Hort Shorts

If you have traveled down south, you have probably encountered kudzu along the way. This non-native aggressive vine grows up and over anything in its way and just keeps growing and growing and growing. Think of it as the Energizer Bunny in plant form! 

It is on your calendar? Are your "celebration" plans in place? For what you may ask.  Next week, February 26 - March 2, 2018 is the National Invasive Species Awareness Week.

Hemlock woolly adelgid, Adelges tsugae, is an invasive insect in eastern North America. It feeds on Canadian Hemlock, Tsuga Canadensis. The insect was discovered last summer feeding on a mature stand of Hemlocks on Little Mountain on a property located on the grounds of Holden Arboretum. Although it is uncertain how the adelgid got there, it is thought that it arrived on birds migrating north. Because of the discovery, both counties have been quarantined. Canadian Hemlocks grown in nurseries located in Lake and/or Geauga County, Ohio will have special requirements and restrictions on movement...

This is a great time of the year to slow down, sit down, and contemplate answers to big questions. Like, what do honeylocusts and pronghorns have in common? Why do Osage orange trees, Kentucky coffeetrees, and avocado trees have such large seed packages? In all cases, what we see now was shaped by animals that no longer exist; they are extinct.

Scouting for scale in the Winter is great use of your time. 

Scale comes in many shapes, sizes and varieties. Last year we saw Oyster Shell, Calico, Juniper, Greedy, Bamboo, Fletcher, Japanese maple, Pine Needle, Brown, Putnam, Euonymus and Magnolia Scale.

Scale is sometimes hard to see when a plant is in full foliage. But in the winter with no leaves on trees and shrubs, except evergreen, scale are easier to see.

Scouting scale in the winter makes sense because there is less to care for outside in the landscape. The following pictures are Scale images on the...

This tree has been around a little while in the Snyder Park Gardens and Arboretum.  In fact, it's one of my favorite trees.  It's such a popular tree in this garden that we even decided to move the location of a sidewalk while developing our master landscape design in order to preserve this tree.  However, now that it has revealed its identity, I am not sure what we will do.

 

Yes, this particular tree is a ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) and it's a girl.  We had no idea.  For at least the last three years while we have been hanging out at this site, creating a landscape...

In a recent bygl-alert (https://bygl.osu.edu/node/944) I posed this challenge: More wicked (sometimes) plants this way shall come, culminating with Halloween, bygl alert-style. What are your candidates for the ultimate in plant wickedness? E-mail me at chatfield.1@osu.edu.

 

Or at least spookiness of some sort. Here are a few of your responses:

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While writing my bygl-alert on Aesculus parviflora yesterday afternoon, Joe Boggs was sending me photos: his latest bottlebrush buckeye beauties. I opened the message, and above and below are those images.

 

Glorious fall! 

 

 

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My, oh my, buckeyes, oh my, the weekend beckons, but for now, let us praise Aesculus parviflora. “No better plant could be recommended as a lawn shrub”, according to W.J. Bean, as quoted in Michael Dirr’s Manual of Woody Landscape Plants. “Bottlebrush buckeye, is my favorite shrub” from an unnamed source in Holden Arboretum’s Plant Profiles, probably Brian Parsons.

 

 

  I concur. Palmately compound leaves with 5-7 leaflets, lovely in spring, summer and fall. Multi-stemmed...

Fall color is beginning in northeast Ohio. Although the Sugar Maples have not reached peak fall color, other plants including Sassafras, Sourwood, Black Tupelo, Staghorn Sumac, Burning Bush, and Dogwood have exploded in fall color.