Hannah collecting Gaura biennis in Pennsylvania in 2006....Flowers on a plant in Fern Valley we grew from the seeds August 2008

Hannah, Joan, and I (Fern Valley Staff in 2006) went on a seed collecting trip around State College, Pennsylvania in the fall of that year. We spent two days in the Bear Meadows Sedge Bog, and another day collecting in various places nearby. We brought back seeds from a variety of plants including Larch, Verbena hastata, Leatherleaf, Blueberries, Phlox paniculata, this biennial Gaura, and a few others. The Verbena and the Phlox have been or are flowering in the collection already. This morning, just returned from Florida and on my pre-work circuit of the Arboretum, I noticed that the Gaura had begun to flower. It is always good to find another plant that blooms later in the season!

The flowers are attractive, mildly fragrant, and much like those of the common perennial, Gaura lindheimeri. The plant itself is a bit loose and quite tall. It would be most appropriate in the garden in less formal settings and p;ossibly growing out of and overtopping earlier perennials. They could help support the ~6' stems. When we collected the plant the flowers were distinctly pink and these barely so. Various things can affect flower color the likeliest is that the flowers age to pink. Theses have just opened. We shall see.

Big big Container Plants

Coincidence is an interesting concept; I had just been thinking about the feasibility of obtaining large magnolias for a customer on Capitol Hill, and the next day, on the way to the Florida Scrub Jay Trail, there it is, Cherry Hill Tree Farm. Thousands of flowering Crape Myrtles among their other plants. The last 10 years or so that I was at Behnkes, we bought large container plants from Cherry Hill: Magnolias, Hollies, and Crape Myrtles. Their smallest trees are 15 gallons and they go on up through 35, 45, 65, 100 up to, get this, 670 gallon! live oaks. These people do containers right.

I knew they were in Florida, but had never thought about their exact location that turns out to be about 20 miles from the Wildwood Garden. The scale of the nursery is as epic as the size of their containers, it stretches on for at least a mile and a half mile and the trees extend off the road into the distance. Didn't stop, but it seems as neat and well attended as I had anticipated. Their material is always clean, well pruned, and generally in good shape. They are a wholesale nursery so their material has to pass through a retail nursery, but they have great stuff.