first published December 21, 2006

There are two immutable Laws of Christmas. The first is “Thou shall eat way too much food and feel guilty about doing so.” The second is “Thou must choose nothing but evergreens for Christmas trees and every one of those Christmas trees must be cone shaped.” Well, you can chalk up the first law to the good old opportunity-makes-the-criminal theory. But what about the second one?—why is it that we never hack down a birch, decorate it and call it a Christmas tree?

When I thought about the question, the evergreen versus birch part of the equation seemed pretty straightforward: a tree with dense, green foliage is more symbolic of life and birth than is a leafless, deciduous tree—even if it is just dormant and not dead. Simply put, a birch just doesn’t capture the Christmas spirit. Although the connection between green, supple needles and birth/life made a lot of sense to me, I wondered if the morphology of evergreens had anything to do with their appeal. Was there, in fact, a canonical explanation for their conical shape?

Seasonal Sleuthing
My hypothesis was that conical-shaped evergreens pointed to a higher power, God, if you will, and that was the predominant reason why pine, fir and spruce were the ‘chosen ones’ for adorning our homes at Christmas. Well, I was partially correct. When I did some research on the Internet, I found an article that explained that the ‘triangular’ shape (the author was better at theology than geometry) symbolized the Holy Trinity: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Whether the explanation was apocryphal or not, it made perfect sense to me. People like symmetry and order, and coniferous evergreens accommodate those desires rather nicely. But if it weren’t for plant physiology, evergreens would not likely have been chosen as the “it trees” for the world of plant theology.

Shaped for a Reason
The reason that evergreens grow in such a nice, conical, geometric, pattern is due to a plant hormone called auxin. Auxin (from the Greek auxein, meaning to increase) is found in virtually every plant in the world. Without it, plants would have no direction—literally—they need auxin to ‘find’ sunlight and to grow in a direction that will maximize their exposure to that energy source. If you’ve ever seen your houseplants leaning toward a window or wondered why cut gladioli stems bend upward after having spent a few hours laying on the kitchen counter, it can be explained by auxin.

Auxin is at its highest concentration in the growing tips of plants, and it moves downward as required to optimize the orientation of plant leaves toward the sun. What this means is that a greater concentration of auxin accumulates on the dark side of a stem, causing the plant cells to enlarge. These enlarged cells push the plant stems in the opposite direction, forcing the leaves to face the sun. While certain concentrations of auxin stimulate cell growth, a high concentration inhibits it. When it comes to evergreens, the highest concentrations of auxin exist at the tops of the trees and gradually diminish the farther you move toward the bottom of the trunk. Since high concentrations mean greater inhibition of growth, evergreens taper from the top down.

So there you have it. Science and hormones comfortably united with theology, at Christmas, beneath the fragrant boughs of the Christmas tree.

Hit & Misses: Poinsettia sales and amaryllis flops
Bug of the Week: Ground beetles
In the News: Oakville saves an oak

It’s that time of year again when our social calendars fill with events that give us a chance to meet new people and to make many first impressions. I’ve often called myself a nerd of the garden variety, and if you’re reading this, perhaps you consider yourself one, too. I say we spiff up our images with a new name. If you love to vegetable garden but feel that you play second fiddle to those who grow more prestigious plants like orchids, you can rise up in a social circle by saying that you are an olericulturist. Granted, olericulture is just the scientific name for the cultivation of vegetables, but it sure has an academic ring to it. I can’t guarantee that it will raise your social status in the long term, but it will cause a raised eyebrow or two for the duration of those holiday dinner parties!

Hits & Misses
Hits: Going, Going, Gone
It seems we will be sold out of poinsettias by Christmas Eve. I think that when a crop sells out, it’s tempting to give yourself a pat on the back for choosing the best varieties, providing the best growing environment and having great staff that make it happen. While it’s wonderful to be in that situation, the crucial ingredient in a formula for retail success is always customers who understand the difference between the poor quality plants offered in the discount stores and the high quality poinsettias grown by garden centres. The bottom line is that if our customers didn’t have a discerning eye for quality, we couldn’t keep doing what we do.

