 | | Above, on Friday morning as I came out of my office I heard a tapping noise in the garden near the street. I thought perhaps it was ‘Charlie’ the deer on one of her visits, but it wasn’t. It turned out to be a pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus) on the lower trunk of our large poplar tree. The photo below is a great planting of colchicums (Colchicum autumnale) in Campbell River, B.C. Author photos. |  |  In the e-mail inbox this week was a note from Jamie Hauyon who said: “I enjoy your Saturday morning show on AM 740. It's very interesting and informative. Keep up the good work! Can I have your suggestions on the following: I'd like to wrap a vine plant around a very old 4' wooden fence in my backyard. I'd like to do this in order to strengthen this old and weak fence, plus to improve the appearance. What type of vine plant is most suitable for this purpose?”
That’s one of the more interesting questions I’ve had! It’s interesting because Jamie is looking for a vine to support and cover a fence, when most folks are looking for a vine to cover an already supported fence.
Now Jamie, like many correspondents, didn’t tell me from whence he was writing, and all I know is that he’s in the AM740 listening audience area, but that is quite a vast region of central Ontario. Knowing that leads me to suggest he might consider a wisteria vine or two (likely the Chinese type--Wisteria sinensis). Wisterias are ultra strong-growing vines, and should never be grown against flimsy wood such as the thin trellis often used on decks and at the top of wooden fences. The strong growing larger branches will twist weak supports out of shape in just a few years. But, depending on the type of support his old fence has, wisterias might be just the answer.
I cannot think of too many other vines that could be depended upon to do the same. He might also take a look at trumpet vine (Campsis radicans), American bittersweet (Celastrus scandens), Dutchman’s pipe (Aristolochia durior) and maybe a honeysuckle (Lonicera) such as ‘Dropmore Scarlet’ or ‘Goldflame’. That’s about it.
Of course, another route to go would be to take almost any medium-growing shrub and plant one in front of each post. Mock orange, Spiraea, smoketree, Hancock coralberry, Weigela or Viburnum would be just a few possibilities.
Whatever Jamie decides to do, I should remind him, and thousands of other gardeners, right now and for the next month, is an excellent time to get this type of planting done, while the soil is still relatively warm. I certainly wouldn’t wait for next spring. And, the prices will be better now at most nurseries and garden centres.
Back in the late 90s, I worked with the Genesis organic compost people. It was an excellent product and one that most folks who bought it swore by, and came back for more. Then Tom Vasko, the local sales manager, was fired by a changed Corner Brook, Newfoundland management (the product came from Corner Brook) and everything was different. Distribution was moved to the Nu-Gro folk in Brantford, Ontario. Last year that arrangement ended and Nu-Gro have replaced the compost product with their own Premium Compost in the Green Earth line of organics. They’re generally available in garden centres. I did try to find the status of the Genesis line but my calls were not returned, or in the case of the Newfoundland operation, the number was no longer in service.
When I visited the Can-West horticultural trade show on September 17th, I met up with an old friend in the hard goods end of this business--Ed Ashmore who is now with a company called International Compost Ltd. out of Calgary. They manufacture both organic fertilizers and organic compost and in fact, some of their products are already available in Ontario at a few garden centres. Their brand name is Ground Keepers Pride and you can find them on the web at www.groundkeeperspride.com. This is another line that shows great promise, and judging by the demand for at least the organic compost products that I’ve been involved with in the past, Ground Keepers Pride could well become almost an household name for gardeners in Ontario over the next few years.
The last week in August this year saw a meeting of botanists in Uppsala, Sweden to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus publication of Species Plantarum which indexed and named, with two Latin names each, just under 6,000 species of plants. According to Helen Pearson in the August 29th issue of Nature magazine, before Linnaeus’ book, folks described living things in lengthy paragraphs and various dialects with little consistency. "Just about everything under the Sun was used," says Tod Stuessy of the University of Vienna, Austria, who led one of the Uppsala sessions.
“In Species Plantarum, Linnaeus proposed that plants be christened first by the general group in which they fall, called a genus--such as pine or Pinus--followed by a unique species name, such as strobus. Two-word names had been used before, but Linnaeus is credited with their widespread introduction and standardization, partly because he collated, in the same tome, some 5,900 different plant species labelled in this way.
“Ever since, the binomial system has helped scientists to classify and study the natural world. ‘It stuck with us over the years,’ says Gerry Moore of Brooklyn Botanic Garden, New York.
Five years later, “Linnaeus' 1758 book Systema Naturae extended two-part titles to animals--hence our own double-barrelled moniker, Homo sapiens.
“Although Linnaeus' naming system in Species Plantarum was robust, his plant catalogue was not. Up to 420,000 different plant species may be growing on Earth, of which [only] perhaps 80% have been found and named even now.
“In the past few years, several ambitious projects have sprung up to try and complete this species inventory. Their organizers hope that such catalogues can help to identify regions of the greatest biodiversity on Earth, and hence those on which to focus conservation efforts.
“One such endeavour is called Species 2000. Part of a larger initiative called the Catalogue of Life, it aims to link different species databases into a unified network by 2011. ‘If Linnaeus were alive he'd be very happy,’ says team member Yuri Roskov of the University of Reading, UK.
“But producing such a comprehensive catalogue is a gargantuan problem because many plants have been identified and christened independently more than once. For example, the Index Kewensis, a species record held at Britain's Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, near London, lists more than a million Linnaean titles. And plants are going extinct before botanists can record their existence. Uppsala delegates agreed that they need an umbrella organization to unite these disparate efforts. ‘The challenge is how to coordinate this,’ says Tod Stuessy.
“Although most botanists remain diehard fans of Linnaean nomenclature, the system does throw up a problem. When new research shifts a species from one group into another, it has to swap names to reflect its new position. Tomato, for example, can go under both Solanum lycopersicum and Lycopersicon esculentum. Because of such problems, a renegade band of scientists wants to ditch Linnaeus' names for a system called the PhyloCode, which names organisms according to their evolutionary relationships. Linnaeus' scheme places organisms in groups based on shared characteristics that do not necessarily reflect their position on the evolutionary tree.
“PhyloCode's advocates will gather in Paris in summer 2004 to thrash out the details and decide whether to approve its use. Meanwhile, Linnaean traditionalists fret that a new system will cause even more confusion.” |
by Art Drysdale
