Here's a peek at a few local gardening happenings and tips to get your gardening season started off right:
2006 Great Plant Picks
Nursery shopping can be more fraught than fun when gardeners are faced with so many pretty plants. Which will thrive and which are potential troublemakers? Impossible to tell when they're corralled in pots and looking their blooming best.
Do yourself a favor and look for the "Great Plant Pick" signs scattered around nurseries, which designate plants chosen by a panel of expert horticulturists as ideal for our climate.
All Great Plant Pick choices must be "vigorous and easy to grow by a gardener of average means and experience." This means we can trust the program, directed by the Miller Botanical Garden, to avoid the most fussy, delicate and expensive plants, which require coddling or specialized knowledge to grow well.
Every plant on the list is hardy in USDA zones 7 and 8 (that's us), long-lived, reasonably disease- and pest-resistant, has a long season (and preferably multiple seasons) of interest and is readily available in nurseries.
New GPP picks this year include nine outstanding roses, such as the semidouble white Rosa 'Seagull' and the delicate peach R. 'Ghislaine de Feligonde.' Five new trilliums, long-blooming Abelia 'Edward Goucher' and purple moor grass are just a few of this year's 45 plants new to the program.
Learn about all the Great Plant Picks at www.greatplantpicks.org, where you'll find plant lists, descriptions, photos and cultivation information.
The Web site has a new search function, so you can put in key words such as "blue flowers" or "soggy soil" and come up with the best plants for specific situations. Call the Miller Garden at 206-362-8612 if you have questions about the program.
Gardening with Cass
Cass Turnbull is an inspired and dedicated pruner who founded the local organization PlantAmnesty, which is dedicated to saving trees from destructive pruning. You know those hideously topped and stunted trees you see around town? There'd be many more of them if it weren't for Turnbull's crusade to educate us on how to prune properly.
To take the mystery out of pruning, pick up the newly revised "Cass Turnbull's Guide to Pruning" (Second edition, Sasquatch Books, $19.95).
Turnbull's knowledgeable voice and detailed instructions walk you through step-by-step techniques to improve both the looks and health of plants from groundcovers to fruit trees. Simple line drawings illustrate her points, and the book reassures that all gardeners can take care of their own gardens with this volume and a pair of pruning shears in hand. Maintenance is the dark underbelly of gardening, but Turnbull tackles it, along with renovation and design, in her recently reissued manual "Landscape Design, Renovation and Maintenance: A Practical Handbook for the Home Landscape Gardener" (available exclusively through PlantAmnesty at www.plantamnesty.org or by calling 206-783-9813).
You'll find the "dos and don'ts" of tasks from weeding to planting to installing irrigation, all explained in Turnbull's lively style.
New Mini Coneflower
Coneflowers (Echinacea species) bloom for many weeks in summer and attract birds and butterflies. But up until now, they've grown too large for containers and smaller gardens.
New this spring from Chicago Botanic Garden is a downsized mini-coneflower called 'Pixie Meadowbrite," ideal for small-space gardening. The pixie is bright pink, spreads into a 2-foot clump and grows a mere 18" tall.
It is drought-tolerant and hardy and will be available at nurseries and garden centers later this spring. Like other coneflowers, the compact version does best in well-drained soil and full sun.
Valerie Easton also answers questions in Wednesday's Plant Talk in Northwest Life. Send questions to P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111 or planttalk@seattletimes.com. Sorry, no personal replies.
