Bill M. Basham at his Conroe home with the original tree (courtesy Dr. Doug Welsh)

Crapemyrtles (Lagerstroemia indica )are the favorite flowering shrub of the South.  They were introduced  by seed from the East Indies as early as 1799 by George Washington.  Since that time crapemyrtles have established themselves as the premiere flowering shrub of the South.  Martha Turnbull, owner of Rosedown Plantation, St. Francisville, LA, kept a detailed diary that included obtaining and planting crapemyrtles in the 1830s and 40s.  Some of those same specimens ae alive and well today at Rosedown.  Sometimes referred as the “lilac of the South” crapemyrtles stand their own ground as the premiere shrub and small tree of the South because of their long bloom season (about 100 days) resistance to insects, disease and drought  as well as wide variety of colors and bloom size.  They are now available from dwarf sizes in 2-3’ range to medium trees in the 40-50’ category.  Colors range from white, pink, purple, red, lavender and even include bicolor flowers and maroon colored foliage.

The mature tree at the Basham home (courtesy Dr. Doug Welsh)

In addition to the long flowering season crapemyrtles are known for their beautiful trunks.  Some have bark that peels throughout the growing season exposing cinnamon or gray markings.  Dr. Donald Egolf, research horticulturist at the United States National Arboretum began a breeding program in the 1960s by crossing traditional Lagerstroemia indica with L. fauriei, a vigorous species from Japan known for its colorful trunks and resistance to powdery mildew.

Closeup of flowers (courtesy Dr. Doug Welsh)

An early collaborator with Dr. Egolf was Lynn Lowrey, a well known nurseryman in Houston who specialized in native Texas and southern plants.  Bill M. Basham was the City Horticulturist for Houston and was given a plant of L. fauriei from Lowrey and planted it in his home garden in the Conroe area.  A seedling cross between the new fauriei and a nearby old fashion indica produced a seedling that showed great promise.   The plant was noticed in 1963, named  and introduced to the trade by Lynn Lowrey in 1965.  ‘Basham’s Party Pink’ soon became very popular and has been featured in many street plantings and home gardens in Houston and the South.

Lynn Lowrey sent this hybrid to Dr. Egolf in 1965.  Greg Grant tells us that Egolf then began his series of crosses between L. indica and L. fauriei  which resulted in dozens of named cultivars like ‘Natchez’, ‘Tuscarora’, ‘Muskogee’, and ‘Catawba’.  Mildew resistance is one of the good features of the new cultivars along with larger flower panicles.   Cultivars like ‘Natchez’ have become extremely popular because of their fast growth, handsome peeling bark and white flowers.  A negative feature is that the beautiful panicles mature into large seed pods that are last on the tree and discourage continuous flowering.  This can be remedied by removing the spent seed heads.  Since the trees can easily be 30 to 40 feet tall this may not be practical.  Fall leaf color in shades of yellow and red are another advantage of the hybrids although the indicas can also color up nicely.

4 Trunks (courtesy Dr. Doug Welsh)

Fortunately for southern gardeners, ‘Basham’s Party Pink’ has endured the test of time and competition for the “newest” varieties.  Its advantages are fast growth, free flowering, handsome trunks, soft lavender-pink coloration and modest seed set.  It also transplants easily and has good resistance to powdery mildew.   For colder climates than Hardiness Zone 8, the very similar Egolf cultivar, ‘Muscogee’ is a good choice.  Both mature into 30-40’umbrella shaped trees.   A large “bosque” (a formal, geometrical  planting) of ‘Basham’s Party Pink’ is being considered  for the new Centennial Garden at Hermann Park in Houston.    Its Houston roots will reinforce the history of gardening in Houston.

That same week I attended the Pineywoods Audubon Society meeting and heard friend and fellow garden writer, Jeff Abt, speak about the late famous Nacogdoches poet, Karle Wilson Baker, and her book The Birds of Tanglewood which she wrote at her home in Nacogdoches.  Unfortunately the home is now a fraternity house.  Historic Nacogdoches, Inc. is currently raising funds to add her statue to the growing collection in Nacogdoches.  Of course I like her bird book because bluebirds were her favorite bird!  Though I have an original signed copy (thanks to friend Jeff) it’s recently been reprinted by Texas A&M Press.

The first Saturday of the month I did a radio interview with Bexar County horticulturist, David Rodriguez, on WOAI in San Antonio.  We talked about my new vegetable book and about my days as county horticulturist there.  I used to do a weekly radio program on WOAI with the ever popular Bill McReynolds in the late 1980’s.

Then I spoke to a SFA horticulture class on plant breeding and the stories behind my introductions to the Texas nursery industry.  I think I overwhelmed them as I mostly got blank stares.

