client of mine, a fine, upstanding guy, must get out his sawzall every year and cut out the stiff, curling starts of timber bamboo that come through his soil from his neighbor’s yard. With not even ten feet between the two houses, there is a huge stand of timber bamboo. It’s super tall. The trunks look like solid stone. It reminds me of the enormous, forest trees they had sword fights in in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The monstrosity tops both my client and his neighbor’s houses, blocks out all sun, and does little for privacy. And did I mention it sheds like an overheated dog in August?
Which brings me to my main point. Bamboo is not a good plant to use for screens, not because it grows in an out-of-control, eerie, sci-fi movie sort of way, but because of these other reasons:
Anytime you put multiple amounts of one plant in one place, it sucks the nutrients out of the soil, creates a huge network of roots, and leaves little biodiversity for wildlife. There are no berries breaking up the bamboo, no shrubs for nesting, etc.
I mean constantly. During springtime the least, but all-year-round it’s letting go of its older leaves and dropping the skinny, papery things everywhere, in your neighbor’s yard or yours, covering the ground with a light litter that requires constant raking. If you don’t rake, guess what, slugs and other critters, like even rats, will use that litter for joyful cover.
As it loses those papery leaves, the lower part of the stems turn bare. And here, the whole reason you planted bamboo becomes void. Instead of a thick, fluffy screen of greenery, you have a thousand, twiggy, bare stalks to stare at. And through which, your neighbor can stare at you.
Enough said.
I know I’ve got a bit of an attitude for this post. But it’s a practice I see a lot and it rarely works out. You may say, “But we planted bamboo years ago and we love it.” As I said, if you know what your getting into, you can ignore this post.
Other folks may say, “Not all bamboo runs, you know. We planted black bamboo and it worked out great.” I know black bamboo and other varieties do not run, I used to have a clump of black bamboo that I inherited in a yard at a house I used to own. The same applies. It was a giant clump of monoculture I couldn’t pair any plants well with (in terms of design), it shed constantly, and it only screened the top of my neighbor’s house, not her windows.
If the side of your house sits close to your fence line in the city, I urge you to substitute another plant that can actually add privacy while offering interest: blooms, peeling bark, nuts for birds, fragrance. Oftentimes, people install Arborvitae trees, those cone-like conifers that are highly boring and yet highly puffy and evergreen. I have in mind even better substitutions that I’ll talk about in a future post. Until then, listen to those you know with regrets and headaches about bamboo and please resist the urge to put any in your garden! Thank you for listening, that is all.
One advantage of Mother’s Day is a mom gets to do whatever she wants. Want to visit a botanical garden because you’re a plant nerd? A mom can do that. And that’s exactly what I did with my family last Sunday on Mother’s Day.
When I was in horticulture school, I worked for a quarter at the Bellevue Botanical Garden. It was a field practicum class for hands-on training. That was a fun time. I made a new, close friend and learned about rare plants I’d otherwise not have access to. Back then, in the early 2000s, the garden wasn’t as expanded and polished as it is today. There are more sites to see now. The perennial border in particular is even more beautiful. While it used to be a mass of hillside with trees, shrubs, and perennials, it now has proper gravel paths cutting through it with benches and broad, gentle steps. And not only are there spectacular collections of unusual plants on this 53-acre site, but a rock garden, native habitats, waterfalls, sculptures, even a suspension bridge. All in tidy, lovely shape. I left yearning for a crew of volunteers to maintain my yard. Here are a few photos of my visit. Oh, and by the way, it’s free.
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