Proceedings Library

You and I most probably agree that the world of plants is fascinating and interesting, but does the rest of the World’s population have the same priorities? When performing a Google search on "plants, " "plant novelty(ies), " or "plant novelty/breeders’ rights, " almost 190 million hits were revealed; "beer" had 127 million matches; "wine" had 232 million; "sex" had 413 million; and "food" revealed 661 million hits. In other words, plants are half as interesting as sex, but 50% more fascinating than beer. Wine is just a bit more interesting than plants, the interest of which is only a little less than 1/3 that of food. Certainly, plants are fascinating!

The demand for new ornamental crops in the plant market continues to soar and independent breeders are the key source for such introductions. The job of a plant breeder is to create improved plants. This may be accomplished simply by selecting a superior individual from amongst a range of existing possibilities, or it may require that a breeder know how to efficiently swap or replace parts, recombine components, and rebuild a biological system that will be capable of growing vigorously and productively in the context of an agricultural or horticultural environment. How the breeding is done and what goals are achieved is largely a matter of biological feasibility, consumer demand, and production economics. What is clear is that the surest way to succeed in a reasonable amount of time is to have access to a large and diverse pool of genetic variation.

The greenhouse and nursery industries in the U.S.A. are, to major extent, container plant industries and as such have a need for a continuous supply of growing media. The components that can be used to create a growing medium are numerous and often regional in terms of availability. Growers want components that are readily available, consistent, and economical. A component that has potential as a growing medium amendment is spent mushroom substrate (SMS).

The U.S.A mushroom industry generates 1 billion tons of SMS each year and that SMS is not recycled by the mushroom industry. The mushroom industry either puts the SMS on a field and lets it weather for a year or longer or the SMS must go into the waste stream. When placed on a field for weathering, the SMS continues to decompose and results in a product that has been used by gardeners. The product is called mushroom casing soil or spent mushroom compost, and it is highly organic and has some nutritional value. Problems with this procedure are that it requires land for the application of SMS and the supply of land is running out and there is potential for surface and ground water pollution.

• Aspects to be discussed.
• Why propagate medicinal plants?
• Difference from producing other plants.
• Factors influencing success.
• Promoting use of African medicinal plants.
• African medicinal plant standards (AMPS).
• Quality control.
• Marketing.

• Biotechnology is applied biology — putting our biological knowledge to work.
• Biotechnology is using any living system to produce something useful.
• Modern biotechnology — various new ways to produce products more efficiently, or to produce new products.

BIOTECHNOLOGY

Present: Proteonomics, metabolomics, and genomics.

Modern:

• Tissue /cell culture: molecular breeding.
• rDNA techniques: diagnostics.
• Gene transfer > genetic modification > microbes, plants, and animals.
• Conventional: selection, breeding, and chemical and radiation mutation.
• Past: bread, beer, wine, vinegar, compost, mining, ethanol, etc.

• Shrinking supply of fossil fuels and the increasing demand for energy in 2005.
• In the global economy it could lead to an oil crisis in the future.
• The enforcement of the Kyoto Protocol drives towards using biofuels to offset CO₂ emissions. As a result the possibility of earning additional revenue through bio-fuel projects in the form of "Certified Emission Reductions" is certain.
• This form of funding contributes towards the financial feasibility of tree projects for bio-diesel.
• The potential of alleviating poverty in South Africa’s rural areas with the production of a needed product bio-diesel while reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a solution to many of Africa’s problems.

Eustoma grandiflora: lisianthus, prairie gentian, Texas blue bell.

• Eustoma: Gentianacea family.
• Eustoma grandiflora (syn. E. russellianum) is the first name given to this species of the Eustoma genus. On the basis of international nomenclature rules the name Lisianthus, is a synonym for Eustoma.

Lisianthus is native from Colorado to Texas, U.S.A., where these plants grow in the prairies. If the seeds in nature germinate early in the spring they will flower the same season. If germination takes place later in the season, with higher temperatures, drought, etc., the plants will not flower until the next year.

We arrived in Brisbane on Tuesday the 16th of May 2006, after a harrowing and exhausting flight. Imagine that! Thirty hours to get to the other end of the world! At least this was the opinion of the girls. The men consoled themselves with the profusions of meals (or so it seemed).

We booked in at the Carlton Crest Hotel where the Australian I.P.P.S. Region conference was held and were delighted to find the hotel clean and refreshingly welcoming. To our dismay, we discovered that we would only be allowed to enter our rooms at 12 noon. This left us dragging our feet around a few blocks of Brisbane, until we were able to flop down on our beds after a cleansing shower.

Refreshed and revived the following morning, Brisbane impressed us with its very well organised public transport system. For only $5 a day, unlimited river, bus, and train transport was available. This left us giddy with a sense of long lost freedom and everywhere to go! Soon we discovered that this city had a feeling of a small town with vast amounts of sidewalk space, friendly people, and half a zillion sidewalk cafes. We vowed to try them all, but failed dismally. You can only eat so much!

Refining the micropropagation, hardening off, and growing-on of the New Zealand bred hybrid Zantedeschia has been a continuous process at Frontier Labs for the last 10 years. And refinement continues!

MICROPROPAGATION

In early spring sprouting "eyes" from dry-stored tubers are excised and initiated onto basic Murashige and Skoog (MS) basal medium in vitro. Basil-shoot multiplication is stimulated from aseptic culture lines through the addition of 6-benzylaminopurine (BA) at final concentration of 0.5 mg?L^-1. At this stage the original mother shoots are isolated and sent for virus indexing (see disease management paragraph). Mass propagation proceeds with the culture lines that show no virus infection. Rooting is carried out using standard MS medium (Murashige and Skoog, 1962) without the addition of growth regulators. Rooting results in 5–14 days and plants are removed from the glass containers ready for hardening off.

Awareness of the environment has become all the rage and not before time. Politicians invented it just a few years ago, or so they would have us believe. For some of us it has always been a way of life. My first major revegetation was a silverbirch (Betula pendula) forest in our back garden in Essex, United Kingdom, at the age of seven. Sixty years later this planting must now be well past its use by date. There are other quite major plantings in that country I helped plant while an apprentice. On arrival in New Zealand in 1963 I travelled north from Wellington. The population along the route were still in the slash and burn mode, and dark remains of once proud trees littered the eroding hillsides. In the intervening 40 years or so, things have changed, some for the better, but many places are still eroding and sending their precious cargo of topsoil down silted rivers to the sea. There is an awakening in certain areas that plants matter, even native plants!

The seed extraction/cleaning process used is outlined in this paper and involves the use of four lab-scale seed threshing/cleaning machines plus ancillary equipment. Overall seed quality as a result of the extraction process was acceptable with losses through broken seed typically restricted to around 5%. In today?s dollar terms, extraction costs ranged from 1.9? to $1.00 per seed, ave. 5.5¢, largely depending on the seed number able to be extracted, or 3.2¢ to $1.67, ave. 9.2¢ per germinable seed based on a conservative germination rate of 60%.

Preliminary laboratory germination tests revealed no loss of quality from mechanical extraction and also confirmed naked seed germinated faster than seed still held in its bracts as spikelets. Subsequent occasional germination tests were conducted on only a few seed lots, at client?s request, with results ranging between 60%–81% over 35 days.

Improvements to the process will depend on the scale of the operation desired but are definitely possible through modifications to existing machinery and/or access to and possible modification of other machines such as a cone thresher, hammer mill, and de-awner.

Over the last 26 years the production methods in our nursery have and will continue to change considerably to meet the needs of the revegetation market. My purpose in this paper is to outline these past changes as well as taking a brief look at what still needs to happen in the future.

THE MARKET

Firstly, identify the needs of the revegetation market, which is the market for native plants specifically to restore native vegetation to specified areas.

The market requires:

• Identified and/or specified seed provenance.
• Bulk supply at low cost.
• Consistent grades of healthy, viable plants.
• Ease of handling for contractors.
• To be a serious grower of revegetation native plants and to remain competitive in an increasingly pressurised market we have had to change practices and will continue to change to remain a market player.

Stockton Coal Mine is situated 25 km north-east of Westport and stretches from 1 km to 5 km from the coast. The 2,200-ha coal mining licence is located within the western sector of the Buller Coal Field on a plateau 400 to 1,100 m above the coastal plain. The opencast mine currently has a disturbed area of 750 ha and is expected to have a footprint of more than 900 ha at end of mine life. Thick seams of generally high quality coal exported for use in thermal, coking, and specialised markets overlies a basement of weathered granite rock. This material is quarried for mine road aggregate and, due to its phosphate content, is capable of supporting vegetation. Overlying the coal is a thick layer of hard, massive quartz sandstone overburden, which is fragmented by blasting and stripped using 180-tonne excavators. It has poor plant-supporting characteristics, being low in fertility and having low water and nutrient-holding capacity. Remnants of the Kaiata mudstone exist on top of the sandstone and contribute to acid rock drainage through oxidation of sulphide-bearing minerals.

The Taranaki Regional Council (TRC) has a statutory obligation under the Resource Management Act 1991 (RMA) to give effect to the fundamental purpose of promoting the sustainable management of natural and physical resources in carrying out its functions in the Taranaki Region. In particular, Sections 6 and 7 of the Act recognise the importance of preserving the natural character of rivers and their margins and the protection of them from inappropriate use; protection of significant areas of indigenous vegetation and habitats of indigenous fauna; and maintenance and enhancement of amenity values. Furthermore, Regional Councils are required under the RMA to prepare a Regional Policy Statement that identifies significant issues in the region along with objectives, policies, methods of implementation, and environmental results anticipated. One of the key issues identified in Taranaki is the degradation of water quality resulting from diffuse source contamination from agriculture. Council has identified riparian management as one of the preferred methods of improving water quality.

Greenhouses protect the plants from adverse conditions and enable the grower to control the growing conditions. Good control helps achieving a high yield, good quality, uniformity, and precise timing of delivery. A wide range of crops is grown in greenhouses; the end product can be leaves, roots, bulbs, tubers, flowers, fruit, seed, young plants, mature plants (herbs, salad plants, bedding plants, pot plants, garden plants), and more.

Controlling the growing conditions requires technology, primarily for heating and venting, and optionally also for root-zone heating, cooling, fogging, misting, CO₂ enrichment, shading, assimilation light, day-length extension, black-out, and more. Greenhouses come in degrees of sophistication: from uncontrolled plastic tunnels to completely automated and robotised plant factories. Simple greenhouses can be manually operated, but advanced greenhouses with a lot of technology require a good control computer. In New Zealand, most greenhouses used for plant propagation are relatively basic compared to some highly specialised greenhouses overseas.

