That’s right, the horticulture staff from the Garden will be making appearances at the Great Big Home and Garden Expo at the IX Center all week beginning February 6. We’ll be giving presentations covering a wide range of horticultural topics including: Sustainable Rose Care, Growing Orchids Successfully, The Best Beautiful Plants for Your Garden, Composting Basics, Container Gardening, Proper Houseplant Care and Selecting the Right Rhododendrons for Your Garden. We are once again sharing exhibit space with the Cuyahoga County Master Gardeners who will also be speaking throughout the week.

When you visit, you’ll notice that our garden display is quite different for the other landscapers’ gardens. We chose to showcase orchids and tillandsias on one side to make visitors aware of our upcoming Orchid Mania show, Feb 27-Mar 28. The opposite side of our garden was created by Shoko Morton, an expert in the Sogetsu School of Ikebana Japanese flower arranging. Our exhibits are unlike any other you will see at the IX Center! We hope that you will visit and enjoy our floral artwork!

Mid-winter at Cleveland Botanical Garden is a time to look up.  Vivid autumn is a faded photograph lost in mom’s dresser drawer, and the twinkle of the holidays is now an unplugged string of lights lying in the snow. The days are still weak but growing stronger, and the sky is a drama of frozen smoke and clouds like anvils and granite.

The leaves are gone and the little grove is laid bare. Our dozens of big trees, remnants of Wade Oval’s once-forest of oaks and tulips, now dare to throw their crosshatch of flying beam and lintel against the framing sky.

One tree in particular catches my attention.  It is the red oak (Quercus rubra) growing in the circle of lawn near the C.K. Patrick Garden. There is no better specimen in Northeast Ohio.  From a sturdy buttress of exposed roots, it bends skyward on a massive, branchless trunk.  The bark is steely and segmented like armor plate.  At about 45 feet above the turf, it abruptly sends out three thick limbs, and then a few feet higher, several more. They proceed to radiate upward, divide and sub-divide in patterns repeating the stronger patterns beneath them, and end in pencil-twigs and rocket-buds, 70 feet aloft; a crown that offers royalty to the surrounding grove. 

Red oaks are perhaps the most common deciduous tree in our local upland woods.  But familiarity does not breed contempt.  Their numbers provide endless variation to the red oak theme.  For instance, the bowed trunk that our sample displays is a tendency throughout the species — like a gentle conceit — that is fun to notice.  Sometimes, it is rakish and exaggerated on that odd individual daring to grow out over the brink of a local ravine.  Couple this trait to the elbowed, muscled, sinewy limbs, and the red oak becomes so distinctive that a spotter can identify a red oak against the far horizon. 

Oaks as a group number over 700 species, and circumnavigate the North Temperate Zone. They are then split into the red and white oak tribes. Ours is in the red tribe, which means that its leaves have pointed, minutely-bristled lobes instead of rounded lobes; and that its acorns take two growing seasons to mature on the branch instead of just one.

Red oak acorns look like velvety “heads” sporting jaunty berets. They fall to the ground in October, immediately germinate and issue carmine-red tap roots, pause for the winter, then resume business next spring.  This was a good year for acorns (every several is a cyclical “mast” year), and it was like walking on garden marbles for awhile there. But today, most of ours are reduced to husks heaped at the base of the trunk, complements of hungry fox squirrels. 

Please don’t surrender these days to the television.  Look up through our Garden and witness the beauty and strength of the red oak revealed, as it stands against Cleveland’s dramatic winter sky. Too soon it will be April, and so many leaves attendant.

Posted Mark Bir

Last time, I wrote a little bit about Joe Lamp’l’s book the Green Gardener’s Guide: Simple, Significant Actions to Protect & Perserve Our Planet.  Let’s finish up, shall we? The chapter that really got my attention is Chapter 7: Gardening to Protect the Ecosystem. Now here, I thought, Lamp’l could start to lose the casual gardener. This has potential to get preachy maybe, or so scientific as to turn people off. Nope. He very easily explains our garden food webs and their importance.  He also explains why monocultures are bad, why heirloom plants are good, why you shouldn’t use bug zappers, and a whole lot more.

I often see lists on websites or in magazines about what gardeners should or shouldn’t do to protect the environment. What is lacking in most of those is the background information as to why something is either good or bad for the planet. And that is why I give high marks to this book; the easy way he explains why you should avoid invasive non-native plants (they are one of the biggest threats to biodiversity in the US), and the reasons why you should leave dead trees standing (they provide homes for native wildlife, among others).

Do yourself or a loved one a favor: Come to our Sustainability Symposium, hear Joe speak, get a copy of this book, and read it. You will be glad you did.

And just keep counting down the days ’til spring…

"What frightful trouble you have taken about Vanilla; you really must not take an atom more; for the orchids are more play than real work"    

-Charles Darwin in letter to colleague William Hooker   

  As I am preparing for this year’s Orchid Mania exhibit  opening February 27, I wanted to share some history of one very interesting and perhaps most economically important orchid species, Vanilla planifolia. The vanilla orchid is peculiar because it grows like a vine. The fermented seedpods are the source of the flavoring vanillin.

