Spring Plant Sale: Saturday, April 19This year’s Spring Plant Sale will offer herbaceous plants and sub-shrubs only. Of special note: seed-grown trillium will be available! Friends members’ sale starts at 9:00 a.m., general public sale starts at 10:00 a.m. The sale ends at 2:00 p.m. Friends memberships can be purchased at the Garden on the morning of the sale, starting at 8:30 a.m., or in advance on the Garden website. As with all of our biannual plant sales, the full listing of plants, pot sizes, and prices will be posted at least a week before the sale date on the Garden website, and will be updated up to and including the Friday evening before the sale. We will have our full plant inventory for sale during the Fall Plant Sale when the weather is appropriate for planting. Garden Director, Bart O’Brien, provided the following notes on some of the special offerings at this year’s spring sale: Adiantum x tracyi – We grew these plants from spores collected from this naturally occurring hybrid, so expect these to be variable! The parentage of this hybrid is A. aleuticum (evergreen) and A. jordanii (summer deciduous), and the original hybrid plants tend to be evergreen, but with distinctive seasons of new growth (March–April and October–November). These vigorous young plants may behave just like the parent hybrid or they may tend to be more like one of the parent species–though none of these has gone fully summer dormant for us so far. These plants make excellent container specimens for bright shady areas, and usually require regular watering. Trillium – We have plants grown here from seedlings that have not yet bloomed after five years. Most should have white flowers and are either T. chloropetalum (most likely) or T. albidum. It’s possible that there could be other color forms of T. chloropetalum–dark maroon, mauve, or pinkish. These plants are very long-lived perennials when grown in partial shade where the soil never gets too hot or dry (key word here is hot–they do not like hot soil). For butterfly lovers, we will have two very good caterpillar food plants: an abundance of young California pipevines (Aristolochia californica), and a smaller number of Lomatium californicum–probably the showiest of the Lomatiums. Hardy Creek Barberry (Berberis nervosa var. mendocinensis) is one of the notable discoveries of our founding director, James Roof. It is widely recognized as one of the most distinctive forms of Berberis native to North America. That’s because it looks much more like its Asiatic cousins–with much larger leaflets and many more leaflets per leaf–AND because it is tall, slowly growing to six feet or more in height. It produces multiple six-to-eight-inch terminal inflorescences, each containing a multitude of sweet smelling golden yellow flowers. The flowers are followed by attractive, 1/4-inch blue-black berries that certainly look tempting to eat, but their taste is quite disappointing (some would say they are downright bad). Leave these fruits for the birds that relish them. A few more early teasers: Adelinia (Cynoglossum) grandis, Artemisia californica ‘Canyon Gray’, Asarum caudatum, Calamagrostis foliosa, Chlorogalum pomeridianum, Eriogonum giganteum, Eriogonum grande var. rubescens, Erythronium revolutum, Heterotheca sessiliflora subsp. bolanderi (from Albany Hill), Heuchera maxima (the largest Heuchera species), Heuchera parishii ‘Chiquita’ (the smallest Heuchera cultivar), Iris douglasiana, Iris macrosiphon, Iris sp., Lilium ‘Tilden Botanic Garden’, Lilium pardalinum subsp. pardalinum (small pots!), Lilium pardalinum subsp. pitkinense (small pots!), Oxalis oregana (pink flowers), (white flowers), and ‘Klamath Ruby’, Penstemon newberryi, Penstemon rupicola, Phacelia californica, Phyla nodiflora, Polypodium californicum, Salvia ‘Gayle Nielson’, Salvia spathacea, and Wyethia angustifolia.
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