Taupo Native Plant Nursery is located approximately 5 km south west of Lake Taupo, in the central North Island. We produce mainly New Zealand native plants for ecological restoration throughout New Zealand. Currently we are producing approximately 2 million seedlings and 1 million in containers. Staff numbers vary between 55 and 75 depending on seasonal requirements.

A VOLCANIC PLATEAU

Lake Taupo is actually a massive depression or caldera within the earth’s crust that has formed as a direct consequence of repeated volcanic eruptions. In fact Taupo is considered to be the single most frequently active and productive volcano on earth today. Furthermore, within at least the last 5,000 years, Taupo has produced the most violent eruptions globally. It first began erupting about 300,000 years ago and last erupted about 1,800 years ago. On average it erupts every 900 years.

Many of us have had plants that have basically said "tough; we are not going to let you propagate us. " I have a saying that I use quite a lot "There is no such thing as a plant being impossible to propagate; it is only that we have not yet worked out how to do it. It is only a matter of time and patience, where there is a will there is usually a way. "

I have been fortunate that through the 1970s I was involved in some basic propagation research when employed as a technician with the former Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (MAF) at the now-closed Levin Horticultural Research Centre (LHRC).This was a time when tissue culture was a new but still quite expensive tool in research. For more than half the time that I worked there I was responsible for the day-to-day running of the nuclear-stock unit, a plant quarantine unit that housed the National High Health (mainly virus free) berry-fruit collection.

"Battling the bugs and beasties in the war zone of a plant display house." This paper looks into the techniques and strategies that are available and used in controlling plant pests in the Fernery and Display Houses (The Fernery), Pukekura Park, New Plymouth. A coordinated approach evolved out of our desire to do things better. We wanted to reduce the use of toxic pesticides, because we were concerned about the development of pesticide-resistant populations, the nontarget effects pesticides can have, and the all-important public, staff, and environmental safety issues. We were also aware of the increasing public desire for a clean and green environment. Rather than rely on a prophylactic programme based on a calendar of spray applications, we looked for more environmentally friendly approaches sympathetic to the actual levels of crop damage. As horticulturists we found ourselves in the world of entomology, chemistry, ecology, and economics as we move into an integrated pest management (IPM) system. Although plant health depends on both the control of pests and the management of plant diseases, this paper only addresses insect and mite pests and their management.

What I would like to discuss with you today is how the tissue culture laboratory and the nursery can work together more effectively to produce more successful exflasking.

To get the very best results at exflasking, it is necessary to have a greater understanding of the plant and its needs both while it is in the laboratory as well as when it leaves. It is important to have input from both sides. This will greatly improve the chances of a successful result. Some of you may recall a very good paper presented at the 2003 I.P.P.S. New Zealand Conference in Palmerston North entitled: "Exflasking, A Shocking Experience" (Seelye, 2003). To refresh your memory, I will return to this paper and will go over some of the points raised, looking again at these issues from perhaps a practical viewpoint. I hope in this way to foster a better understanding of the roles the plant nursery and the tissue culture laboratory have and how collectively they may improve their chances of successful exflasking.

My venture into the world of breeding, selecting, and commercializing pineapple lilies (Eucomis comosa) began in 1995. I sowed a few hundred seeds collected from a bed in the South African collection of the Auckland Regional Authority Botanical Gardens. The project was inspired by a visitor from Japan who, upon viewing these delightful plants, asked me to supply him with 5000 bulbs. I committed to growing them if he guaranteed to buy them, and so it all started. Within three growing seasons I had a field full of flowering bulbs showing great diversity of foliage and flower types. In 1998 I made my first selections and exported my first consignment of bulbs as a mixed strain. This project has now grown to a global exercise, with breeding and selecting done in New Zealand then starter bulbs being shipped off to locations in the Northern Hemisphere to be finished off in the natural cycles for their growing seasons, completely opposite to us in the Southern Hemisphere. This paper sets out to describe the techniques I used to bring the crop from a breeder?s dream to a venture that generates regular income as well as a great sense of satisfaction.

Where do plant propagators get their stock and how good is it?

What needs to be done to remedy problems of poor strikes and poor resultant crops due to inferior material? What sort of cutting do we need to be successful?

Most of you will have the ideal cutting in mind, a bit like a fresh, succulent, plump salad that makes your mouth water, and no one wants a limp, pale, washed out thing that will become a gooey heap. You may laugh but I have seen bags of cuttings exactly like that. So now we see this ideal cutting, brilliant green, plump, fully nourished, close nodded with no stretch, firm and ready to root at a minute?s notice. How do we go about getting it?

You could take cuttings from leftover stock or from old bushes in someone?s garden, but this is not really a good answer. To produce quality plants from cuttings you need to take ownership of the source of plant material. That’s right, you have to own the process from the start. We at Plant Production Ltd. have lacked a standalone facility to do just that, and with producing the ideal cutting in mind, we set our goal towards the steps needed to accomplish this.

If you can imagine a plant, it?s only a matter of growing enough seedlings and you will find it. Chances are, however, along the way you will find something even better! Random selection from crops of seedlings or tissue culture variants is one way to find new plants. Controlled hybridizing is a way to speed up the process of finding desirable plants. I have been breeding plants for 20 years now. This paper mainly discusses the last 4 years and how a more streamlined system has been developed that could be applied to practically any genus.

Noeline and David started Cedar Lodge Nurseries over 30 years ago, developing it from a hobby. We had an interest in conifers, and thought that by specializing in only conifers we could handle it quite easily. What we soon found out is that we had taken on the world?s largest family of plants. This created many challenges since every continent has its native conifers, with climate requirements varying from the tropics to close to the Arctic Circle. These climatic requirement variations didn’t prove much of a problem from a propagating point of view but the continuing management of the young plants through to sale required a lot of experimentation with varying plant husbandry techniques, which continues today. We are blessed with a wonderful temperate climate in our locality, which allows us to handle this challenge and produce plants that can survive and thrive in their preferred climate range, which can be found in most cases within New Zealand.

Innovative ideas are everywhere, but innovation is about INNOVATORS, people who not only have great ideas but people who develop and test those ideas and navigate them through or around the system and into the market or workplace. Innovators are passionate dreamers and doers with dogged determination to make a difference. The following is a limited sampling of those ideas and "hort-truisms" that have made a difference in the industry and some thoughts on testing and marketing your ideas. Most of the innovators have been long-time members of and contributors to I.P.P.S.

From its creation, Narromine Transplants has endeavored to be at the forefront of its particular sector of the Australian nursery industry, namely cell-raised seedlings. To maintain this edge and at the same time ensure the enterprise remains economically viable, it has been necessary to be both innovative and inventive.

This paper outlines just some of the measures taken to ensure that we are the nursery of choice for our forestry customers, with a commitment to quality and service via the introduction of innovation.

Vegetative propagation is used in certain aspects of the vegetable seed industry, with the majority being for plant breeding purposes. The uses are for:

• Plant rescue
• Multiplication and maintenance
• Selection
• Embryo rescue
• Inbred development
• Grafted seedlings

VEGATIVE PROPAGATION

Vegetative Cuttings. These are used in brassicas, lettuce, cucurbits, and solanaceous crops for plant rescue, multiplication/maintenance, and selection. Cuttings are placed in Growool® (or similar) blocks under mist and potted immediately when root production is apparent. This ensures the highest seed yield by maintaining the vegetative stage for as long as possible.

INTRODUCTION

Innovation is seen by many people to be many different things. For some it is something that somebody else does, for others they can be too innovative and waste a lot of time and money. People in the nursery industry should be innovative and use it to their effect. For me, innovation is:

• Taking an idea and using it to improve your business.
• The key to future business prosperity and can take place in all areas of the business process.
• Not just for big multi-national businesses ? it is for you!
• Crucial.
• Something to be promoted and nurtured.
• Great for solving problems.
• More than just invention.
• Okay to copy if somebody else has already carried out good innovation that suits you.

Nonrenewable products such as perlite, sphagnum peat, and sand have been the mainstay of propagation media. Concerns about the long-term viability of their use, and the health risks associated with the use of perlite in particular, have prompted a search for alternatives by staff in the nursery at the Australian National Botanic Gardens (ANBG).

The ANBG nursery has used a combination of a coarse grade of perlite (P500) and coir (fine grade) (5 : 1, v/v) as a cutting propagation medium since 1990. Coir is a renewable resource and has the added advantage of being easy to rewet, unlike sphagnum peat. This combination has all the right characteristics for promoting root growth on cuttings of the wide range of Australian plants propagated by the nursery each year. In January 2006, pine bark and rice hulls were identified as potential ingredients that are inexpensive, safe to use, and made from renewable resources and that might be suitable for substituting for perlite.

Macadamia nuts are the success story for the Australian bush food industry, but with a twist. Macadamias were discovered in Australia, but nuts were originally taken to Hawaii, U.S.A. where they were grown and bred. It took some enterprising Australians to bring them back to the NSW north coast to establish an industry now worth tens of millions of dollars.

There are two species that have been used for nut production, Macadamia integrifolia and M. tetraphylla. While the flavour of M. tetraphylla is considered superior, M. integrifolia cultivars are the most widely planted for nut production. Macadamia trees are generally grafted onto seedlings, with the selection ‘Hinde’ (syn. H2) being the most widely used rootstock. This is a M. integrifolia selection and is said to grow a vigorous seedling due to the large size nut. There has been some work on rootstock evaluation, but this has been limited.

This paper describes the design and environmental control features of a new research greenhouse built at the Gatton Campus of the University of Queensland (UQ). The greenhouse was funded by the University for the Centre for Native Floriculture, a research centre funded by the Queensland state government. Most University research greenhouses are designed for research on high light demanding agronomic crops such as sunflowers, sorghum, and wheat. This makes greenhouse design and environment control parameters relatively easy to deal with.

The nature of the research to be carried out in the UQ Gatton greenhouse involves studies of the floral physiology of a range of new native flowering plant species, and this requirement added a significant additional range of environment control parameters to this project. When the University of Queensland allocates funding for a project of this nature, an architect is appointed to manage the project. The architect has the final say on overall design of the structure. The University staff who are to use the facility form a ?users? group? that determines the environmental parameters required of the facility. I was the Chair of the users? group for the development of this facility.

At last year?s conference in Brisbane, coloured shade cloth was mentioned and discussed. I thought that this needed looking into with more depth. A Google Internet search for more information did not result in anything that was relevant.