        Vanilla and chocolate have a long history together and have been together long before the invention of ice cream.  One of the earliest record of the use of the vanilla bean dates back as far early 1400’s when vanilla beans along with cacao seeds, from which chocolate is derived, were part of tributes paid by the Totonacs and other Central American tribes to the Aztecs. The Aztecs, Mayans, and other Central American natives used vanilla almost exclusively to flavor and perfume a popular beverage prepared from cacao seeds. 

      In the early 1500’s, vanilla, along with its chocolate beverage, was introduced in Europe and became popular among the wealthy. It wasn’t until 1602 that Hugh Morgan, pharmacist to Queen Elizabeth I, suggested that vanilla could have other uses besides being a flavoring for chocolate. In 1789, Thomas Jefferson, then the U.S. ambassador to France, brought Vanilla to the U.S. from Paris along with a recipe for vanilla ice cream. His hand written recipe can be found in the Library of Congress.

          Many attempts were made to grow vanilla outside of Central America in the first three centuries after its discovery, but the orchids never bore fruit. In 1838, Charles Morren discovered that only bees of the genus Eulaema pollinated the flowers, and they could not survive outside of Mexico. Three years later a suitable method of hand pollination was discovered that allowed vanilla production to spread across the globe. In 1858, vanillin was isolated opening the way for the creation of artificial vanilla.

 Posted by Nate Tschaenn

When I started working as a professional gardener, people would ask me to identify trees in their yard. Needless to say, I shrugged my shoulders a lot, especially in the winter. Since then, I have learned a bit from my gardening colleagues, from books and from on-line resources. I’ve found that if you know what to look for, you can usually figure it out.

Buds, for instance, have a lot of varying characteristics that will help ID a tree. For starters, how are they arranged on the branch?  If they are opposite each other, that helps narrow it down to a handful of likely candidates here in northern Ohio. Maple, ash, buckeye, dogwood and lilac have opposite bud arrangements on their branches.

Posted by Bob Rensel

Even in the darkest days of winter - especially in the darkest days of winter- there are orchids to be found in the Eleanor Armstrong Smith Glasshouse. The past few weeks saw the annual flowering of the "Darwin Orchid," Angraecum sesquipedale (left). This immense white orchid is a native of Madgascar.

This week and for weeks to come, more and more orchids will be opening their buds in the Costa Rican biome.

This substantial Brazilian species, Oncidium ampliatum (right) , has branched flower spikes more than 2 feet long. A single plant can produce more than a hundred bright yellow flowers. 

Many of the most popular domesticated orchids bloom during the gloomy winter months - one reason why the Orchid Mania 2010 is always such a spectacular and

welcome event.

I promised last time to highlight this book by Joe Lamp’l, our keynote for our upcoming Sustainability Symposium, and I really enjoyed this read. Its best quality: he boils some complex scientific topics down to easy-to-understand levels.  I found so much in here to share that I’m splitting this entry into 2 parts, so please enjoy.

 Part I:

In the chapter on Reducing Garden Chemicals is a very useful section on “…the unintended effect of de-icers in winter.” Useful, because well, we live in Cleveland and we use lots of de-icers. And we should if we don’t want people or pets slipping and falling. But there are many different products out there that can damage plants and soils in various ways. One product he does recommend as a salt-free de-icer is SafePaw™. Good to know!

I am also intrigued by chapter four: Landscaping to Control Runoff.  In the section, “plant trees and shrubs to control erosion” there is a nice little list of helpful trees and shrubs you can use for this purpose including spicebush, serviceberry and larch.  The thinking is that the tree canopy of these plants slows down the rain velocity, stores water on their leaves for a short period of time, and the roots help uptake water from the soil to prevent excessive runoff. In “plant a rain garden” there is once again a helpful list of plants to use in such a plot.  Joe-pye (one of my faves), swamp milkweed (another fave), and Jack-in-the-pulpit make this list. Stay tuned for chapter 7 highlights next time: Gardening to Protect the Ecosystem!

Posted by Renata Brown

A Garden BHAG

Gardening is centered on managing resources and working with the land one possess. Cleveland Botanical Garden believes zero waste is an important means of stewarding our gift of land. Responsible use of money makes a lot of sense to all because it hits home quickest, yet irresponsible use of water, air and earth creates a resource strain felt deeper than an empty wallet . . .just not now. Much can be said and has been written on this point so I will not thump the table too hard here. One other point, though, most do not think about is American waste disposal methods defy what other natural systems suggest. Individuals in natural systems like woodlands or coastal tidal zones create little waste. Their by-products are consumed in some other individuals activiity. Extracting resources, using energy to put in usable form and then burying it, sealed to never be used again makes no sense.