So thank you for having that discerning eye. The gardening world would be a much poorer place without people who appreciate great plants.

Misses: It’s All In The Timing
With their huge blooms, amaryllis are beautiful, striking plants that are also easy to grow in our homes. But the challenge we face at the greenhouse is getting them to bloom at just the right time to match the desires of our customers. The crop must be timed so that the blooms are on the verge of opening in late November to mid December. This year, we had a long cold snap, so many of our beautiful amaryllis ended up opening to a small, albeit appreciative, audience made up mostly of our staff—the customers were snuggled up at home. This now means that some plants are simply too far advanced to sell. The whole timing thing can drive a grower insane. As the saying goes: Time is a great teacher, unfortunately it kills all of its students.

Bug of the Week
Escargot for Beetles?
I saw a lone ground beetle walking across the floor of our storage building the other day. Obviously, his internal clock is a little out of whack because these beetles hibernate for the winter. Ground beetles are rather large, black, hyperactive beetles that are great friends of gardeners. They dine on many of the ‘bad’ garden bugs and have also acquired a taste for one of the biggest pests in our gardens: slugs. So when you see ground beetles scurrying about in your garden this spring, don’t be so quick to give them the boot; think of them more like foot soldiers, tirelessly patrolling our yards for pests that eat our precious plants.

In the News
Save an Oak
A recent national news item about a tree showed just how revered trees are in our society. In Oakville, Ontario, a 200-year-old white oak was to be cut down to make room for a road upgrade. The cost to preserve the tree by moving traffic around it was tagged at well over $300,000 so it was decided that the oak was destined to become lumber. That was until the citizens of Oakville rallied and donated money to save the venerable tree. At last count, the money raised to save the oak was close to $300,000. As a result, the tree has been granted a stay of execution.

Jim’s Notebook is taking a break and will return on January 11, 2007. Until then, Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year from all of us at Hole’s.

First published December 14th, 2006

Beauty is a hard thing to define, yet we all think we know it when we see it. When it comes to poinsettias, I instantly know which varieties I think are beautiful and which ones I think are victims of breeders-gone-wild syndrome. I remember sitting in the audience at a poinsettia conference a few years ago listening to a breeder present his latest poinsettia variety that he (for lack of a better name) called ‘Curly.’ In my opinion, it was reminiscent of a crumpled up piece of red tissue paper. When he solicited votes about who liked Curly and who didn’t, I was one of three members (from an audience of about 200 growers) who voted against it. I felt like a heretic who was about to be burned at the stake. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and, apparently, I was blind.

Critical I
Plant breeders are always looking for the next great poinsettia variety but, not surprisingly, a fair bit of market research shows that the majority of us are quite consistent in what we deem to be a beautiful poinsettia and what we categorize as an ugly duckling.

It’s easy to visualize a poinsettia as a set of building blocks that, if put together properly, will become a beautiful plant. Of course, there will always be those people who have very esoteric tastes and will love poinsettia varieties that look like they were designed by a flower child, but there’s nothing wrong with that, either—diversity is the spice of life. However, it doesn’t take a lot of research to confirm that a two-leaved, Charlie Brown-type poinsettia is not the plant of choice for Christmas. Year in and year out, a consistent theme determines what kind of poinsettias we like.

Take it from the top
Starting with the top of the poinsettia, bright-red, non-faded bracts are highly desirable. I think of it as the Santa Clause effect. We’ve grown up with powerful red colours for Christmas, and it’s not a trend that shows any signs of fading. Also, bigger bracts are preferable to smaller ones, which, to me, simply means we just want more to love. When we look lower down on the plant, it’s dark-green leaves that we want to see. Perhaps the dark-green leaves punch out and enrich the red bract colour, or maybe the dark-green foliage is just our way of confirming that a poinsettia is healthy.