So I decided to do a trial of my own, seeing if coloured shade cloth affects plant growth. At Advantage Plant Production, we prefer not to use chemicals to control growth and also try to minimise labour costs as much as possible. On top of this we are always looking for ways to produce better plants for our clients. So the option of using coloured shade cloth to regulate plant growth would be very beneficial.

I obtained shade cloth colours in grey, red, and blue. This was donated to me by the distributor, Polysack. Polysack claims the following with each colour.

Fresh, useable water is one of Australia?s and the world?s most precious resources. As a resource, fresh water represents 2.5% of the world’s water supply. Like other horticulture industries, the nursery and garden industry requires access to appropriate and reliable water supplies. Water is crucial to nursery and plant production, and water is a resource we need to be aware of conserving. As an industry we know we need to be "waterwise." More importantly it is essential we implement and achieve high water-use efficiency without sacrificing plant quality and productivity.

In order to improve water access, given competition amongst users and the influence of dry climatic conditions, it is important for the nursery industry to be promoted as a responsible and efficient water user to help achieve:

• A secure "water future" for our businesses;
• Recognition of established Industry Best Practice; and
• Recognition of the industry?s own initiatives in water conservation.

Many pest management problems arise from the repeated use of simplistic, unilateral management responses for what are often complex and highly variable pest problems. It is inefficient for a motorist to repair an oil leak by replacing the engine; it is equally unwise for a grower to manage a small pest problem by using large amounts of synthetic pesticides. A motorist is more likely to replace or repair small components of the engine, and a grower should also be prepared to use an integrated and more refined approach to dealing with pest problems. Is pest management changing the spark plugs or is it replacing the entire engine?

It was only a matter of time when I confirmed that I would rather grow plants than sell them. I expressed this to Ken, the owner, and we started Wallsend Wholesale Nurseries. At the beginning we grew indoor plants and camellias and bought and sold palms. After a period of time my previous employer retired from his wholesale nursery, so I decided to venture into the hibiscus that I liked and maybe fill the gap in the market place that he was going to leave.

To start with we grew plants on a section of the retail nursery in Wallsend, since it had growing areas from past years and some older glasshouses. After a couple of years we leased some land (2 acres) at Glendale, approximately 2 km from the retail site, and continued growing and expanding the business. The rest is history. After the 2 acres filled up I purchased 2 adjoining acres, and we now grow on about 3 of the 4 acres; the rest is house and gardens. I guess this is how a lot of us expand, by adding and changing over the years. After 25 years we changed our name to Glendale Select Plants, and we have just finished some smaller igloos for growing.

The Australian National Botanic Gardens (ANBG) in Canberra holds the largest collection of Australian plants in Australia, and its goals are to promote the study of and culture of Australian plants. Plant collections are held for a range of purposes including ex situ conservation, education, and display.

Canberra has a temperate climate with a temperature range from -6 ^oC to 40 ^oC, making it possible to grow a wide range of Australian plants species.

However, the soil is largely clay, which means that many species in the genus Eremophila, which grow naturally in sandy, well drained soils, are more difficult to establish unless grafted on to a suitable rootstock.

The ANBG holds 53 Eremophila species, many of which make excellent display plants. The flowers are usually bright and well displayed, often appearing en masse, but there are often one or two flowers on the plants throughout the year. Some, like E. racemosa, have the unusual characteristic of having a range of distinct colours as the flowers develop — orange to red to pink — all of which can be present at the same time. The leaf colour and form is often as distinct as the flowers, and there is almost always a strong colour contrast between the foliage and flowers.

All along my wife and I had a desire to have a nursery. In the 1980s we had joined the Australian Plant Society to find out more about Australian native plants. When I could, I continued to collect seeds and propagate plants from cuttings as a hobby. With changes in the manufacturing industry in Australia we set out in 2000 to establish a production nursery.

There are many issues that the nursery industry faces in tackling invasive plants in Australia. This is one of many environmental problems that face our industry. There has been a lot of misinterpretation as to the causes of invasive plants and their impact in Australia, and there are also a lot of interested parties and key stakeholders, from government (federal, state, and local), conservation groups, the media, the public, and the nursery industry.

The history of weeds in Australia is varied, and yes, the nursery industry has contributed to it — but we are actually working very hard to stop the impact of invasive plants on our natural and built environments. We need the help of industry, government, and the media to spread the word on minimising the impact of invasive plants.

For years now significant changes have been taking place in many arenas, but as these small shifts in thinking progress, they often bump into each other, creating greater awareness of each other and revealing an interrelationship not thought of before. The synergy of all these smaller and larger changes coming together creates some of the major shifts that we are now beginning to witness. For example, extreme weather all over the globe has more folks around the world believing the cause to be global warming, triggered by an excess of carbon in the atmosphere. The majority public opinion is that industrial pollution and exhaust from automobiles and two-stroke engines are major contributors to this problem.

New plants, information, and technology are always the hot topics in the trade magazines and shows, and certainly that keeps us all interested. But my sense is that what distinguishes a consistently profitable nursery or garden center is attention to the fundamentals. We will look forward and review some critical ones in my experience: labor and water management.

Finally, we’ll close with a dozen or so items of more traditional interest for you — specific ideas that you might implement to help you do a better job in the coming growing season.

Indole-3-acetic acid (IAA) was described in the mid-1930s. It is the principal, most abundant, and most physiologically relevant natural auxin (Thimann and Went, 1934; Thimann and Koepfli 1935; Blazich, 1988; Armstrong et al., 2002; Taiz and Zeiger, 2002). At high concentrations, IAA and other auxins enhance adventitious root formation, which is of paramount importance to horticultural practitioners who rely on the initiation of adventitious roots when propagating plants asexually.

After the discovery of IAA, synthetic auxins were discovered or developed. Potency and stability account for the widespread use of these chemicals. Asexual propagation of many plants without synthetic auxins is almost unimaginable. Indole-3-butyric acid (IBA) and naphthleneacetic acid (NAA) are commonly used auxins today, but some plants are not responsive. Perhaps certain plants lack chemical receptors necessary for any form of auxin to be effective at promoting roots on detached stems. But it is at least equally plausible that new chemical forms of auxin could be developed that will overcome recalcitrance. Variation in the efficacy of known auxins among species justifies efforts to develop and evaluate alternative auxins. Indeed, the potential value of new auxins has been recognized for at least two decades (Blazich, 1988).

Capillary mats have been used by grower almost for more than 75 years. They were made of different types of fiber such as wool, cotton, and more recently with synthetic fibers like fiber glass polypropylene, polyester, and acrylic. Their use was principally to get uniform watering on greenhouses benches. This is also one reason they are still needed by grower, but they lost some popularity due to important problems of disease and algae propagation into their open structure that is remaining wet all the time, and evaporating water at the same time. In fact, capillary mats were never popular on their ability to save water because they never did so, but mainly to save time in getting a uniform crop. Growers are facing now more water and energy restrictions than never, and we would like to present you the new generation of capillary mat that can really save water and energy and solve major disease, runoff, and environmental problems.

Today I’ve been asked to speak about softwood propagation and will let you in on "How we do it. " We propagate 1.5 million plants every year. 1 million of those plants are made as softwood cuttings throughout the spring, summer, and fall months, which are mostly shrubs, perennials, and broadleaf evergreens. The other 500,000 are conifers made as hardwood cuttings in the winter.

Douglas-fir (Pseudostuga menziesii) has been used in many parts of the world as a Christmas tree, forest tree, and landscape plant. Much of the need for Douglas-fir is for reforestation and as such seed propagation is common and relatively easy. The Christmas tree and landscape industries have been limited in the development of commercially available cultivars of Douglas-fir due to difficulties with vegetatively reproducing clones of desired unique plants. Mass production by vegetative propagation has been successful but limited to "bulking up" seed supplies of elite families of Douglas-fir for the forest industry (Richie, 1993). High percentage rooting has been limited to propagating from juvenile seedlings. Success is significantly reduced with rooting of cuttings when stock plants experience their first dormancy as a seedling. Mature cuttings not only are difficult to root but the resulting plants are often very plagiotropic (horizontal) in growth causing plants to have undesirable form.

Over the past 6 years Bailey Nurseries, Inc. has been delivering IBA (indole-3-butyric acid) to unrooted cuttings in a couple of ways; manual basal dips before planting and overhead sprays after planting is complete. Careful, repetitive trialing has shown us that many of the taxa respond equally as well to being sprayed with water soluble IBA after sticking instead of the traditional hand dip method that we have used for years. In both our Minnesota and Oregon propagation facilities the shift in delivery method has been driven by a desire to reduce our employees’ exposure to chemicals, develop a more streamlined and sanitary approach to propagation, and to reduce the labor costs associated with rooting hormone applications. All of these goals need to be met while maintaining our standards of high quality, well-rooted cuttings. Using Hortis IBA water soluble salts has helped us reach these objectives with many of our taxa.

A propagation house should be kept separate from the rest of the nursery, and traffic through it should be minimal. A foot dip with daily-refreshed disinfectant is a good way to set a tone of high sanitation standards for all who enter.

I was soon screeching to a stop by the side of the road, jumping out of the car, Felcos in hand, and hauling home a myriad of unknown genera. It?s taken a few years to identify all that stuff and some of it still grows at my home in Connecticut. Some needed several applications of Roundup before it would go away! Boy, those invasive plants sure do smell good! Having no real direction back then, I became known as one of those "she?ll try anything" people and the recipient of garbage bags full of intriguing and mysterious cuttings. In one of those bags came my first Daphne branches.

For those uninitiated souls, the genus Daphne consists of 50 species ranging in origin from Europe to Asia, from the Caucasus to Siberia, from Zones 4 to 7. Daphne can be deciduous or evergreen. To my knowledge, all are extremely fragrant and all have a very bad (and in my opinion) somewhat undeserved reputation for "sudden death syndrome. "

Ornamental attributes of many native shrubs and small trees have been recognized, but some taxa remain rare in commerce, and little information on propagation is available. Availability of plants for restoration projects also remains limited while the demand for propagules for such projects is on the rise. Many species with horticultural merit also have become rare in the wild, in part due to destruction of their natural habitat for anthropogenic use, and at times because of over collection of wild plants from natural areas. Such losses prevent horticultural assessment of native plants and increase our reliance on non-native species that do not reflect a region’s natural heritage, may become invasive, or may introduce pests and pathogens. Use of native plants in natural and managed landscapes can help contribute to preserving the overall biodiversity and the within-species genetic diversity of indigenous taxa while providing attractive alternatives to the more common, homogeneous landscapes.