So what are doing to move toward eliminating our dumpsters? It is simple in concept and a tremendous challenge in practice. Everything we need to know in order to zero our waste, we learned in kindergarten. The Garden is following the four R’s: re-use, reduce, recycle and re-think. We are re-thinking our exhibits and horticultural practices to see if we need to purchase or use certain materials. We are, and have been, reusing materials from one exhibit to the next, and we are recycling our organic waste (as compost). We recently instituted a organizational wide staff composting collection system and all the materials from our roof reconstruction was re-used and recycled.

Sustainability is about starting where you are and being a better steward today. Cleveland Botanical Garden seeks progress in ways that are small and large. Most ideas staff implement are simple and quick and further our financial and mission bottom-lines. What are you doing?

Is a garden better than any other designed space? Horticulture therapists can explain the healing powers of plants and landscape architects can describe the therapeutic attributes of a well-designed green space.

But wait a minute. Won’t a feng shui designer help you achieve that same tranquility and balance in your living room? And a home organizing consultant can relieve the agitation of a cluttered basement or the chaos of a hopeless closet in disarray. Why should a garden space be considered more beneficial than any other well-designed space? After all, there have been many snowy nights lately during which I find peace in my favorite stuffed chair in front of the fireplace. Add a good book and a glass of wine to that scenario and one might think it’s the perfect stress-free environment in which to recuperate from a hectic day. How could this setting be any more calming and therapeutic?

Well, let’s see. It would be nicer if there were fragrant lemon tree blossoms next to my chair and a hedge of lavender and rosemary for me to brush up against when I moved around. The calm generated from these aromas could be enhanced with a beautiful sunset or interesting cloud formations moving across the sky. But I can’t see those from my living room. And while it is peaceful in front of my crackling fireplace, I kind of like the sounds and sights of wildlife. Bird song can be very tranquil and the simplicity of hummingbirds, blue jays and squirrels are entertaining distractions in our complicated lives. While I like the colors in my living room, they aren’t as dynamic as those that unfold in the garden. Chocolate heucheras, stained glass coleus and bold sunflowers just begin to describe the changing palette manifested in the garden. The ceiling fan can move some air, but it’s just not quite the same as a gentle garden breeze rustling the ornamental grasses. Just thinking about fresh air makes me want to breathe deeper.

Everybody’s different and one person’s paradise might not be as ideal for someone else.  But research shows that gardens generally lower stress levels, improve memory and alertness and promote healing and self esteem.  That’s why I prefer the back yard patio chair when the weather is more accommodating.  Until then, the stuffed chair in the living room will have to do.  Where’s that latest seed catalog?

                Ants are like the mercenaries of the plant world. If given a reward, they will fight to protect plants from grazing animals and insect pests. On the other hand, if the price is right, ants can also be found aiding the sap-sucking insects that feed on plants. With their great numbers and impressive strength given their size, they are certainly a formidable army. So what does it take to have an army of ants on your side? 

                 Well, if you were a plant, one of the best things you could do to bribe a colony of ants into protecting you is to provide them with a home. Many plants have specialized structures called "domatia" in which certain species of ants form colonies. These can be hollowed-out structures like stems, petioles, or spines or cavities and chambers in swollen roots and caudices. As anyone who has ever accidently stepped on a fire ant nest can tell you, ants will aggressively protect their homes.

This ant plant, Hydnophytum, has been cut open to show the chambers used by some species of ants as a nest. photograph © Alex Wild 2004	Cross section of a hollow acacia thorn. photograph © Alex Wild 2007	Cross section of cecropia branch show ants nesting in the hollow internodes.  photograph © Alex Wild 2007

                  Another method that plants use to attract ant guardians is supplying them with food. There are many different examples of plants that provide ants with nectar in extrafloral nectaries. Extrafloral nectaries are special glands that produce nectar outside of flowers. Providing ants with their own nectar source also has the benefit of keeping them out of the flowers so that they do not interfere with pollination. In addition to nectar, some plants even produce specialized food bodies that ants can collect and store in their nests.  

Extra floral nectary on the leaf of an inga tree. photograph © Alex Wild 2007	Ants collecting protein rich food bodies from an acacia tree. photograph © Alex Wild 2007	Food bodies produced a cecropia tree at the bass of the leaves.   photograph © Alex Wild 2007

            Of course, with upwards of 10,000 different ant species, not all of them are plant friendly. There are many ant species that  harm plants by aiding the sap-sucking insect enemies of plants. The insects have something ants want that is just waste to them, literally. Ants actually eat the sugary substance known as "honeydew" that is excreted from a variety of sap-sucking insects. In what is often referred to as "farming," ants will protect their insect livestock, overwinter them in their underground nests, move and position them around a plant, and even "milk" some types of insects by coaxing them into producing honeydew. Unfortunately, we see more of these enemy ants in greenhouses. It can be a real problem trying to control pests with beneficial insects because they will protect their livestock from insect predators.

Posted by Nate Tschaenn