The physical stature of the plant is also a key component in the whole beauty formula. It is not the absolute size that determines beauty, although larger plants grab our eyes far more easily than do small plants, but big is equated with a bigger bang for the buck. But don’t confuse big with stretched. Stretched plants have too much “see through.” We want leaves rather than stems to dominate the plant but don’t like wide ‘internodes’ (the stems between the leaves). In fact, if the internode space throughout the canopy is greater than 2 to 4 centimetres, we deem the architecture to be rather lanky and ugly, regardless of the bract and leaf quality. Fortunately, stretching is a physical trait over which growers have a lot of control, but it takes a good eye and a lot of work to achieve just the right proportions.

As you might guess, anyone can grow a poor quality poinsettia, but the vast majority of us have enough of an innate sense of beauty not to be fooled into buying one. I would estimate that there are at least a couple of hundred poinsettia varieties in the world today, which means we have a lot of latitude in selecting the right quality and type of poinsettia to match our needs. So this holiday season, when you are choosing a poinsettia, take some time to scrutinize it for its colour and architecture. Because, clearly, when it comes to poinsettias, beauty isn’t skin deep—it’s just the place to start.

I won’t even raise an eyebrow if you choose Curly.

People don’t always think before they give a plant as a gift. Jim gives a few pointers on what you need to consider when giving gifts to ensure the new owners enjoy success with their plants.
Quicktime
WMV

Hits & Misses: Big poinsettias for bigger homes and jumbo flops
Question of the Week: Isn’t frozen just frozen?
Timelines: Lilies arrive
Science & Technology: Garlic Mustard

It’s nice to see that the human hibernation that occurred in November (thanks to the cold snowy weather) is over… at least for the time being. The best laid plans for the Christmas season will always come to a grinding halt with the first heavy dump of snow and a frigid Arctic front as its companion. The only good thing about a deep freeze is that when the temperatures “soar” to the freezing mark, it feels like a heat wave.

Hits & Misses
Hits: Grabbing Attention
Bigger poinsettias have really captured the imaginations of our customers this year. We have always grown extra-large poinsettias in 15 cm pots and, while that size still remains the number-one seller, the 20 cm pots have really grown in popularity. I don’t know if the ‘super-sized ‘ poinsettias are in high demand because people own bigger houses and have the room for larger plants, but there is no doubt that these huge poinsettias create a WOW factor on the sales floor.

Misses: Bow Wow
Speaking of WOW, this year I decided to experiment with some jumbo-sized poinsettias. The poinsettias in their large pots stand about 1.5 m tall and have a mass of foliage. That’s the good news. The bracts, on the other hand, fell short of expectations, remaining small and really lacking in colour. I’m blaming the unspectacular display on the lack of sunlight in October and November. So the WOW factor in this case is more like BOW WOW (as in, it’s a dog!). Whenever I screw up with one of my “brilliant” ideas, the staff always say (sarcastically, of course), “That’s okay, Jim. It will look really nice in YOUR house!”

Question of the Week
What difference does it make if a plant is exposed to –20˚C or 0˚C? Isn’t frozen just frozen?

I received a call from a customer who was wondering why some plants would be injured at temperatures lower than freezing. To her frozen was just frozen. In other words, if plants are damaged by freezing, how much difference could it make to the plant if the temperature plunges well below freezing or just a little? The answer is: a lot of difference. For the science geeks out there, cold is not a scientific term because it can’t be quantified. When we talk about an object being cold, we are really talking about how much heat an object has. Everything contains some amount of heat no matter how ‘cold’ it seems to be. In fact, an object would have to get down to –273˚C (absolute zero) before it essentially had no heat. Now, if you apply that to plants, you’ll discover that one at 0˚C is quite a bit warmer than one at –20˚C. While plants that are indigenous to cold-winter climates have their own antifreeze-like chemicals to prevent cell damage, they still can take only so much cold. Even a lot of the toughest of plants have a lower limit of about –40˚C before they succumb to the cold…or rather, the lack of heat!

Timelines
Easter Elves?
Yes, I know that Christmas has yet to arrive and that most of our staff is busy with poinsettia and giftware sales, but the Easter lily bulbs have arrived, nonetheless, and have to be potted up this week. That is just the way it is in the greenhouse business. Plants have yet to yield to our human schedules; invariably, we are forced to yield to theirs. If all goes well, we will have the Easter lilies ready for sale a couple of weeks before Easter, which falls on April 8th, 2007.