Approximately two-thirds of North American woody species exhibit some form of seed dormancy (Schopmeyer, 1974), and inhibitors to germination can develop at various times during seed development (Bradbeer, 1988).

To fully respect the planet we live on and the communities in which we dwell, we must understand the immediate, and specific, place where we live and work. People are more environmentally conscious than ever before as we learn to work in cooperation — rather than competition — with nature. Recent drought conditions in Canada, for example, have made us very conscious of the value of our water supply. We now have a very heightened awareness of the delicacy of our ecosystems.

As horticulturalists, and plant propagators, we continually look for ways to work in harmony with local climate and soil conditions. The upfront costs involved in making the shift to more natural plantings is offset by the considerable savings to be achieved in long-term maintenance.

A tall grass prairie, for example, which the first European settlers in North America described as a sea of amber waves, is composed of plants that belong and are rooted in the North American climate zones where they flourish and propagate easily.

Some believe the orchid family to be the most evolved because orchids have adapted to attract specific pollinators and/or to marginal conditions where other plants can’t grow. This specificity to pollinators and habitat has also made orchids vulnerable to extinction when their habitat or that of their pollinators is disturbed. All orchids have been placed under protection of CITES, the Convention on the International Trade of Endangered Species. This document regulates the international shipping of all orchids. Orchids that have been micropropagated or hybrids between species are issued a CITES certificate along with a phytosanitary certificate with no additional difficulty.

Orchids that are successfully pollinated develop a capsule that may contain thousands to millions of seeds. These tiny seeds are easily carried by wind or float on water and thus orchids are found on all continents except Antarctica. With an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 species worldwide, orchids are the largest flowering plant family. Adding to this species diversity, are the even larger number of hybrids that have been made between species.

Tissue culture refers to the culture of complete plants or, more often, excised plant organs under sterile conditions on a nutrient medium. The techniques for successful tissue culture were developed in the previous century: growth under sterile conditions, satisfactory inorganic and organic nutrients, and plant growth regulators. Tissue culture has been utilised in horticulture for the removal of pathogens (by meristem culture), various biotechnological breeding techniques (among others, embryo rescue, genetic engineering), and vegetative propagation. In this paper I will focus on vegetative propagation in tissue culture, also referred to as micropropagation. This technology was established in the 1950s and 1960s, with the first commercialization immediately following. Rapid growth of micropropagation occurred through to the 1990s, and ever since, growth has been steady, both with respect to the total numbers of plants produced, and the number of micropropagated crops.

What the term really means is that a certain plant is hardy somewhere warmer than where you live. Using this assumption, it’s easy to then understand this term is a catchall group that might include herbaceous and evergreen perennials, semitropical and tropical woody plants, bulbs, palms, ferns, grasses, succulents, and even water plants.

Although seed can be an economical way to propagate perennials, propagating perennials from seed is not without its challenges. Seed size and shape varies tremendously among species, and small or irregular seed can be challenging to handle and sow, whether by hand or with automated equipment.

In addition, perennial seed can be contaminated with weed seeds, debris, or other materials. Finally, it is not uncommon to see extremely wide variation in germination and vigor among different seed lots of a given perennial species, particularly those that have dormancy mechanisms. Together, these characteristics can make consistent success germinating perennials challenging for growers.

KEY FACTORS IN GERMINATION

Moisture, temperature, and light are the three primary keys to germinating perennial seed. The goal with moisture management is to provide sufficient moisture for germination, without over saturating the media. Oversaturation reduces oxygen levels, slows growth, and promotes disease.

• Greenhouse concepts
• Airco Greenhouse, objectives and tools
• New growth insights
• Result from field trials
• Examples of up and running projects
• Aircomatic

• Dutch government has set the objective: Horticulture should be an energy-neutral industry by 2020
• New vision: greenhouse as energy source
• Ever-ongoing quest for cost reduction
• Trial and error approach (Innogrow, Knowhouse, etc.)
• Mutual effort: Synergie platform (Growers, government, research, and suppliers)

• Six tomato growers
• Two pepper growers
• Five potted plants
• Two cut flowers
• Three bedding plants
• Four bedding and potted flowers

A comprehensive energy auditing program was developed based on our experiences with these audited facilities and others. The auditing program is set-up to accommodate four different levels of participation (with different cost commitments).

The figure below (Fig. 1) illustrates the different levels of participation.

So if complete coverage of the new forms is not realistic here, the next, and in my opinion even better option, it’s to talk about the opportunities that exist for future work. I will cite several of the newer forms and what they have brought to the table and then discuss where we might go from here.

Cornus canadensis. While this is a plant that frustrates many gardeners and producers alike, most miss the primary reasons for their failure. An examination of the circumpolar distribution of the species immediately indicates a requirement for cool growing seasons.

Founded in 1991 by Dr. Harold Pellett, the Landscape Plant Development Center is a non-profit 501c(3) organization that operates solely on contributed funds and royalties in order to promote the development of durable, cold-hardy ornamentals. After having taught for 34 years at the University of Minnesota and developing at least 25 (Table 1) well-recognized plants, he recognized how little was being devoted to the development of new durable, cold-hardy plants. First begun and still headquartered at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, the Center has a dedicated and still expanding distribution of full- and part-time researchers across the country.

The Center’s unique approach to research and development is unmatched by any other institution. It has adopted a cooperative approach to its work that consists of engaging a network of approximately 80 plant scientists from universities, research stations, and arboreta from across the globe. It provides important access to a wide range of plant collections and test sites in different geographic regions. The Center provides funds to hire research technicians for these cooperative efforts at academic institutions and arboreta and those institutions in turn, leverages the use of their existing facilities and, in many cases, the expertise of their scientists to help conduct the research.

The process of seed collection and cleaning has many facets and considerations when the goal is to produce viable seed of a desired species that can be used for production of these desired species. The most common and economical method of producing plants is to grow them from seed. Many fine points must be considered when collecting and cleaning seed to ensure that the fruits of the collectors’ efforts will be rewarded with a bounty of clean and viable seed.

The planning process for collecting seed may begin as early as decades in advance as in the case of establishing a seed orchard expressly for that purpose or perhaps 2 years in advance when scouting the timing of pollen release with conelet production and the weather conditions associated with these events. For most people this planning involves spotting trees or shrubs with an obvious seed crop and trying to decide how to most easily collect it.

For most collectors, the crop is usually checked for proper species identification, maturation, ripening, and abscission. Consideration should also be made as to the genetic background of the trees or shrubs from which you are considering collecting. The phenotype is a good indicator of what the offspring will also look like. Very often, heavy crops of seeds are produced on some of the most unworthy specimens of their species.

Since plants are photosynthetic organisms it is no surprise that seed germination if based upon the affects of light as well. Seed can be roughly divided into two categories, those that require light to germinate and those that germinate in the dark. Each category provides the germinating seedlings with a definitive survival strategy. Foxtail grass, Setaria sp., will not germinate unless the seed are exposed to light. Anecdotal accounts have suggested that Setaria seed has a life span of greater than 40 years and can germinate at any point along that life span provided basic environmental elements are met, which includes exposure to light.

According to Sokol and Stross (1992) the germination of most seeds, spores of ferns, lichens, mosses, and related plants is activated by brief exposures to red light. The exact mechanism is known as the phytochrome response and it is based upon the role of the various photoreceptor proteins, Phytochrome A, Phytochrome B, and Phytochrome C and how they are affected by the influx of red and far red light. The ratio of which regulates the activity of germinating seeds. In addition to the phytochromes there are other light initiating germination pigment systems, one or more for blue light and one for ultraviolet A and one for Ultraviolet B, called crytochromes (Chory, 1996). Cross (2006 Internet citation) also lists some twenty four different functions that Phytochrome activity affects in germinating and developing plants. The phytochrome and cytochrome responses to light can be modulated and influenced by a series of screening pigments in seed batches (Cone and Kendrick, 1985).

I really think that whatever you decide to use, your goal is to propagate plants with the best return on investment. You also have to propagate plants which will live for a long time.

I have my idea about the future of grafting but I wanted to get viewpoints from propagators in the industry about this topic. I contacted many nursery people around the world to determine what they are thinking about the future of grafting. The answers I got were from small and large businesses located in Canada, U.S.A., France, and Belgium.

I asked questions about:

• Grafting machines and their use.
• Number of cuttings/hour/person, budding/hour/person, and grafts/hour/person done in the nurseries.
• Difficulty to find good workers to do grafting.
• Growing grafted plants or growing plants on their own roots.
• Short- and long-term incompatibility problems with grafts.
• Loss of knowledge due to retired workers.
• New developments about grafting in your nurseries.

• Berberis thunbergii ‘Maria’ pp#18,082, Gold Pillar Japanese barberry
• Berberis thunbergii ‘Talago’ ppaf, Sunjoy^™ Gold Beret Japanese barberry
• Buxus sempervirens ‘Mont Bruno’
• Buxus sinica var. insularis Wee Willie^™ Korean boxwood
• Camellia japonica ‘Beatrix Hoyt’
• Camellia japonica ‘Margaret Radcliff’
• Cercis glabra
• Helianthus ‘Capenoch Star’
• Hibiscus syriacus ‘Notwood3’ ppaf, cbraf Blue Chiffon^™ rose of Sharon
• Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Lynn’ ppaf, Let’s Dance^™ Starlight hydrangea
• Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Robert’ ppaf, Let?s Dance^™ Moonlight hydrangea
• Magnolia fraseri, mountain magnolia
• Syringa ‘Purple Haze’
• Weigela florida ‘Carlton’ ppaf, cbraf, Ghost^™ weigela

Berberis thunbergii ‘Maria’ pp#18,082, Gold Pillar Japanese barberry

Similar in shape to Helmond Pillar, but with bright golden foliage and red new growth. Great garden architecture. Bright orange-red autumn foliage is stunning. Proven to be burn resistant in side by side tests with other yellow leaved barberry. Certified Rust resistant. Size: 3-4 ft. USDA Zone 4. Breeder: Lucjan Kurowski of Poland.

As an ornamental group of plants, hazelnuts (Corylus) are grown for their showy spring catkins, ornamental habits, red-colored foliage, and as stress-tolerant street and boulevard trees (C. americana, C. avellana ‘Contorta’ and ‘Fuscorubra’, and C. colurna, respectively) (Dirr, 1998; Flint, 1997). Most of these are familiar landscape plants but less familiar is C. fargesii, a fast-growing and highly ornamental tree introduced in the mid-1990s from China into several North American arboreta.

