THE DESERT NORTHWEST [blog]

Fellow Heroes of Horticulture,

It’s a spectacular summer and this weekend comes our summer open house! As usual the details and directions are posted on our web site.

Hey, we’re actually having a real summer this year, and by the end of it, you are certain to be tired of watering, if you aren’t already. It’s time to start planning NOW to make your garden more drought resistant with plants that are easy to grow and don’t need a lot of water! Yeah, I know, I am probably preaching to the choir.

It doesn’t look like I will get a chance to update the web list before this weekend (here and here), so allow me to highlight some of the more exciting plants we have that are available for purchase and look great now! However, the web list is very nearly still up to date – we haven’t sold out of much in the last two months. I probably need to add a few things to the list soon, which may explain why some of the plants I am about to tempt you with are not listed on the web site.

Our New Zealand and Chilean plant sections are looking particularly good this summer, in terms of both selection and quality! Plants from both regions are very well adapted here, since central Chile and New Zealand are at approximately the same latitude as we are, and with a strongly maritime climate similar to ours. Central Chile even has a summer dry period like ours, while New Zealand plants are frequently adapted to gritty soils and tough enough to take our summer drought without any help once established, or nearly so, depending on the soil/site. In any case, New Zealand plants are perfect for Northwest gardens that are close to salt water.

Among the best New Zealand plants for Northwest gardens are the Olearias. These daisy shrubs are fun and easy to grow and many of them reward the gardener with showy white flowers, which are fragrant on some species (notably O. x haastii) and may appear in late summer when little else in blooming (O. x haastii and O. avicennifolia). We have many of these to choose from now, in a variety of sizes from 4” on up to 5 gallon for O. macrodonta and O. avicennifolia. Other Olearias in our selection occur the huge-growing O. traversiorum, fine-textured O. lineata and O. solandri, and well-behaved grey-leafed shrubs O. x mollis and O. moschata – lots of options!

The fragrant Olearia x haastii putting on a show in late July.

Olearia macrodonta, a spring bloomer, with Phormiums.

Olearia x mollis putting on a show in a planting bed with Phormium and others.

Olearia avicennifolia blooming in August!

Check out this cool picture. That’s Hymenanthera crassifolia, which we don’t have our own image of yet. Evergreen and drought tolerant, with LOADS of shiny purple fruit, it’s pretty great! This is one of those plants that no one ever buys because they don’t know what it does. But now you have no excuse. We also have H. alpina, which has narrower leaves.

Some New Zealand plants have strongly divaricate juvenile foliage, thought to be an adaptation to prevent grazing by moas, which is pretty fun. Corokia cotoneaster is the well-known example, but we also have the much larger-growing Aristotelia fruticosa available now, and a hardy form of Leptospermum scoparium, the New Zealand Tea Tree (which isn’t strictly divaricate, but has similarly tiny, tough leaves).

Divaricate growth habit of Corokia cotoneaster.

Leptospermum scoparium, the source of tea tree oil.

Everyone seems to have forgotten about Hebes (technically Veronicas) for some reason – perhaps because too many of the tender varieties were marketed and then wiped out in recent cold winters, and now people are afraid to try all of them. Yet, as the discriminating gardener will note, the numerous hardy species that remain are still excellent garden plants, requiring little care and always looking great. Try Hebe ‘Blue Mist’, with conspicuous blue flowers; ‘Quicksilver’, which has tiny silvery leaves, or ‘Western Hills’, a nice mounding shrub with greyish foliage and white flowers.

And I’ll just mention a couple other New Zealand odds and ends. Astelias are very cool – like silvery Phormiums, and they are hardy in the Northwest (except frost pockets) once established if they are provided really good drainage: a scree garden is ideal. We now offer the spectacular A. chathamica and the red-tinted A. nervosa ‘Westland’. Podocarpus totara ‘Aurea’ is a small coniferous tree with foliage that is bright gold in full sun. Also we now have, for the first time in years, Carmichaelia australis, one of the elusive New Zealand ‘tree brooms’; though this one is more of a shrub, at least it is hardy!

Astelia chathamica looking fine, and this picture was taken after a hard freeze.

Podocarpus totara ‘Aurea’

Let’s take a look at a few exciting Chilean plants. We seem to have a whole lot of Azaras right now. These plants are wonderful evergreen shrubs or small trees with flowers that are either showy, fragrant, or both. They are moderately drought-resistant and don’t mind being in either sun or partial shade. Our current selection includes, in a variety of sizes, A. microphylla, A. microphylla ‘Variegata’, A. dentata, A. aff. uruguayensis, A. lanceolata, A. petiolaris, and A. serrata – more than you will find anywhere, probably! (I’m not sure how that happened.)

Azara lanceolata blooming in April in Seattle. I bet you never knew Azara could be this showy – it looks like an Acacia!

Luma and Eucryphia continue to look great with a good selection to choose from. These are evergreen large shrubs or small trees with showy white flowers, which again are very easy to grow, unfussy, and moderately tolerant of dry conditions once established. We have L. apiculata and E. nymanensis ‘Nymansay’ in about any size you could want, but also a good stock of L. chequen, and a selected hardy form of L. apiculata, as well as Eucryphia x intermedia and the rather rare, small-leafed E. x hybrida.

Eucryphia x nymansensis blooming prolifically in August in Bremerton. Bees love the flowers!

In the ‘odds and ends’ department, Aristotelia chilensis is looking great. This very vigorous and easy shrub produces tasty edible fruit that is attractive to birds. Gunnera magellanica is a cute little groundcover with glossy green leaves suitable for a moderately moist spot in the garden. And if cute things aren’t your cup of tea, Dasyphyllum diacanthoides is a giant tree-sized daisy relative that gets 60′ tall and has spiny leaves.

Finally, Chile has a number of exciting conifers, like the rare Fitzroya cupressoides (Patagonian cypress), which we have in plenty in 1 gallon pots. Prumnopitys andina and Podocarpus salignus are two beautiful Chilean conifers in the Podocarpaceae family with a soft texture and very graceful habit of growth; also available now in a variety of sizes.

Beautiful new weeping foliage on Podocarpus salignus. I think I just posted this a couple months ago on my blog, but hey, it’s such a great plant that one more time won’t hurt!

And as long as we’re talking conifers, I’ll mention a few hard-to-find Northwest natives we have in stock now. Cupressus bakeri (Modoc Cypress) is a very special native tree from the Siskyous that does great here in a dry spot. Juniperus maritima is a very special native of the ‘Salish Sea’ area that is rarely available. We also have Cupressus pygmaea from Northern California, and a local collection of Taxus brevifolia (Pacific Yew). Hurry and buy them all so I don’t have to put them on the web site – ha ha.

Well if you have read this far, your level of plant-geekiness is certainly sufficient to make a visit to the Desert Northwest this weekend, or any time really, a rewarding trip. Learning from last year, we have tried to schedule the summer open house for a weekend when not much else is going on in Sequim. The weather promises to cool off just enough not to be blasting hot in our greenhouses – so it ought to be perfect. Thanks for reading and we hope to see you soon!

Ian & Co.
The Desert Northwest
PO Box 3475
Sequim, WA 98382
mail@desertnorthwest.com
http://www.desertnorthwest.com