Easter Lily bulbs

Science & Technology
Garlic Mustard
Garlic mustard is a very invasive European weed that is causing concern because of how quickly it has advanced through forests in the Eastern U.S. and Eastern Canada. It hasn’t found its way to the Prairies yet—hopefully it never will—but it is a rather interesting plant. Garlic mustard gains its competitive advantage by attacking the friends of its enemies, so to speak. Most plants on our planet develop symbiotic relationships with soil fungi that enable both plants and fungi to flourish. Garlic mustard secretes chemicals (yet to be determined) that kill the symbiotic fungi of other plants. The indigenous forest plants are then weakened, allowing the garlic mustard to out compete them.

First published December 7, 2006

Houseplants have always been a struggle for me—a physical one, in the purest sense. But like most people’s, my desire to grow houseplants has more to do with enthusiasm than sensibility—evidence of which was ample a few years ago when I decided that a gigantic pot of canna lilies would make the perfect, if not completely impractical, addition to my home.

The lilies looked spectacular at the greenhouse. The more I envisioned them in my foyer, the more I needed to have them. The more I needed to have them, the more possible getting them home seemed. The plastic pot that contained the cannas was filled with lightweight soil, yet the combined weight of the plant, soil and pot was remarkably heavy—about 136 kg (300lb). Thankfully, dollies and forklifts made getting the massive assembly into a van and to my house easy. The situation upon arrival was another story.

Now, I don’t have a run-of-the-mill house. In fact, it’s been referred to (lovingly) as a sugar cube with skylights, but it’s these skylights that allow me to grow plants. No, the challenge wasn’t getting the cannas to grow in my home. The challenge was getting the cannas into my home.

California roll
For some reason, the previous homeowners built with the California look in mind. The result was a 13-flight, concrete staircase that begins at the sunken driveway and ends at the landing. Now, I wasn’t crazy enough to think I could get the pot up those stairs, but I did sell myself on an alternate path. Instead of having to navigate 13 concrete steps, all I had to do was make my way up a not-too-steep slope. Drastically different terrain, same endpoint.

Quite satisfied with both myself and my luck, I slid the giant canna onto my wheeler and gently rolled it down the ramp of the van. Oh, did I mention it was the middle of November? Now seems like a good time to.

So it’s November, and I’m slipping and sliding (giant canna in tow) up the ice-covered walkway to my front door. The entire ordeal left my upper body drenched in sweat and my lower body—primarily my rear end—drenched with snow, a souvenir from the numerous times I fell. When I arrived at the small concrete ridge separating the walkway on the left from the 13 stairs on my right, I put the grip of death on the pot and eased it over the bump. But because I was due for a life lesson, the pot rolled off the wheeler, bounced down each of the 13 stairs and ploughed into my garage door.

Try, try again
I swore the entire walk down to the driveway. As angry as I was, I was grateful that neither the pot nor the canna was damaged. So, like a trooper, I slid the pot onto the wheeler and repeated the move—same slippery slope, same sweat, same wet rear end. The only difference was that this time I knew what could happen. So this time, when I got to the tricky spot, I planted my feet, pulled the pot as tight to the wheeler as humanly possibly and eased the rig over the bump. You’d think that would have done it; yeah, me too, so you can imagine how funny I didn’t find it when the pot bounced back down the stairs. As the canna meteored downward, the pot separated from the soil mass, I suppose much like a booster rocket drops off the space shuttle. The pot, it hit the concrete wall; the huge mass of soil, my car.

Disbelief? Anger? Stupidity?—you pick, but one of them had me at the base of the stairs, muscling soil back into the pot and giving it one last go. This time I used my body as a shield to stop the canna from rolling into the abyss. And, this time, it worked!

As I triumphantly threw open the front door and flashed a crazed smile at my startled wife, I prepared to wheel my prize into the house. It really was too bad that the pot was wider than the door.

Happy indoor gardening!

