I’ve Given Up On Getting Ahead…

It’s true.

It’s sad, but true. After 20 years of trying to get ahead, I had an epiphany this week. I actually said to myself, “What if I simply strive to catch up?”

The thought is indeed a novelty.

For me, 2010 has been a weird weather year. As if forty-nine inches of snow in Baltimore wasn’t hard enough to handle, we’re now in a pickle of a drought and it’s just passed mid June.

Everything is blooming two weeks early and that means I have been traveling like a mad woman to see everything I need to see before my journey to The Netherlands to see this year’s crop of new plants.

I know I promised you thoughtful answers and a revolutionary solution that would save the nursery industry, but hard as I try, I just don’t have time to put pen to paper to express those very important thoughts. Not this week and I didn’t get much of a chance to breathe last week either.

I was on the road most of last week.

My journeys took me to West Virginia and back (insert banjo playing the theme from Deliverance here…).

Boy, is it beautiful down there, but don’t count on using your cell phone to call for exact directions to visit my friend Barry Glick of Sunshine Farm and Gardens in Renick. That is, unless you call 3 hours before…cause there’s NO cell service there, so you’ll be driving up and down and up and down and up and down the mountains to find one service bar.

Thank goodness the mini is great on gas. Too bad my friend Becky, who accompanied me, was overtaken by carsickness. Or was she?

Was this merely a ploy to get to drive the mountain switchbacks with the top down? I guess I’ll believe she really was sick…

We seriously had to use longitude and latitude coordinates to find Barry Glick’s place – and this isn’t the first time I’ve been there. It’s easily seven miles from any major road and many more from a cell tower.

I knew Sasquatch (or a man with a long beard and an axe) was jumping down from the mountain, onto the very thin pass we were traversing by the light of the moon and stars, at any moment.

Did I say how lovely it was?

We saw a mountain of Hellebores and so many cool things. We also learned that being so far from civilization, Barry has no choice, but be prepared, so he shops – for everything – in bulk. Barry gave me a Telekia speciosa (tall Oxeye Daisy), a plant I’ve been searching for since I saw it in the Bonn Botanic Garden in Germany.

Here’s Becky and Barry and the mini (top down of course) and Barry’s brood of loving pups.

Becky and I spent the night in a lovely bed and breakfast called the Great Oak. It’s a lovely place run by a lovely couple in the quaint little town of Lewisburg, West Virginia.

The next morning we traveled even further west to Hinton, WV to visit Enchanter’s Gardens and Peter Heuss. This wonderful, humorous man knows more about native plants – local to WV – than anyone I’ve ever met.

Did you know West Virginia has one of the most diverse, untouched collections of native plants on the East Coast?

Peter knows them all and is growing many of them in his mountain valley nursery. Here’s Peter with some of his new selections.

Peter grows a lot of plants from seed, so he finds all sorts of little treasures. He and I are working on some fancy new coneflowers and a stellar new Lobelia cardinalis (Cardinal flower) seedling that may very well take your breath away. Peter also specializes in drought tolerant plants because there are so many rocky slopes in his neck of the woods.

Anyone need drought tolerant plants? Na, really?

So, two days in West Virginia, then I had to be back home for my son’s lacrosse camp.

The next day, I took a day trip just south of DC to visit a new breeder, originally from South Africa, who is a brilliant man. Alan is working on hydrangeas and hibiscus and many, many other things. He has his own tissue culture lab on the top of his house and he’s quite possibly one of the most organized breeders I’ve ever met.

It was a great trip and I promise we’ll have some fantastic new selections to introduce in the next few years.

So back to fixing the nursery industry…

I received so many comments from last week’s e-letter entitled, The Nursery Business Is In A Mess. I never expected so many heartfelt, thought provoking replies. It really got me thinking.

I talked to a lot of my industry friends this past week too, trying to come up with an easy solution. We all decided there isn’t one, but we want to be on the team that comes up with the plan.

It’s exciting. Really! I embrace change and I know the solution will involve a lot of change – change that may be painful for some, but necessary for survival.

I have some really great ideas, so while I’m away these next ten days, I’ll put pen to paper and we can discuss this more when I return in July.

Until then, here’s a Summer Solstice video update of the trial gardens. See what’s in bloom and what’s doing well. There’s new coneflowers in bloom – imagine that!

While in The Netherlands this week, I’ll be rooting for Holland in the World Cup and wearing lots of orange so I fit in. I travel to Germany after that…will I root for the Germans?

It’s a hard choice for me. I have so many good friends in both countries. I do know I’ll be voting for Portugal and Christiano Ronaldo… just because. Have you seen the June issue of Vanity Fair?

My book club was ogling it last week. He’s lovely. Perhaps a tad bit overpaid, but lovely nonetheless.

Please do a rain dance for Baltimore and Happy Weeding.

Until next time…

Angela Treadwell-Palmer
President, Plants Nouveau