Although it was virtually unknown in North America prior to 1996, C. fargesii is now well-established in several American arboreta as a result of seed collected by the North American China Plant Exploration Consortium’s (NACPEC) 1996 expedition to Shaanxi and Gansu provinces, in the People’s Republic of China. The trees have highly attractive bark patterning, exfoliating to reveal patches of copper and russet, and this ornamental characteristic rivals the most attractive birches. In 2005 additional seed was collected on NACPEC’s expedition to Gansu province (Aiello, 2006).

Approximately 40 years ago, Alfred Fordham, propagator at the Arnold Arboretum from 1958 to 1976, began to develop a seed herbarium.

Today, there are 2104 specimens in the seed herbarium, 1878 of which are from accessioned plants found in the living collection. Of the latter, over 472 originate from Arboretum plants of known wild origin.

All images include seed measurements, and reference to the record and accession numbers of the specimen pictured. This information, information, along with all other plant related information is stored in a BG-Base database.

After the war, when I was 16, I went to horticultural school while working in a fruit tree nursery that taught me to bud and graft (scars are still on my fingers). They were generous to teach me. The information about soil management gained at the horticultural school still comes back.

My father decided to go to North America where we were fortunate to land in an area that had nurseries. He and I worked at this fruit tree nursery that sold rosebushes as well. During the depression my dad burned 30,000 rose bushes twice over. He vowed he would never grow roses again. Yet, ironically, it was the one of the first items we propagated in Canada.

The Northeastern portions of the United States or America and Canada offer many environments that accommodate a host of diverse plant species, and taxa. Unfortunately little is available commercially in the family Cactaceae the exception of Opuntia humifusa (Fig. 1), which occurs naturally from Florida to New Jersey and therefore suited for the Northeastern climate variations. Trial gardens at Lorax Farms and Meadowbrook Farms (Meadowbrook, Pennsylvania) have shown that cacti are adaptable to this region if given particular attention to cultural conditions.

The genus Hibiscus has approximately 41 species that range from tropical herbaceous and woody plants to cold-hardy herbaceous and woody plants. Colors range from white, yellow, pinks, orange, red, purple, and near blue. Colored foliage and cutleaf forms add to the mix. Many of the new forms of H. syriacus from the National Arboretum are sterile as are two selections from the Winterthur Museum and Gardens, ‘Tosca’ and ‘Lohengrin’. Breeding efforts have centered on the production of sterile, seedless selections of H. syriacus which is the main species used by the late Dr. Don Egolf at the National Arboretum and the late Hal Bruce at Winterthur Museum and Gardens. But to date the colors for sterile cultlivars so far have been white, pink, magenta, and light lavender with no sterile forms with blue flowers. The intent here is to begin the initial phases to breed a blue flowered sterile form of H. syriacus.

Plectranthus, an Old World genus, is a group of herbaceous plants belonging to the Lamiaceae family and consists of about 350 known species distributed throughout summer rainfall areas of Africa, Madagascar, India, Australia, and a few of the Pacific islands (Van Jaarsveld, 2006). Plectranthus are mostly soft, low-growing semi-succulent to succulent herbs or shrubs, some with unusually beautiful tubular flowers ranging in color from blue, violet, white, and pink (Brits et al., 2001). The name Plectranthus literally means spurflower (plectron = spur and anthos = flower) and refers to the spur at the base of the corolla tube of Plectranthus fruiticosus.

This species was the first plant in this genus to be described (Codd, 1975). This name is confusing because only a couple of the species in the genus have this spur. Plectranthus is a very diverse group of plants with some of the species converging into other genera. DNA studies are needed to clarify some of the taxonomic confusion within this genus.

One of the most important environmental challenges of the modern grower will be the optimal use of water, fertilizers, and pesticides. For this, new water management approaches need to be developed. The actual project focused on methods to reduce water and fertilizer use in nursery production. During summer and Fall 2004, 11 nurseries have tried the new capillary mat Hydro-Switch^™ growth mat in their own growing conditions. These trials gave the opportunity to see how the capillary mat performed under different water management and crops. The first goal of these trials was to measure plant growth under conventional water managements compared with the growth with the new capillary mat Hydro-Switch growth mat. The second goal was to compare the water use with different water treatments.

• I.P.P.S. Member for 55 years
• Award of Merit Recipient Eastern Region, North America
• Fellow Recipient Eastern Region, North America
• Past President Eastern Region, North America

Nurseryman and Propagator

A member of I.P.P.S. since 1952 (a year after the Society was founded) Bill Flemer lived the I.P.P.S. motto "To Seek and Share." He was talked into joining I.P.P.S. by his good friend and founding member Jim Wells.

A very active member of I.P.P.S. for many years, Bill presented over 25 papers to the Society and was always ready to answer questions raised by members during meetings. His extensive knowledge of plants and his tireless efforts to improve plant cultivars for the industry led him to introduce over 60 trees and shrubs.

Bill was a walking encyclopedia of plants, propagation, and production techniques. As part of his plant development program he was heavily involved in the development of new and more effective propagation and production techniques. Bill lectured widely on nursery management, plant propagation, woody plant breeding, and shade tree selection and use.

Anthracnose caused by the ubiquitous fungus Colletotrichum gloeosporioides is a very serious disease on Euonymus fortunei, particularly on cultivars such as ‘Emerald Gaiety’ and ‘Emerald ‘n’ Gold’. The disease causes leaf spots and stem cankers (Fig. 1), often resulting in leaf drop and stem dieback, and is often confused with low temperature injury (Fig. 2). Ontario nursery growers have reported losses of up to 60% in susceptible cultivars. In Canada, there is only one fungicide (Daconil) registered for anthracnose management on Euonymus. In any integrated pest management program, the rotation of fungicides with different modes of action (chemical families) is imperative for long-term disease management.

The purpose of this study was to: 1) follow disease incidence as it progresses throughout the growing season and 2) identify foliar fungicides that reduce the incidence of euonymus anthracnose and can be used in rotation with Daconil.

This was in 1941 during the Nazi occupation of Denmark in World War II. Shortly after the war, my parents started a small nursery that never grew beyond the original two acres.

This is where I grew up, in a life with plants that had to provide our livelihood. Often that was very meager. There was a lot of love and a lot of teaching, and somehow we all liked those plants. Unfortunately, my father often liked too many that never produced for the livelihood. Since our family could not afford to send me to high school (you paid for that in those days) I was apprenticed out to a nursery in a neighboring town. Here I learned to grow many plants that I never knew about from my father?s place. The boss was good; he even grew some plants just so I could learn how to do it!

• Herb Spencer working in open plots in front of original wood-frame screen cages containing plants and honey bees ca 1965.
• 1957 — Honey bees were first used to pollinate cages of carrots, beets, celery, and onion; seed production in cages (consisting of wood frames covered with screen) was compared to that in openpollinated plots of same accessions (Hoover, 1957).
• 1970s — 50 to 70 accessions of carrots, onions, parsley, and celery were increased in cages out of total 3000 to 3500 accessions grown annually.
• 1978 — Major improvements in 1.5 m x 1.5 m x 6 m (5 ft x 5 ft x 20 ft or "small") field cage used for controlled insect pollination including metal cage frame covered with Lumite^® flat screen and development of nucleus honey bee hive box (Ellis et al., 1981).

In 2004, 11.4-L (3-gal) containerised tree liners grown under RRGs had 0% mortality after planting-out into nursery fields to grow on, while mortality of field bare root production Quercus rubra was 42%. Averaged over all species in the trials, RRG liners reached saleable size (50-mm caliper) 2 years sooner than bare-root liners, representing a 40% reduction in production time.

In 2006, 11.4-L containerized tree liners from RRGs had 27% mortality, while mortality from field bare-root production was 87% after potting on into 26.5-L (7-gal) containers and stood in harsh conditions in PiP fields. Averaged over all species in the trials, and from one growing season, caliper (18.9 mm) and height (166.43 cm) of RRG liners were significantly larger than bare-root liners (3.6 mm and 26 cm).

In only 4 months, between 1 May and 30 Aug. 2007, heights and calipers of 178 cm and 9.9 mm Cercis canadensis; 146 cm and 9.7 mm Tilia cordata ‘Green Spire‘; and 118.4 cm and 7.4 mm Acer x freemanii ‘Jeffersred‘, Autumn Blaze^™ Freeman maple liners were produced at Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.

This study supported our hypothesis that RRG liners can be double-cropped, accelerating production further. We are currently working with 10-mm caliper liners that are double-cropped out of RRGs to produce 50-mm-caliper PiP container trees in 2 years, representing a 67% reduction in production time compared with conventional nursery practices.

Whenever there is a problem on a nursery there are a number of ways of dealing with it. There are as many solutions as there are growers, but the main thing is to identify the problem and focus on it. Financial matters are no exception.

Most of us come into growing because of our interest in plants and their cultivation. The most successful growers nowadays maintain good plant health and nursery hygiene, while monitoring closely for the first signs of trouble. Everything is grown to schedule to get the best from prevailing seasonal weather conditions. They have the knowledge and equipment to take the best course of action before major problems occur; hence the final crop is of good quality, and hopefully it will sell.

If we put the same degree of focus into financial care that we put into crop care, there is potential to make savings. The worst costs are those created by unforeseen events and lack of uniformity. With careful planning these can be avoided.

This paper will focus on the approach that we use at Kingfisher Nursery, not because this is necessarily the best or only way but because we have reaped rewards and we hope the same approach will work for others.

Increasing income is not just about charging more for your product. Achieving a higher price can help but the nursery owner?s primary task is tight control over business management.

It is vital that every month — or at the very least every quarter — you analyse how much it costs to produce, market, deliver, and sell your products. A breakdown of how much it costs to service various customers is sound business sense, because one of the most important ways of controlling costs is to understand which customers cost the least to service, which cost the most, and why those servicing costs vary. The outcome of such an analysis will provide guidance about the customers you should be putting the most or least effort into to develop. This is a fundamental ground rule that one should establish before embarking on business expansion.

The type of customer you want to concentrate on depends on whether you are aiming to be a niche market specialist or a "run of the mill" production nursery geared up for high volumes and tough competition in what may well be a price-sensitive market place. The latter is not necessarily a bad place to be, because if you can get this right then customers will come to you to work in partnership, but you really have to be mean and lean.