Hits & Misses: Christmas Cacti and Hot & Bothered Poinsettias
Question of the Week: Is It Difficult To Force Bulbs?
Timelines: Move those Plants!
Science & Technology: Education Can Be Entertaining

I heard some sad news this week. Ken Girard, avid horticulturist from the University of Calgary, died this past weekend. For many years, Ken and I alternated on the weekly CBC Radio gardening phone-in segment. His knowledge and enthusiasm for horticulture will be sorely missed. Ken was passionate about orchids and he had a massive collection of some outstanding species. His family has decided to divide the collection and give his precious orchids to selected individuals and organizations that will nurture and appreciate them as he did. It is a wonderful tribute to a man who gave so much to the world of horticulture.

Hits & Misses
Hits: Christmas Cacti
The Christmas cacti (Schlumberga x buckleyi) are in full bloom now and putting on a spectacular display. Christmas cactus are a great choice if you have a spot in your home that is a cool and bright. Customers at the greenhouse are snapping them up, partly, I believe, because they offer something a little different from the usual Christmas arrangements. I often get the question about how to get them to rebloom. There isn’t a magical fertilizer or some other elixir that is necessary to persuade them to flower again. After a resting phase, provide Christmas cacti with adequate daylight and cool night temperatures (12˚C) for a few weeks or, conversely, a few weeks of cool nights of uninterrupted darkness (greater than about 13 hours). Under either set of conditions, these plants will set blooms once again.

Misses: Big and Not So Bold
You can’t have your cake and eat it too. The ultimate size of poinsettia bracts is determined by temperature; the warmer the greenhouse temperature (up to a certain point) the larger the bracts. But if you run the temperatures too high, bracts tend to fade, so instead of having rich, intensely coloured bracts you end up with large, faded bracts. Every year, we have a few poinsettias that get placed too near to the heat pipes and the bracts are, invariably, big but slightly faded. ‘Hot’ poinsettias are equivalent to your favourite red shirt that has seen the inside of your washing machine a few too many times; you still love it but it looks best when the ambient light is a little low.

Question of the Week
Is It Difficult To Force Bulbs?
One of the marvels of bulbs is that they contain everything a new plant needs to grow and many bulbs are ideal for forcing—that is, stimulating them to bloom indoors. Bulbs can be forced in a growing medium of soil or in water. Paperwhites, amaryllis and hyacinths are the most popular bulbs for forcing in water. Here’s the method:

1. Purchase pre-chilled bulbs and a forcing vase (any vase with a neck narrow enough to support the bulb over water will do).
2. Fill the vase with water and place the bulb in the vase. Be sure the base of the bulb is close to the water level but not touching the water.
3. Place the vase in a cool but sunny spot and wait for flowers to appear. Be patient: blooming times vary, and flowers take at least a couple of weeks to appear. You should see roots start to develop in just a few days, a signal that the bulb is actively growing.
4. Keep the water level in the vase consistent: the water should never be higher than just up to the base of the bulb.

Timelines
Santa’s Elves Have Nothing On Us!
Poinsettia season is in full swing and the staff is working at a frenetic pace to get all the orders out. It takes a big team to handle all the orders we receive: enthusiastic call centre personnel and cashiers, dedicated production staff and a fleet of intrepid drivers and “swampers” to deliver. Our greenhouse grows 56 varieties of poinsettias (that translates to 90,000 litres of specialty soil mix + 45,000 poinsettias=25, 000 pots to sell). It’s no wonder we all look forward to our Christmas break!

Science & Technology
Education Can Be Entertaining
I happened to tune into the television show Mythbusters the other day. The affable hosts were trying to determine if a piece of straw could be driven through a palm tree under tornado-force winds, and in a second experiment, to determine if plants have…well, feelings. Launching a straw at 300 mph against a large palm tree’s trunk failed to confirm the first myth. (In fact the straw managed to penetrate the bark only a fraction of an inch.)

