January 2006

What a short, strange trip it’s been. Winter 2005/06 is barely more than a month old and it has already shown us the extremes of a Kentucky winter. December was unseasonably cold; a shocking change from two years previous when we cut the last rose out of the Cappiello garden on Christmas Eve! January has thrown us a more welcome curveball with such warmth that my home garden has more varieties of plants blooming than I enjoyed last August! Three different witchhazels (Hamamelis mollis ‘Earlybright’ opened full on January 2), half a dozen hellebores (Helleborus ‘Blue Lady Strain’, ‘Red Lady Strain’, ‘Royal Heritage’ H. foetidus . . .), winter aconite (Eranthis hyemalis) and snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) have ignored their shadows and decided to make a show a tad early.

This is all a far cry from my January trip to speak at the Connecticut Nursery and Landscape Association winter conference. Having received a new blanket of 6-8” of snow the day before I arrived, and seeing a high temperature of 24 degrees, I was reminded how nice it can be to spend winter in Kentucky. Of course, we all know we will pay for the warm weather some time later this year; could be in February or maybe July!

January also brought the first ever Mid-States Horticultural Expo, held in Louisville just after the first of the year. The MSHE was put on by the Southern Nursery Association and resulted from the combination of the former separate shows that had been run by the Kentucky and Tennessee associations. The combined show was a great success with hundreds of vendor booths, much outstanding plant material and a great crowd. This show is sure to grow substantially in future years.

The MSHE brought some nice plant offerings that have rarely been seen at industry shows in Kentucky. Don Shadow of Winchester, Tenn., was showing plants of Rohdea japonica, a choice evergreen member of the lily family that makes an outstanding container or limited groundcover plant for our region. Rohdea has also been selected as a Theodore Klein Plant Award winner for 2006. We hope to have some available at Yew Dell’s April 29-30 plant sale. Tennessee’s Gum Tree Farm was offering Fothergilla gardenii ‘Harold Epstein’, one of the most dwarf and select cultivars of this excellent North American native shrub. The selection was named for Harold Epstein, in his day, one of the most accomplished plantsmen in the U.S. Cornus florida ‘Appalachian Spring’, the only flowering dogwood selected for dogwood anthracnose resistance, was in prominent attendance at several vendor booths. All three are plants worth looking for this year. So travel was a bit limited in December and January. I tell myself that this arrangement should give me plenty of time to get through all those mail-order catalogs in time to place my orders. Wouldn’t it be nice if that was true. The pile next to my bed is still getting taller rather than shorter. On second thought, I can just buy my plants at the Yew Dell plant sale this year!