The author runs Green?s Leaves, a small business producing specialist plants selling to landscapers and to the general public at plant fairs, and works part-time in the new plants R&D department of Wyevale Nurseries, a large wholesale nursery stock business.

As a supplier of garden centre stock, Wyevale Nurseries is constantly being asked about new plants being offered in the latest catalogue, whether new to cultivation, new to the nursery, or new to production in commercial numbers.

The Royal Horticulture Society Plant Finder lists more than 70,000 plants available from nurseries in the U.K., which just shows what a comparatively small number of lines the average individual nursery can offer. While customers have been conditioned to expect new plants (by promotion material from nurseries, constant release of new varieties, and greater media interest), there needs to be a strict process to ensure only worthwhile plants are added to a nursery?s list.

Springfield Nurseries is a small nursery specialising in fruit trees. I developed a miniature apple tree product range that we called "Coronet. " It has been on the market since 1998 and is now selling in Ireland, U.K., and Europe. This paper shares our experiences in product innovation using Coronet as an example.

Product innovation is the development of a new product or the restyling of an existing one. It could involve changing the appearance of a plant so that it has, for example, brighter colours or more flowers. It could also involve changing the image of a plant so that the market perceives it as having a higher value.

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

During the 1980s and 1990s the apple trees supplied to garden centres would end up as large trees, up to 5 m high and wide, in consumers’ gardens.

Western Australia has a world-renowned, highly diverse, and unique flora, with approximately 12,000 known taxa of vascular plants from over 220 families (Paczkowska and Chapman, 2000). Major families represented include Myrtaceae, Proteaceae, Mimosaceae, Epacridaceae, and Papilionaceae. This diverse flora has adapted to a wide range of habitats, soil types, and climatic conditions, from subtropical, deserts, and sand plains to eucalyptus forests, coastal heath, and mallee country. The southwest corner of the state in particular has extremely high diversity, with many endemic species. Unfortunately it also has many rare and threatened species, giving it the status of being Australia?s only globally recognised biodiversity hotspot.

Kings Park is a 406-ha urban park that receives almost 5 million visitors a year. It includes a large area of remnant bushland (260 ha) with its own unique biodiversity and is also the home of Western Australia?s 17-ha state botanic garden.

This paper is based on work carried out at Las Cuevas Research Station, Belize, during a 6-week work placement, as part of the author’s Bachelor of Science Honours Degree, in Horticulture with Plantsmanship, at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh (RBGE) and Scottish Agricultural College, Edinburgh, sponsored by RBGE and Maya Forest Enterprises, in Summer 2007.

The Chiquibul Rainforest AND Las Cuevas Research Station

The Chiquibul Forest Reserve and National Park of Belize is located in the Maya mountain range in the west of the country and bordering with Guatemala. The rainforest lies at the centre of the tri-national Maya Forest, the largest remaining intact tropical forest north of the Amazon, and includes the countries of Mexico and Guatemala. Covering an area of more than 500,000 ha, the Chiquibul Forest is the largest protected area within Belize. Its rich diversity of plant and animal species makes this natural reserve an important area of biodiversity.

As a Kew Diploma in Horticulture student I had the opportunity to travel to Mexico to research the natural habitats and growing conditions of cacti and succulents and to study the genus Pinguicula, widely represented in this country.

Mexico covers about 2 million km², bordered by the U.S.A. in the north and by Guatemala and Belize in the southeast. There are five general geographical regions: Baja California and the Buried Ranges of northwest Mexico; the central plateau and the bordering Sierra Madre; the Gulf Coast plain and Yucatan Peninsula; the trans-Mexican volcanic belt; and the highlands of south Mexico.

The climate varies from arid and semi-arid to humid and semi-humid under the influence of trade winds and cyclones and a wide range of elevations from sea level to 5700 m. Summer is in theory the rainy season, but the precipitation varies notably from place to place.

This paper highlights the vast array of propagation and nursery production being carried out by botanic gardens for the conservation of plant collections; for training and education; and even for the production of plants for sale. Botanic garden staff members possess a huge amount of nursery knowledge and skill, but unfortunately within the U.K. there are relatively few examples of botanic gardens linking with the commercial nursery industry. This paper concludes by identifying an area of potential collaboration between nurseries and botanic gardens.

WHAT BOTANIC GARDENS DO

The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) is one of the world’s leading botanic gardens, and its work is representative of that carried out by many other botanic gardens. The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh’s overall mission is to "explore and explain the world of plants, " which is achieved in five main ways.

Hybridization is how many new plants are created, but bamboos with such a long interval between flowering, there has been very little crossing, none in the U.S.A. or Europe as far as I know. There are thought to be a few naturally occurring hybrids. Semiarundinaria fastuosa is thought to be one. Hibanobambusa tranquillans is another. In the mountains of Costa Rica there are some chusqueas that have hybridized.

Mike and Jim asked me to tee up this event and gave me lots of rope. They suggested that I might answer the question, "How did you do that?" from starting our Heritage Seedlings Nursery until today — asking me to tell our story. So my hope is to shine some light onto how we have done it. But after a generation in this business, I am convinced that success is not so much about what you do as it is about who you are.

Defining who we are will be an essential matter in the next 5–7 years because, in my own judgment, there will be more change in horticulture during this time than in the previous twenty. Just the matter of demographics — retiring current owners — will cause this. A big proportion of well-established wholesale growers and owners are in their late 50s and 60s.

Technological change will put enormous pressure on mid-sized family firms that may not have the profit in a maturing industry of price competition to invest in economies of scale, labor-saving equipment, and computer controls.

When I was a youngster in Pittsburgh, both of my grandfathers were avid gardeners. They lived near one another and would have a friendly competition each year to see who could produce the earliest ripe tomato and the year’s biggest watermelon.

My paternal grandfather liked to grow his annual flowers from seed sown directly into his annual flowerbeds. Each year in late spring he would thin his beds to give the remaining plants room to grow and develop the optimum flower display. The surplus plants that were removed from the beds were carefully wrapped in wet newspaper and given to me to plant at home in my youth garden.

With today’s considerable interest in native plants there is still much to be learned on how to bring those natives to the forefront of nursery production and utilization in the landscape. When highly desirable natives found in natural environments are displaced and brought into much more foreign locales, the degree of success can be adversely affected. Perhaps the most notable example is the arbitrary movement of high-altitude species to much lower ranges. These transitions are often fraught with difficulties and such difficulties are even more exacerbated by accompanying changes in longitude and latitude. The scope of this paper is to look at some of the problems with regards to particular species and possible suggestions on how to increase survival of non-endemic Western species to East coast environments.

What started as a way to reduce the amount of liquid fertilizer applied to the floor of our greenhouses during the production of spring annuals and forced crops has blossomed into a much more targeted and accurate way of applying nutrition. I kept looking at crops that were spaced between 50% and 88% and thinking how much liquid fertilizer was being wasted every time the injector clicked and pumped. By providing individual plants the nutrients they need instead of supplying water-soluble fertilizer to an entire growing area we can reduce the amount of fertilizer that is applied to the spaces, walkways, greenhouse ends, and voids within a group of plants. We asked ourselves what other crops were spaced or shipped at staggered times from the greenhouses. Various programs and propagation schedules began popping up. Potted liners were spaced between varieties for watering needs and shipped at different times when orders were taken.

Layering can be briefly described as the process wherein adventitious roots are formed on a propagule while still attached to the parent plant. Layering can take a number of forms or techniques, including simple layering, tip layering, air layering, serpentine layering, French or continuous layering, mound layering or stooling, and trench or etiolation layering. Bruce Macdonald gives an excellent overview of these sundry methods in his book Practical Woody Plant Propagation for Nursery Growers. Layering is also seen commonly in nature, occurring widely in Rubus and Hedera, among many others.

We all know that new varieties are the lifeblood of the nursery business. For many propagators, the difference between success and failure is determined by how skillful they are in getting access to new materials and then putting them into meaningful production as quickly as possible. The use of plant patents or trademarks (brands) is on the increase and their use constitutes an important way for breeders and marketers to get a return on the investment of cultivar (here after referred to as variety) development and promotion. However, the very likelihood of a propagator getting access to new varieties depends only in part on his or her technical knowledge. It also depends on how well that propagator has handled other varieties or trademarks in the past. The understanding of how patents and trademarks (collectively, intellectual property or IP) function in horticulture is, therefore, of increasing importance for propagators, in particular for those whose sole business is propagation.

This presentation is intended to briefly introduce these concepts to the new propagator, or in the case of the experienced propagator, to review them. In reviewing the rules and established practices, some potential IP pitfalls will be discussed, and finally some ideas offered that may be useful in avoiding them. Although this presentation is aimed at propagators, it is hoped that licensors of IP may find some benefit also.

By "efficiency" I mean any step that saves us money by lowering labor and production expense. As I see it, it’s not "how fast can we make our fingers stick the cuttings," but rather how we can protect profit.

A LITTLE BACKGROUND ABOUT US

We may be best known as breeders and propagators of new Begonia x rex-cultorum selections but, that is only the tip of the iceberg. We specialize in the novel and unusual. For example, our carnivorous plant program may be the world’s largest. We have bred and patented over 20 begonias. We hold the only patent ever granted for a carnivorous plant, ‘Cobra Nest’, patent 12,821, a highly colored Sarracenia cultivar which is easy for commercial growers to finish.

When my father started the nursery in the mid 1950s, he began by growing arborvitae, juniper, and other common popular plants of the day. He was a truck-crop farmer growing berries, potatoes, and cabbage on the family farm that his father had emigrated to from Sweden in the late 1800s. He looked to a few nurserymen who were very open to give him guidance and he would always be looking for different plants he could add to help improve his mix.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, my brother and I grew up and began to help around the nursery. The assortment of plants grown increased greatly and more land was acquired.

This presentation will briefly detail the findings of numerous production nursery visits in Oregon, Washington and the lower mainland of British Columbia. The distance traveled focused on trials, tribulations, successes, and shortcomings of control-release fertilizers (CRFs). The thought here is to present a brief picture of the role of CRFs in nursery production in the Pacific Northwest.

INTRODUCTION

What is contained between the margins of this manuscript is clearly not a research paper. It contains neither new earth-shaking nor evolutionary ideas. What is briefly detailed is a refresher for those who treat knowledge of nutrition needs, horticultural production practices, and specific crop tolerances as a foregone conclusion. What is needed is an open discussion of what has changed in the way some production nurseries are using CRFs. There are more aspects to a controlled-release nutrient than just getting plants to market. Focusing on what cannot be seen may play a more prominent role in the near future than just plant nutrition. These "new" uses have come not from deep within the manufacturer’s sterile laboratories, or the brain-child of some white-coated laboratory chemist, but rather by the "trial-andkill" method of the true innovators in horticultural research, the humble grower.

