Mr PGC's Blog » eBooks

A Rookies Guide to Designing Beds and Borders

mrpgc — Wed, 24 Sep 2014 05:39:02 +0000

Welcome to the wonderful world of ornamental plants. In this eBook, we will try to help you begin to understand the process of arranging these plants for their best effects in your home landscape. As the title implies, this is aimed at the “Rookie” or novice gardener who wants to understand the basics of the landscape design process.

Anyone who visits a landscape garden can form an opinion about what they like or dislike about it. This eBook will teach you concepts and terminology so you can describe WHY you find a garden or grouping of plants either pleasing or not so pleasing. That way, you can reproduce the “good” and avoid the “bad” in your own beds and borders.

Whether you decide to design your own landscape or have someone else do it for you, a thorough grounding in a few basic concepts will put you well ahead of the general gardening public. Plus, it will help you to have some fun along the way.

This guide will describe a “typical” design process that might be followed while developing home landscape beds and borders. Obviously, each project will present unique situations and challenges, but there are several basic steps that are common to all projects.

Learn How to Develop a Baseline Map and Landscape Inventory as Part of Your Design

We have divided these steps into the following chapters:

Introduction to Beds and Borders
Chapter 1 – Early Planning Decisions
Chapter 2 – Preparing a Baseline Map
Chapter 3 – Making a Landscape Inventory
Chapter 4 – The Functions of Plants in the Landscape
Chapter 5 – Choosing a Garden Style
Chapter 6 – The Art and Science of Garden Design
Chapter 7 – Design Criteria
Chapter 8 – Color Combinations for Beds and Borders
Chapter 9 – Unifying the Landscape Design
Chapter 10 – Beds and Borders as Theater

The “A Rookie’s Guide to…” eBook series is designed to provide the hobbyist gardener with helpful, practical tips for success in the home landscape. Each one will concentrate on the major issues, gardening techniques and horticultural knowledge needed to help you avoid common pitfalls. Every eBook is filled with illustrations, pictures and hyperlinks to our PlantsGalore.Com and HostHelper.Com websites to help you expand your knowledge on the topic.

The information provided is based on university generated research and over 40 years of practical gardening experience by the author, Ralph Heiden aka Mr PGC. He has an MS degree in ornamental horticulture and has taught horticulture and gardening classes and seminars to thousands of homeowners, hobbyists, hostaphiles and Master Gardeners over the past 3 decades. He is also an avid photographer with a very large collection of plant and garden images from the U.S., Canada, Western Europe and Great Britain.

Tissue Culture and Hostas

mrpgc — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 18:11:29 +0000

The big question that has circulated around the hosta world since the beginning of tissue culture (TC) is, “Are tissue cultured hostas as good as those divided from a plant growing in the ground?” The answer is a resounding, YES! Just like taking a knife and cutting a part of a hosta crown off to make a division, TC plants are exactly the same as the mother plant.

I think some of the confusion comes from a couple of factors. First, in their effort to make a quicker return on their investment, some nurseries sell tiny, little TC plants in two inch pots. Of course, it may take a year or two for these to grow to the size of a single division taken directly from a mature mother plant. But, they will eventually catch up.

If for example, both plants came from an H. ‘Sum and Substance‘ mother plant, they should both eventually grow to the same mature size given similar growing conditions. It may take the under-sized TC plant a little longer because it started as a smaller plant. If the TC plant is grown to a larger, more typical, size at the nursery before it is offered for sale, there should be little or no difference between it and a similar size hand-made division. When both plants are grown under similar light, fertilizer, water and other conditions, they will be virtually identical when they reach mature clump size.

Another point of confusion may come from the fact that there seem to be a lot of sports produced during TC. Sports are “spontaneous” changes in the morphology i.e. external traits of a plant. These kinds of changes tend to happen to hostas more than most genera of plants. Whether in the wild populations, in gardens or nurseries, it is quite common to find otherwise solid colored hostas suddenly developing a set of variegated leaves. Or, for variegated plants to “revert” back to the solid base color.