The second Saturday of the month I spoke at Arbor Gate with my friend, mentor, and co-author Bill Welch.  We had fun yapping as always.  I then worked in my little garden at Arbor Gate and planted some more of my plant introductions.  Beverly had some very nice signs made that placed in their appropriate spots.  While there, friend and Rose Rustler Becky Smith made me a beautiful tile mosaic stepping stone with my Rosie dog’s picture on it.  I put it next to her grave under my weeping baldcypress.  I also came home with a yellow bird of paradise (Caesalpinia gilliesii) which I have been seeking for years now.  It’s very showy and drought tolerant.  It used to be Marie Daly’s pride and joy when I was her yard boy growing up in Longview.  I’ll plant it at my great grandparent’s dogtrot just up the road inside an old wagon wheel ring where I grow my bluebonnets each year.

The next day I did a radio interview with my buddies Jerry Parsons and Calvin Finch on KLUP in San Antonio.  We mostly hooted and hollered but occasionally talked about my new veggie book.  Calvin was the county horticulturist in San Antonio after I left.  Of course Jerry was the long time vegetable specialist there and tutored us all.  I dedicated the book to Jerry and his late predecessor in San Antonio, Sam Cotner.

On the following day, April 16, we dedicated our new Gayla Mize Garden at SFA.  It will feature many cultivars of both deciduous and evergreen azaleas, as well as Dave Creech’s usual incredible assortment of rare woody ornamentals.  Gayla Mize was a good friend of both historic Nacogdoches and SFA Gardens.  She even took one of my horticulture classes years ago.  Her husband Ray made the garden possible with a generous gift.  The Gala Mize Garden is directly across from the Ruby M. Mize Azalea Garden on University Drive in Nacogdoches.  They are both part of SFA Gardens.

On April 19 my good friend Steven Chamblee, from Chandor Gardens, spoke at our SFA Gardens lecture series.  He spoke on “Garden Harmony 101” and did his usual fantastic job.  He and Felder Rushing are two of my very favorite speakers because they don’t overload you with rules and expectations and both preach that it’s OK to just be “you.”

Saturday April 21 was our big Garden Gala, plant sale, and Earth Day celebration at SFA Gardens.  Our spring and fall plants sales are our major fund raisers for the gardens and part time staff.  That includes me!  Without these two successful sales I’d be picking up aluminum cans on the roadside full time.  Thanks to the SFA Pineywoods Native Plant Center we always have lots of native plants for sale as well as many of my introductions to complement our usual assortment of Texas tough perennials, tropicals, and woody ornamentals.  We grow most of the plants ourselves at SFA, with student and volunteer help of course.  I gave a lecture on “Growing Your Own Veggies at Home” at the Earth Day celebration.

The following Monday I had to put on clean clothes and do a little TV interview for the SFA campus Purple Pride on SFA Gardens.  Of course I yapped on like a ninny but they didn’t seem to mind.

The last weekend of the month I attended the annual Briarwood Picnic at the Caroline Dorman Nature Preserve in Saline, Louisiana.  I even led an afternoon walking tour.  The late Caroline Dorman was a kindred spirit and amazing woman.  She was the first female forester in the U.S., the first conservationist in Louisiana, and was pretty much solely responsible for the establishment of the Kisatchie National Forest.  She was raised in Arcadia, Louisiana but her people were from around Saline.  Around 1950 she built her “dream home” in the woods at Briarwood.  It’s an incredible log cabin tucked in the middle of the woods.  She authored a number of books including Wildflowers of Louisiana, Flowers Native to the Deep South, Natives Preferred, Southern Indian Boy, and Bird Talk. Her biography The Gift of the Wild Things has recently been republished and tells the story of her amazing life.

In the writing world, I published an article on Turk’s Cap in the May/June issue of Texas Gardener and one on crinums in the May/June issue of Neil Sperry’s Gardens.

Next month finds me in Austin on May 3 doing a radio interview with Cecilia Nasti’s Field and Feast program in Austin and in San Antonio speaking to the state Master Gardener conference on May 4.  I’ll be rambling on about my grandparents old dogtrot house in Arcadia and my gardens there.  I’ll get to see and visit with lots of my old San Antonio friends while I’m there.  Our SFA Gardens Lone Star Regional Native Plant Conference will be held in Nacogdoches May 18-19.  I’ll be speaking on landscape design.  For a brochure and registration form, go to our website at sfagardens.sfasu.edu.  On Saturday May 26 I’ll be doing a book signing at King’s Nursery in Tenaha.  King’s is a third generation nursery in Shelby County.  Aubrey and Cheryl King are good friends of mine.  And on May 31 I leave for Richmond, Virginia to attend the annual meeting of the Southern Garden History Society.  They have great meetings and even better tours.  Join and attend if you can.  Their website is southerngardenhistory.org.