We have been able to keep this site reasonably productive by rotating different kinds of crops throughout different locations at the nursery and utilizing winter and summer cover crops between nursery crop cycles. Another management practice we have utilized to control soil pathogens is soil fumigation. We used methyl bromide/chloropicrin in the early days but found it very challenging to grow deciduous seedlings after eliminating mycorrhiza from the soil profile.

Jim Booman: We use cookie cutters to cut the leaves.

Jim Owen: Should less controlled-release fertilizers be applied when working with plugs?

Propagules have been reproduced asexually from stem cuttings to retain desired genotypic traits using mist propagation since the 1950s (Snyder, 1965). The successful initiation and development of roots is dependent on an optimum atmospheric and edaphic (or rooting) environment. Increased success of de novo root formation came with the introduction of natural and synthetic auxins. Wounding, basal auxin application, and control of the atmospheric environment, the latter being the primary interest in research and practice, have increased rooting percentages and root quality. Applying mist irrigation or shade cloth, or enclosing the propagules in polyethylene achieves increased relative humidity, decreased irradiance, and lower air and leaf temperatures. These environmental control methods maintain cell turgor in the absence of functional roots, retaining cell competence to form root initials (Hartmann et al., 1997). Further advances in the rate of root emergence and the quality of developing roots came with studies of the edaphic environment, the most significant being that higher basal stem temperatures increase the rate of metabolic processes. In addition, researchers continually study rooting media to determine what mixtures provide an optimal ratio of air and water to root individual stem cutting of specific taxa. The combination of proper atmospheric and edaphic environment result in high percent of cuttings rooted with a quality root system.

Carlton Plants’ composting program began as a basic, small-scale program directed toward waste management. A decade later it has become a large-scale, intensely managed supply of microbe-packed compost utilized for soil building and crop enhancement. The program addresses the negative aspect of burning and disposal of nursery waste from an environmental and economical standpoint. The process has led us to a better understanding and appreciation of the value of the finished product and the impact it can have on soil enhancement and product quality. Efficiency and cost control has been gained by fine tuning the process and by utilizing the finished product to replace traditional products like bark and sawdust in our operation.

Monrovia quality has been improved by paying close attention to the soils in which we grow our containerized plants. One aspect of our soils is the compost that we make and add to our soil, which gives benefits such as waste reduction and disease supressiveness. This presentation will cover the basics of how we make our compost, why a living soil is important, and the benefits that come from compost use.

Monrovia did not set out to make a great living soil. In the 1990s, Conrad Skimina, Monrovia’s Research Director, was interested in reducing the amount of waste that was generated by dumping plants. Monrovia has always had a commitment to growing healthy, high quality plants. Plants that do not meet Monrovia’s quality standards are dumped. Conrad reasoned that if the plant material were ground up, it could be added back into the soil mix, eliminating the waste disposal problem and making it a resource which could reduce the amount of bark that needed to be purchased for the soil mix.

Plants are dumped for many reasons including poor quality, over production, and broken plants. But plants are also dumped for disease, insect, or weed reasons. If the plants are to be ground up, and added back to the soil, the pest issues need to be dealt with. Skimina’s solution was to fumigate the ground-up plants, using methyl bromide. This method was very effective at eliminating the pests; in fact it eliminated everything living in the pile.

During the course of this article the author hopes that the reader is informed regarding the basics of plant breeding related to ornamental plants. But more importantly, the author hopes that the reader is inspired to pursue breeding plants in the future.

Many interesting and valuable ornamental plants have been hybridized by skilled, knowledgeable, and passionate amateurs. These breeders should be credited for elevating the quality and variety of ornamental plants being propagated and grown throughout the world. In fact, the bulk of the new plants introduced yearly are from amateur, yet skilled hybridizers. Ornamental horticulture is truly indebted to these talented individuals.

The interest and desire for superior plant selections in our industry has elevated the demand for these special plants. It is an exciting time to produce innovative and valuable plants.

The Hebe evaluation has been going on since 2000 at the Oregon State Uiversity (OSU) North Willamette Research and Extension Center (NWREC) in Aurora, Oregon. That evaluation is likely to continue through 2008. The Cistus and Halimium were evaluated in a joint planting at NWREC from 2004 through 2007. The Ceanothus is located at the Oregon Garden, and that evaluation was conducted from 2001 through 2005. The work has been supported by modest grants and assistance from several organizations.

Although Dr. Robert L. Ticknor?s horticultural biography includes much more than Pieris, Dr. Ticknor’s Pieris selections and breeding goals created many successful Pieris clones and the foundation for Pieris improvement at HortSolutions LLC. Pieris breeding and seedling growing procedures have been published (Jaynes and Ticknor, 1984; Starrett et al., 1992; Ticknor, 1988; van Hof, 1984), and similar techniques with minor adjustments are still in use. More recent Pieris breeding goals have been discussed (Svenson and Mathers, 2000; Svenson and Ticknor, 1997).

Depending upon the taxonomic (Judd, 1982; van Gelderen, 1979), or text reference (Dirr, 1990; Griffiths, 1992) one presently favors, the genus Pieris has from 7 to 20 species or more. The most widely cultivated Pieris are P. japonica (and its cultivars), P. formosa, P. floribunda, and interspecific hybrids of these three species (Bond, 1982; Bond and Lancaster 1996; Creech, 1983; Jaynes, 1975; Kruse, 1987). There is growing interest in P. phillyreifolia.

A working knowledge of the available species is of major importance in breeding programs. Sowing species seed provides potential hybridizers with variable progeny from which can be selected potential parental individuals displaying desirable characteristics. In the case of hellebores, these characteristics include both floral and foliar features combined with overall vigor.

SPECIES

Helleborus argutifolius. Native southern Europe/Corsica. Handsome caulescent specimen. A superb performer in the Pacific Northwest. Magnificent, variable foliage. The bold foliage creates an attractive contrast with the heavy effect of conifer foliage, i.e., Thuja.

Cultivars: ‘Janet Starnes’, speckled cream leaves; ‘Pacific Frost’, heavy cream foliage speckling.

Plant Select^® is a program designed to seek out and distribute the very best plants for gardens from the high plains to the intermountain region. Plant Select^® is a cooperative program administered by the Denver Botanic Gardens and Colorado State University together with landscape and nursery professionals throughout the Rocky Mountain region and beyond. Plant Select^® is a private not-for-profit Colorado corporation.

Sven Svenson: The life-span of this plant is a function of where you site them. Some will be durable under any conditions while others are going to be very sensitive to site conditions.

Neil Bell: Some are definitely short-lived. I grew ‘Centennial’ and it was very short-lived. We grow them in a well-drained soil and we don?t water them or prune them.

Eric Hammond: Can you elaborate on the use of calcium on the Pieris?

Because what we might think will always stay the same, probably won’t…

Because being a Texas Rangers Fan is "Dog" Tiring…

The 32nd Annual Meeting of the International Plant Propagators? Society-Southern Region of North America convened at 7:45 am at the Chattanooga Marriott, Chattanooga, Tennessee, with President Kay Phelps presiding.

PRESIDENT KAY PHELPS: President Phelps welcomed everyone to Chattanooga, Tennessee, for the 32nd Annual Meeting of the International Plant Propagators? Society - Southern Region of North America.

About 15 years ago, Saunders Brothers developed a spreadsheet that we use to compare the profit potential of various products we grow, or consider growing. We developed the spreadsheet by taking a tax return from a given year and expensing all costs incurred for the business in either a direct or indirect category.

Before getting into expenses, one needs to determine the units produced in a given calendar year. These units can be determined in one of two ways. You must either know the containers per cubic yard (CCY) of the container you are analyzing, or know its volume — see Figure 1. In an industry where a 13.6-L (3-gal) container is not always 3-gal, using the CCY, one can determine the cost of media in a 3-gal pot, if the containers per cubic yard are known. To generate the figure of total units produced, convert all containers into a single unit size using one container size as the base-line unit.

I have been involved ’hands on’ in grafting for some 30 years. During this time I have experienced monumental success and failure — sometimes both within a few weeks.

Nobody likes a poor take rate. Obviously there is more to grafting success than how an individual holds their knife, but sometimes it’s easier for a nursery manager to blame the grafter than look closer at their production processes.

Simple things can make a big difference. Since my livelihood is dependent on grafting success, I have observed what can go wrong with grafting as a way to assist growers in getting the best result. I am happy to share these clues.

BOTANY BASICS

My talk will use the term grafting, but I am also including budding in the discussion. Grafting entails matching stems of the rootstock with stems of the scion (shoot system) — which have more than one bud. Budding is typically the transfer of a single bud with a small portion of the scion stem. But let’s keep it simple.

Cultivation or herbicides can be used to maintain a weed-free strip 30 to 46 cm (12 to 18 in.) wide during the first year of nursery production. The strip can be widened annually to a maximum of 0.6 to 0.9 m (2 to 3 ft) on each side of the row. There is no need to spray middles that can be later cultivated. Vegetation in the middle is not harmful to the nursery crop, as long as a sufficiently wide, weed-free strip is maintained in the row. Vegetated middles reduce erosion and provide support for traffic. While band spraying reduces the amount of chemical required by 33% to 50%, it can require a longer application time, since the middle must be driven 1 to 2 times with a small tractor.

RIGGING to BAND SPRAY

While it is possible to rig a nozzle on the rear of a spray tank to spray a band along the row, the nozzle cannot be watched as easily as one mounted in front.

Native Museum soft color, sandstone, sedimentary

Food, corn, beans squash, sunflower, and tobacco

Heron stalks, fish mid cattails

In the middle of the capitol.

Vast array apparel apparent

Beaded skin dresses finely crafted, moccasins, papoose cradles

Ceremonial belts, collars many many more, galore.

Dumbarton Oaks Gardens huge trees

White oaks, willow oaks, large-leaf beech

Osage orange fruits like tennis balls strew the court

Flower borders mums, asters too brimming

Beautiful butterflies through

Large pebble mosaic wheat sheaf

What you sow, so shall you reap

Baring calamities drought, fungi, critters

For us sheep.

