savage garden

It’s that time of year again, when  Million Bells (Calibrachoa ) are being started in the greenhouse.   This post will discuss common insect and disease pests, such as aphids, thrips and black root rot and viruses. Stay tuned for an upcoming post about production tips and tricks for this popular spring favourite. Disease Issues: Anyone who’s grown million bells knows they are  highly susceptible to   Black Root Rot  ( Thielaviopsis ) – I’ve seen this take out a good chunk of a crop, especially in crops that are grown mainly on the floor or on landscape cloth, where resting spores of this disease can hide . Symptoms include: Stunting of foliage and roots Plants in a tray will have uneven heights Black areas on roots Yellowing of leaves Yellowed plant growth (yellow circle) and dead plugs (orange circle) on a plug tray of Callibrachoa from black root rot. Prevention  is worth a pound of cure with this disease, as it is  diffic...

And now we come to the Garden in a City stumpery. When I started writing the first post about stumps , this was only a gleam in my eye, as they say. I’ve been fretting for several years about the two large trees in the back garden. They provide a wonderful dappled sunlight throughout the day, around which the character of the back garden has been built. The overall theme is meant to be green and white, but who could resist a few wild geraniums, and I don’t know when that yellow corydalis was added, but it is very happy. So green, white, lavender and yellow. Both were planted when the house was built, in 1940, and are exactly the kind of fast-growing but short-lived (for a tree) trees favored by contractors. Anchoring a small bed to the back right of the yard is a silver maple, which has long since lost to its shape due to trimming of dead branches. I love that Bowman’s root! You can’t see it here, but in the photo above there is a large goatsbeard. There’s another dwarf variety b...

Here at long last is the next post on stumperies. The second stumpery I saw this past summer is known as the Renaissance Garden, and is part of Heronswood Garden on the Kitsap Peninsula of Washington State. I saw it the day after the stumpery in my last post , as a part of the 2024 Garden Fling (formerly Garden Bloggers Fling) in July. I still can’t entirely explain why these stumps, logs, mosses and ferns make my heart go pitapat, but they do. The Kitsap peninsula was extensively logged during most of the past century, and this stumpery is called the Renaissance Garden because it represents the reclaiming of the forest and the land. My friend Pat Webster, of Glen Villa Art Garden in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, suggests that, “To be truly memorable, a garden needs to grow out of an idea. It needs to mean something.” This garden certainly fulfills that mission. Let me back up and tell you about Heronswood , to put it into some context. Heronswood was launched when Dan Hin...

For those of you relying on chemical control for aphids in spring crops, some of you might have observed that Beleaf (Aria in the U.S.) has not been working as well recently, especially in green peach aphid ( Myzus persicae ). This post will fill you in on what we know about potential resistance to flonicamid in aphids, and which chemicals are working. Is Resistance to Beleaf/Aria a Thing? Green peach aphid. Photo by OMAFA. Beleaf has long been relied on as the main control for aphids in greenhouse crops in Canada and the EU, given it’s relatively “soft” nature on natural enemies. However, overuse of a single active ingredient often leads to resistance . Resistance to flonicamid in melon/cotton aphid ( Aphis gossypii ) has already been reported 16 separate times, in both the U.S. and Asia, according to the Arthropod Pesticide Resistance Database (run by Michigan State University and the Insecticide Resistance Action Committee (IRAC)). Resistance in this aphid species was...