Until next month, REST IN PEAS!  -Greg

Thanks to Theresa Sandberg for providing this wonderful article for our blog!

Nothing makes me happier than digging around in the dirt, planting colors, harvesting edibles, photographing everything that is growing, and even weeding! I never imagined that I can still do all that while my mobility continues to deteriorate.

I walk with leg braces and forearm crutches, and on ‘bad days’, I use a manual wheelchair to get around. Anticipating more of those ‘bad days’ to come, my husband Derek designed the front and backyard of our patio home for wheelchair accessibility. Our landscaper, Carmelo Longoria, has the uncanny ability to visualize and execute Derek’s arm waving designs, and together they made it possible for me to play in the garden.

10 Tips to Share: 

(1) Grass is evil, treacherous to walk with leg braces and impossible for a wheelchair, plus not ecofriendly. We have replaced all the grass with flower beds and hard surfaces that are much safer to walk on. Make sure the pathways are wide enough for the wheelchair. A loop path or one where you can turn around in the wheelchair is recommended, unless you are very good at wheeling backwards. I have collided into a pot or two that were on the edge of the pathways rolling backwards.

(2) Be careful of gardening seats on wheels. They don’t have brakes, so you can end up sitting on the ground when they take off on their own. Wheelchairs are definitely safer.

(3) I like to sit on the edges of the raised beds to work in the flower beds or just to sit to rest. Benches are great rest stops also.

(4) Raised beds and big pots allow easy reach without too much bending. It’s amazing how many vegetables do great AND look great in pots, and you can jazz them up with some trailing colors. We have grown lemons, limes, guavas, potatoes, carrots, beets, soya beans, lettuce, eggplant, spinach, peppers and of course, all kinds of herbs in pots. Yum!

(5) Angela Chandler’s High Density Orchard class at Arbor Gate is a must. Short fruit trees allow easy access to prune, thin (gasp, yes!) and harvest fruits. Angela is overhauling the website www.thegardenacademy.com , but there are a lot of goodies there for reference.

(6) I love my pop up yard waste containers. They are lightweight, and I can loop the pop up handle on my wheelchair handle and take it to any part of the yard. When not in use, they collapsed down out of sight.

(7) Small plastic container with a fixed handle is great for carrying tools or harvests. The buckets with swinging handles interfere with forearm crutch walking, but are great for putting on the lap while wheeling. And don’t be tempted to put pointy tools in your pants pockets.

(8) Long handle tools allow further reach from the chair. My new favorite, nick named ‘Marcus Agrippa’, is a gripper that you can get at any drugstore…to pick up prunings, do light weeding, poke holes, drop seeds and cover, and pinch the husband.

(9) I have crutch holder pouch at the back of the wheelchair. These are also good to hold long poled tools. I cannot wait to get a permanent wheelchair just for gardening so that I can ‘pimp my wheelchair’ with a handyman’s belt to carry ALL my tools, buckets, and water bottle.

(10) Be sure to have a good landscaper who will make sure proper drainage is considered. Flagstones on crushed granite and French drains work really well. And, finally be sure to get approval from your home owners association before you start any modification.

Although most pines in East Texas are destined for the saw mill for pulp or lumber after about 25 years or less, it turns out I need and want them forever.  I didn’t realize this until I moved away to school in College Station, and then Dallas, and then San Antonio.  Something was missing in my life.  It turns out that it was the pine trees.  I loved and missed the way they smelled, I loved their pine straw mulch, and I loved the way they jingled like dainty wind chimes after the ice storms.  I even loved the pine cones that we used to fashion into Thanksgiving turkeys and Christmas trees in kindergarten.

Pine trees are a part of East Texas (and the rest of the southeastern U.S.) and belong here.  Mostly what you see today are loblolly pines (Pinus taeda) but historically we had three native pines in East Texas.  Short leaf pines (Pinus echinata) grew on the dry clay hills in northeast Texas, loblolly pines grew in the wetter areas of southeast Texas, and the regal longleaf pines (Pinus palustris) grew in the sandy lands of Deep East Texas.  Unfortunately the long lasting wood and slow growth of short leaf and longleaf doomed them as they were cut and not replanted.  All upland pines grow in a “pyric” fire prone environment and like grasses and perennials are “fire resistant”.  Many pines used to grow in large, open, park like expanses known as pine savannas.  Out of the 90 million acres that used to exist in the South only about 3 million remain today, mostly in the southeastern U.S.  I’m actually trying to fashion my own in the back yard however.

