Pssst….
We’re so happy to have you here on Substack and glad you subscribed for all the juicy show notes below; but also subscribing to The Garden Mixer on your favorite podcast player helps us get the word out to others.
Here are links to help that happen. You’ll have to click a couple times. Literally two.
For other players like YouTubeMusic, you can right click and copy this link to the RSS feed and add it to your player.
____________________________________
Welcome to Episode #8
This week the girls mix inappropriate metaphors with vague certainties, and come up with yet another episode to amuse and inform their eight listeners.
Without an ounce of humility, Leslie jumps out of the gate with nonsense about a distillery (possibly illegal) where she condenses her vast garden experience into enviable, crystal-clear drops of purity…and assumes Marianne does likewise.
Marianne reminds her that they are both just old — however not too old to enjoy a long, luscious, beautiful, lingering, sensuous, gratifying, fully-satisfying-smoke-a-cigarette spring. Let’s hope they both get one soon.
Clear-Up Corner
In Clear-Up Corner this week, Leslie challenges Marianne on her categorization of a Mid-Atantic climate last episode, leading Marianne to successfully prove that the only ‘extreme’ going on in Virginia, is her bias.
Nancy Goodwin and her love affair with snowdrops in Hillsborough, North Carolina are discussed in greater depth after a mention last episode. Goodwin’s garden Montrose is a pilgrimage for gardeners getting started with snowdrops to see what can come of very humble beginnings - a small package of Southern States snowdrops to be precise.
The Montrose website has really taken off in recent years, and offers sumptuous, seasonal photos of excellent plants that make the winter worthwhile. Highly recommend by Marianne for a peek, and if you’re in the area, a pre-arranged visit - see the website for more info.
The book of letters between the late Allen Lacy (columnist for the Wall Street Journal) and Nancy Goodwin is A Year in Our Gardens. Also highly recommended by Marianne.
Discussing Nancy Goodwin and her snowdrops leads to more talk of snowdrop aficionado and plantsman David Culp and his books The Layered Garden & A Year At Brandywine Cottage - as well as his brilliant term “Temperennial”.
The girls not only mis-define the term as a short-lived perennial (it’s a tender perennial) but then fully compound the error to talk about various short-lived perennials in their lives.
Gaura lindheimeri is first on Leslie’s list followed by Alchemilla mollis (lady’s mantle for those who know what a mantle is), but Marianne saves her ire for the genus Echinacea, whose 6,456,675 cultivars are on a quest to beat Heuchera in the Melt-Out sweepstakes.
Mt. Cuba has done a terrific trial on Echinacea for the Mid-Atlantic region you can find here. Marianne does have some favorites - the Sombrero series and E. magnus because it seeds itself where it wants to be.
MANTS (Mid-Atlantic Nursery and Trade Show)
At the beginning of January, Marianne got her nerd on, and visited MANTS (Mid-Atlantic Nursery and Trade Show) with many of her industry colleagues and friends.
MANTS is considered the “Masterpiece of Trade Shows” (Marianne could not remember that tagline during the podcast). If you’re on the East Coast or Midwest, this 3 day event held over the first full week in January at the Baltimore Convention Center is where your nursery peeps go to see what’s new, who’s selling it, and how much they want for it. It’s a great place to showcase a new product to the industry and a must-go event for many people in retail or wholesale horticulture.
Leslie feigns indifference to this topic as truthfully she is jealous. Two years ago she had a blast wandering the floor with Marianne as a wide-eyed neophyte, and later, interviewing her and Scott Beuerlein over a gin and tonic at the Lord Baltimore Hotel. They grabbed some fake hotel topiary and called it “Between Two Boxwoods”
Boxwood
What Leslie IS interested in however is blight resistant boxwood. And luckily, the three main contenders in that race for new genetics were at MANTS and gave Marianne all the print catalogs and brochures her nerdy little librarian heart could ask for.
For more information on these new brands, see the links:
NewGen Boxwood from Saunders Bros.
Little Missy/Little Mister from LittlePlantsLLC
Boxwood blight is not the only thing worrying Leslie and Marianne though. The devastating boxwood tree moth — which was identified in New York two years ago after causing destruction all over Europe — hangs over their heads after a recent trip to the UK in May showed them just how bad it can get.
Note that boxwood tree moth is not the same as boxwood leaf miner, which may weaken a plant, but rarely kills it.
The girls go back and forth on species, but do manage to agree on two things:
1) Boxwood may smell like cat spray to some people, but these two gardeners inhale deeply and think ‘GARDEN’; and,
2) Variegated box (Buxus sempervirens ‘Aureovariegata’) is a fantastic shrub with a great habit, an ability to brighten shade gardens, and is remarkably drought tolerant. Let’s hope Marianne doesn’t lose all of hers to blight in the next few years.
Don’t Panic. Observe.
Egged on by some recent Instagram drama, Leslie and Marianne talk about the thing that freaks out gardeners almost every year, creates small talk at parties, and populates Reddit convos: the early blooming of….[insert interchangeable spring bloomer].
It’s happened again this year with a few flowering trees, and Marianne has thoughts about human beings’ need to create drama and worry instead of promoting observation and adaptive practices/planting. One of the few benefits of getting older is figuring this out. Leslie agrees.
During the convo however, it comes out that Marianne did a terrible, horrible, very bad, not good thing, for which she is not even remotely sorry.
She justifies her wickedness by outing very good gardeners and garden writers that have done the same thing while telling others not to - thus leaving home gardeners confused and without good options.
You’ll just have to listen to find out what she’s talking about.
Who needs plants when you’ve got birds
Marianne almost lights another cigarette after discussing her newish bird table (of one year) and the joy it gives her on a daily basis - particularly in the winter.
Leslie is convinced, but lazy, and scatters seed on her wall sans table OR feeder. Marianne threatens to send her a Stokes Eastern Birds ID book when she can’t name any of her visitors, but has a sneaking suspicion it will become coffee table fodder.
Share this post