As for the second myth, hooking up a polygraph machine and an EKG to the leaves of a draecena and then swatting the plants failed to evoke much of a measurable emotional reaction. Even while being blasted with a fire extinguisher, the draecena remained stoic and didn’t cause a blip on either of the machines. There was one point in the experiment where the draecena did seem to react to the abuse, which caused a few raised eyebrows, but the crew dismissed the findings as human error. However, if I was one of the Mythbusters, I wouldn’t be so quick to write plants off as ‘emotionless sunlight harvesters.’ Obviously they have never seen Little Shop of Horrors…

Every year Hole’s donates flowers to the community of Parkallen that the kindergarden kids plant in the spring and then return to in the fall, when they are in Grade 1, to see how their garden fared and to tidy up.

The final touches are being applied as I type and by Friday it will be off to the printers. Look for it in early January with such features as “Rock and Roll Plants” by Bob Stadnyk and “Guerilla Gardening” by Penny Cholmondeley. Spring is in the air!

first published November 30th

One evening this past summer, as I sat on my deck sipping wine and watching the bees wander from flower to flower, a thought came to mind: were the mating games played by plants really that different than the ones played by humans? As I scanned the yard and thought back to my short-lived disco days, decks and dance floors didn’t seem so diametrically opposed. Perhaps the wine was at work, but the more I thought about it, the less different the reproductive strategies used by plants seemed from the reproductive strategies used by people. From the plain to the flamboyant to the downright strange, each plant seemed to have a human counterpart. So I ask: is the kingdom of plants really that different than our kingdom? You be the judge.

Pimp My Yard?
Start with the grasses—the reluctant but dutiful friends who get dragged to a club for the sole purpose of playing subservient roles to true players. Grasses, with their dull-brown seed heads, are content to hang around the periphery of the yard, parking themselves against a fence in the corner. In typical wallflower fashion, they are ignored by every one of God’s mobile pollinators. Bugs, birds and bats acknowledge grasses as mere obstructions and circumvent them as quickly as possible in an effort find the attractive flowers. I know. But don’t feel sorry for them just yet—grasses couldn’t care less about the pollinators and prefer to…well…watch and wait until a move is absolutely required. When that moment finally comes, they—quite literally—throw pollen and caution to the wind, hoping against all reproductive hope that some seed will find its way to another grass of the same species…now pity them.

Beauty and the Bees
Next on the scene are my pinwheel petunias. Unlike the grasses, petunias are all about being noticed. As incapable as they are of putting together an outfit that wouldn’t land them in the circus, they have no trouble attracting suitors. Bees go wild for them, proving that beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder. Attracting equal attention, are the blue petunias. While they definitely have more fashion sense than their cousins, the pinwheels, their sartorial sensibilities are overshadowed by wafts of heady perfume. Because subtlety is lost on bees, they buzz and mill around the receptive flowers, reveling in the excess of evocative fragrances.

Across the yard are the foxgloves. They may seem old-fashioned, but foxgloves aren’t coy when it comes to reproduction. On the lower lip of each trumpeted flower is a ‘honeyguide’ that serves as a landing pad for bees. Each beautifully speckled and spotted lip acts like a beacon that lures high-flying bees down to the foxglove’s flowers—much like seductive red lipstick works on some men.

Divide and Conquer
In the other corner of the yard, the scene turns a little alternative with the Jack-in-the-Pulpits and the kiwi vines. Jack-in-the-Pulpits are interesting perennials that live in the dark, moist understorey of the trees, secluded and hidden away from the masses. What makes them most interesting, however, is that they refuse to commit to a sexual orientation. A transgender plant, Jack-in-the-Pulpits decide to produce male flowers when soil resources are lean but then abruptly shift to being female when resources are abundant. Bringing a little discipline to the corner are the kiwis. Kiwis are divided into female and male plants, but don’t mistake them for equals. The female is definitely the dominant gender, having much more vigor and easily dwarfing the male. In fact, the female will often engulf the much smaller and less aggressive male kiwi, using it for nothing more than its ability to supply the pollen needed to produce seed.

Oh! And then there’s the garden cucumber that doesn’t even require a partner, but I don’t think I’ll go there.

So if you’re a little shy around the clubs or old enough to miss your nightclub days, take heart. With a little imagination and a yard filled with an assortment of plants, you can bring your disco past back to life. A glass of wine or two wouldn’t hurt either.