About 20 years ago I planted six thousand loblolly pines out back for a timber project that I hoped I could sell and use the proceeds in restoring my old house.  But along the way, my pine love affair grew along with the pines themselves and I vowed to leave them forever.  They make a great green curtain behind my house and each night before I fall asleep I take a peaceful imaginary walk through them.

Classic pine savannas featured pines spaced far apart and native grasses below that burned on a regular basis.  The burning discouraged hardwoods while stimulating the grasses and pines.  A number of species evolved to only live in pine savannas including pine warblers, brown headed nuthatches, red cockaded woodpeckers, gopher tortoises, and Louisiana pine snakes.  The regular fires also eliminate the buildup of excessive amounts of fuel preventing massive tree killing wildfires like they had in Bastrop last summer.  The bare dirt after the fires makes an excellent seed bed for wildflowers and native grasses.  In addition to serving as a herbicide, the fire also acts as a fertilizer, fungicide, and insecticide.  Although it only needs it every few years, I conduct a prescribed fire or “control burn” every year on my eight acres out back.  Although many natural fires occurred from lightening strikes during dry summers, I conduct a cool, safe, spring break fire each year inside a wide fire lane of course.

Despite five years of ongoing thinning, my pines are still way too thick for a savanna.  I’m working on it however.  In the last five years pine warblers and brown headed nuthatches (my latest favorite bird) have showed up to cheer me on.  I now leave all of the dead trees standing to attract our eight native species of woodpeckers which will in turn provide nesting cavities for our many secondary cavity dwellers. Last year was the first year that bluebirds nested in one of my abandoned woodpecker cavities, the way nature intended.  I love my pines and have just as much fun “playing in them” now as I did growing up as a child.

Of course March was much too busy to just play in the pines.  I spoke again to the library club at Huntington High School on the importance of trees.  I also attended the open day of the Nelton Adams Memorial Daffodil field in Dodson, Louisiana.  Then after ten years of failed negotiations and failed mediation, I participated in a land partition hearing to divide up some land next to me that I own fifty percent interest in.  I’m trying to save my beloved and rare Trillium recurvatum patch next to me.  I’ll let you know how it turns out.  Then along came spring break where I not only burned my fledgling pine savanna but my 8 acre tall grass prairie project as well.  Native grasses love fire even more than pines.  Next I spoke to an enthusiastic crowd in Lufkin on designing landscapes with native plants.  Then I took a whirlwind tour of North Louisiana and Arkansas with Cousin Celia, her husband Steve Templin, friend Thera Lou Adams, my mom, and her best friend Mary Beth Hagood.  I got to see many wonderful gardens, including the late Arkansas icon, Carl Amason’s old place, along with my very first daffodil show in Conway.  At the tail end of the month I gave a tour of the Pineywoods Native Plant Center to a visiting group from Mercer Arboretum and wrapped it up with a visit to the Ivy Payne Wildlife Refuge in Elkhart.

My brand new Growing Fruits and Vegetables in Texas (Cool Springs Press) just came out and is available from Amazon.com, texasgardener.com, King’s Nursery, and of course The Arbor Gate.  I love growing (and eating) fruits and vegetables!  I also published an article on the SFA Ruby M. Mize Azalea Gardens in Neil Sperry’s Gardens and one on my first grade teacher, Miss Mozelle, in Texas Gardener.

April will have me speaking on heirloom plants and my new plant introductions at The Arbor Gate with mentor Bill Welch on Saturday April 14, on home veggie gardening in Nacogdoches at our SFA Spring Garden Gala Plant Sale and Earth Day Celebration on Saturday April 21, and attending the annual Briarwood Picnic at the Caroline Dormon Nature Preserve in Saline, Louisiana on Saturday April 28.

We hold our grand opening of our new Gayla Mize Garden at SFA on Tuesday April 17.  It’s just across the street from the Ruby Mize Azalea Garden and will feature many showy deciduous azaleas as well as the usual assortment of Dr. Creech rarities.  And don’t miss my big buddy, Steve Chamblee from Chandor Gardens in Weatherford, speaking at our SFA Gardens Theresa and Les Reeves Lecture Series on Thursday, April 19 at 7:00.  He’ll enchant us with Garden Harmony 101 as only he can.  Until next month, grow old and be happy.  -Greg

We asked customers to submit a photo of their favorite garden or landscaping element. We have assembled  a gallery of the best submissions and now you get to vote on your favorite. The winner gets at $25 gift certificate!

UPDATE!

The contest is over, and we want to thank everyone that submitted photos and voted!

Congratulations to Sharon of Conroe for submitting the photo of her garden with a beautiful windmill and birdhouse!
 

Raised Bed

Container Garden

Colorful Beds

Rose Garden
Flower Bed