If the new characteristics of the sport are unique or “outstanding”, this changed division may be separated from the mother plant and grown on. Providing that the changed foliage color “stabilizes” over a period of years, the plant may be introduced as a new, named cultivar. The process of finding these changed plants in the garden or nursery is called “sport fishing”.

Finding new cultivars from sports in a random garden is fairly unusual. After all, even the largest of all hosta gardens such as those at Wade and Gatton Nursery in Belleville, Ohio will have “only” about 3,000 different cultivars of hosta. The average hosta enthusiast may have 300 to 500 cultivars in his or her garden. Therefore, the odds of finding an outstanding new sport are rather slim.

In larger tissue culture labs, the number of worthy sports that are discovered is usually way, way above average. There are basically two reasons for this to occur.

One factor is that part of the tissue culture process is to expose the developing plantlets to a type of naturally occurring plant hormone called a cytokinin. In nature, cytokinins are involved in the development of new buds and in hostas, this includes those buds that produce new sets of leaves from the crown. This is a totally natural process, however, in the TC lab, it is pushed at an accelerated rate. So, the TC plants are producing many, many, many more buds in a relatively short time as compared to their counterparts growing in the garden.

The other factor in TC is that, over a period of 6 to 12 months, literally tens of thousands of an individual cultivar may be produced. So, in a greenhouse situation, there may be say, 10,000 H. ‘June’ growing side by side. How many gardens would a sport fisher have to visit to see this many of one cultivar?

Given the exposure to the plant hormones that stimulate buds and the creation of huge numbers of the same cultivar in a short time and space and you can see that the possibilities for finding outstanding new sports is pretty high. No wonder people such as Hans Hansen and Clarence (C.H.) Falstad who work at major TC labs have registered many outstanding new cultivars of hosta in the past couple of decades.

In the end, the key thing to remember is that all the “non-sports” that come out of the TC lab should be perfectly fine and just exactly like the mother plant cultivar. Quality control at the lab and greenhouse should separate the sports (good and bad) from those that are shipped to the ultimate consumer…the home gardener.

Want to learn more about hostas, the Number 1 selling genus of perennial plants? Well, we are in the process of writing several eBooks about hostas, their care and use in the home landscape. These are part of our “A Rookie’s Guide to…” series of landscape gardening ebooks.

The first in the collection, A Rookie’s Guide to Hostas, Hostas, Hostas, is now available in .PDF and .ePUB formats at Lulu.com. For more on this and our other ebooks…give us a click.

A Rookies Guide to Installing Beds and Borders

mrpgc — Wed, 23 Oct 2013 05:06:08 +0000

Landscape design is both an “Art” and a “Science”. The Art part deals with factors that influence how the human eye will perceive the elements in your garden. It is the subjective side of the design process based on how “most people” will respond to the way you arrange the softscape (living things, primarily plants) and hardscape (non-living elements) in your beds and borders. This process was discussed in detail in the first eBook in this series, “A Rookie’s Guide to Designing Beds and Borders“

For purposes of this eBook we will assume that you have gone through a planning process and have either designed or have had someone else design your new beds and borders. You should have either meticulous drawings or at least a rough sketch of your new landscape on hand. This should, of course, include a detailed list of plants and hardscape features that will be included in your new or revised landscape.

This eBook deals primarily with the “Science” part of landscape design. It will address the objective fact that we are dealing with plants that we must keep alive in order to achieve and maintain our subjective design intent. To assure success, we need to analyze the growing environment, select our plants properly, install them with care and give them proper maintenance over the long run.

This guide includes a “typical” process that you might follow while installing landscape beds and borders. Obviously, each project will present unique situations and challenges, but there are several basic steps that are common to all projects. We have divided these into the following chapters:

Chapter 1 – Dealing with Existing Landscape Features
Chapter 2 – Your Landscape Inventory
Chapter 3 – Problem Plant Species
Chapter 4 – Managing Project Costs
Chapter 5 – Pre-Construction Activities
Chapter 6 – Beginning Construction
Chapter 7 – Installing Hardscape Feature
Chapter 8 – Preparing the Soil
Chapter 9 – Selecting and Purchasing the Plants
Chapter 10 – Installing the Plants
Chapter 11 – Post-Planting Care