After 4 years of research and development at Virginia Tech, pine-tree substrate (WoodGro^™) shows excellent promise as an alternative and renewable container substrate for nursery and greenhouse crop production (Wright and Browder, 2005; Wright et al., 2006; Wright et al., 2008). Pine-tree substrate is competitively priced, locally available, and of consistent high quality. This is a totally different approach to container substrate production in that a new material is created for use as a container substrate rather than mining peat (P) (a nonrenewable resource) or using pine bark (PB) or some other industry by-product. The development of a new substrate for container-grown nursery crops is very timely since the availability of PB is currently unpredictable due to reduced forestry production and its increased use as fuel and landscape mulch (Lu et al., 2006). Further, the cost of peat substrates continues to rise due to transportation and growing environmental concerns over the mining of P bogs in Canada and Europe. This paper reports the current status of our research including the manufacturing process, physical properties, cost, growth trials, wood toxicity, fertility management, and post-transplant landscape evaluation.

Spring 2007 in Tennessee was drier than normal, but otherwise plants in nurseries and landscapes were in very good shape. According to the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), a measure of the greening of the canopy of the forest collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) at the Walker Branch Watershed in Oak Ridge, Tennessee — green-up of vegetation was 3 weeks earlier than in 2006. This was due to higher than normal temperatures. In most regions of the state, temperatures had reached temperatures of 21 to 27 ^oC (70 to 80 ^oF) by late March. During the first week of April, flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) was in full bloom.

INTRODUCTION

I want to talk to you today about plant nomenclature. A good word that is nearly as hard to pronounce as many of the plant names we have to use. It literally means a system of plant names. In reality it is a complex process whereby everyone in the world can talk about plants with some level of assurance that they are discussing the same thing. The subject is far too big for me to cover in my short time today. Indeed it is big enough for a whole course at university level or theme for a whole conference.

Concern and awareness over invasive plants continues to grow. Most states have formed exotic plant pest councils (http://www.invasivespecies.gov/other/orgcounci. shtml) and many agencies, organizations, and individuals have developed and distributed "black lists" of plants that they feel should not be grown. Many of these lists include plants that are currently being produced by the nursery industry. The Connecticut legislature passed Public Act 04-203 in 2004 prohibiting the importing, moving, selling, purchasing, transplanting, cultivating, or distributing of 81 different plants with penalties of up to $100 per individual plant. In 2005, the Commissioner of Agriculture in New Hampshire adopted an Invasive Species Rule (3800) prohibiting the collection, transportation, selling, distribution, propagation, and transplanting of 21 plants with a number of economically important nursery crops (e.g., Acer platanoides (Norway maple), Berberis thunbergii (Japanese barberry), and Euonymus alatus (winged euonymus) included. More recently, in 2007, the Suffolk County legislature, Long Island, passed an invasive plant law that forbids the sale, propagation, and introduction of plants on a "Do Not Sell" list: (http://www. co.suffolk.ny.us/legis/resos2007/i1144-07.htm). Most likely, other states and counties will follow suit.

Jenkins Farm and Nursery, L.L.C. is a medium-sized wholesale nursery located in southeast Louisiana that produces both field- and container-grown plants. In the beginning of the container operation in the mid-1970s, a goal of our nursery was to grow native, old unavailable, new and unusual plant taxa for the landscape trade. Liners of most of these were very hard to come by, if not impossible. Hence, it was up to the nursery to propagate them from seeds and cuttings.

My first experience of growing native azaleas from seed was in 1969, and I have been growing them ever since. I tried rooting azaleas from cuttings with practically no success. I read everything I could get my hands on, tried what was recommended and had about the same results. Many years ago, our local Azalea Society Chapter members made a trip to the Gloster Aboretum in Mississippi in the spring when the native azaleas were in full bloom.

At some point, back in the dim recesses of history, the plant correctly known as Ternstroemia gymnanthera was misidentified as Cleyera japonica. I have no idea how this happened, but it did and for all practical purposes the names have effectively been swapped, probably for all time to come. Although I am fully aware of this already muddled picture, the following is a step-by-step narrative detailing how we grow our T. gymnanthera (Japanese cleyera) liners.

Recent advancements in plant molecular genetics have mainly been applied to field crops, but are also pertinent to ornamentals. This talk will address four areas in which molecular genetics has the greatest chance of impacting the nursery industry: hybrid verification, plant identification, marker-assisted breeding, and development of transgenic plants.

HYBRID VERIFICATION

Interspecific and intergeneric hybridizations are often made in breeding programs for the purpose of combining the best traits from two species; however, it may take several years before progeny develop features that identify them as hybrids. Molecular markers, which are small fragments of DNA, can be used for verifying hybridity even at the seedling stage. This process involves looking for markers that are specific to each parental parent and then examining putative hybrids for the presence of markers from both parents. These markers are frequently visualized as bands on gels.

Every nursery needs to have someone who routinely checks electrical conductivity (EC) also called soluble salts, and pH of container crops, potting inventories, and irrigation water. Checking EC and pH should be considered part of the quality control and scouting program in the nursery. Results from testing three to five containers in an irrigation zone each week can be used to schedule irrigation the following week. Comparing leachate solution collected from containers to water collected from irrigation nozzles provides a good insight into nutrient levels in the containers. Checking EC and pH of nursery crops grown in containers doesn?t have to be time consuming, complicated, or difficult. The intention of this presentation is to review the procedure and update growers on the Virginia Tech Extraction Method (VTEM), also called the PourThru extraction procedure (Wright, 1986; Yeager et al., 2007).

A myth can be defined as "a fiction or half-truth, especially one that forms part of an ideology. " The word "myth" often brings to mind stories of characters or creatures of folklore that are generally accepted as fictional, but may also refer to modern-day beliefs or stories ("urban legends" or "urban myths") whose origins may or may not be based on actual fact. The concept of a myth can be extended to our belief system on how things should be done. We can use this idea to help examine the validity of information that we utilize and perpetuate in plant propagation practices. We should especially be on the lookout for myths in plant propagation information when we hear comments such as "That’s the way we?ve always done it, " "That’s how I was taught to do it, " or "That’s what the books say."

My first plant hunting sojourns into the mountains and deserts of northern Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s were led by Lynn Lowrey (1917?1997). Lynn was a special person, a big part of the colorful history of Texas horticulturists who made a difference in the state (http://plantanswers.tamu.edu/heroes/lowrey.html). He made many trips into Mexico in the 1960s and 1970s, usually alone or with a friend, and always with the mission to find seed, cuttings and plants for trial in Texas. Rules for bringing plants in from Mexico were simpler back then. The U.S.D.A. A.P.H.I.S. agents at the border were sometimes cheerful and accommodating, sometimes less so. When problems occurred, Lynn would linger along the border for a few days visiting the U.S.D.A. office often to check on the progress of inspection and to encourage the release of some, if not all, of his cache. Usually it worked; sometimes it didn?t.

Of all the various ingredients that go into the operation of a nursery/greenhouse, labor is generally viewed as not only the largest single component of cost, but also one of the most difficult ingredients to manage. This difficulty is brought about by many reasons. Whether we consider availability, skill, training, aptitude, retention, attendance or productivity, attempting to effectively manage a critical business component with so many variables and uncertainties has driven many business owners, green or otherwise, to look toward mechanized alternatives that can reduce labor costs and associated difficulties. This trend will certainly continue as two opposing forces do battle on the nursery front. On one hand, the nursery and greenhouse industry remains the fastest growing segment of U.S.A. agriculture (American Nursery and Landscape Association, 2007). On the other, availability of qualified skilled laborers to support these operations remains a concern for growers; with the potential for this concern to grow exponentially in the near future. While the addition of mechanization can offer positive results to a nursery/greenhouse grower, the decision to invest in this technology should be well thought out and treated with the same importance as any other key business decision. Rather than delve into the endless range of mechanization options available on the market, the author will address areas which should be considered when establishing a mechanization strategy.

There is currently a shortage of workers in the U.S.A. who are willing to work in agriculture. If you have used local migrant labor, you may have received a letter from the Social Security Administration that says that the social security number that you have submitted does not match the name with which you submitted it. As of now, how to handle a mismatch letter is in our court system. You have probably also heard or read that the Border Patrol is stepping up enforcement, not only along the borders, but also locally. With U.S.A. workers unwilling to perform manual labor and the potential to lose migrant workers whose Social Security numbers do not match, the agricultural workforce is very unstable. You have probably seen the stories predicting vegetables and fruit will rot in the field because there is no one to pick it.

On the 3rd day, 18 Nov. 2006, 40 participants enjoyed the field trip in the middle of Miyazaki prefecture. It was a very fine and warm day. After driving the Hitotsuba Road along the Pacific, the group visited Nippon Grand Cover Co., Ltd., which has a 4.6-ha nursery field planted with 750,000 potted plants such as ivies (Hedera), Juniperus, and Chamaecyparis (Figs. 1a, b, c).

These nursery plants are sold all over Japan. Moreover, it introduces novel plants eagerly. Its main worry is typhoons striking Miyazaki several times a year. When the weather report announces a typhoon will be moving into the Miyazaki area, the staff takes off the plastic film covering all the greenhouses in order to stave off the complete destruction of the greenhouses.

Red-flowering gum, Corymbia ficifolia, is a small native tree from the south west corner of Western Australia. It is a very popular garden plant in Australia and is used extensively for street tree plantings and as a garden specimen tree. Corymbia ficifolia has been traditionally grown from seed. Over the last 20 years or so many selected seedlings and some hybrids have been isolated and registered. The issue of red-flowering gum propagation however has posed some problems. Corymbia is a genus that is difficult if not impossible to grow from cuttings and therefore grafting offers the only viable method of commercial production of these desirable clones.

The grafting method used by the majority of producers in Australia is the top cleft graft. This method however has been found to be inconsistent with a poor success; a 30% success is considered acceptable by many.

Garlic (Allium sativum) is well known as one of the noticeable foods which have many medicinal effects for human health from ancient times. In Mie Prefecture, a local cultivar ‘Iki-wase’ traditionally has been cultivated. Recently, it has been shown that this cultivar has highly effective functions as an antioxidant. Because of this, we decided to develop a rapid and effective propagation method for ‘Iki-wase’. Several tissue culture methods have been reported. However, those methods have some problems, such as the occurrence of somatic variation (Luciani et al., 2006), the need for long-term cultivation (Nagakubo et al., 1993), and the necessity of mastering skillful techniques (Ayabe and Sumi, 1998). In this report, we tried to apply the bulblet chipping method used for nerine (Ezura, 1993) and amaryllis (Yanagawa, 1988) to multiply garlic bulbs rapidly without somatic variations.

Sugi cedar (Cryptomeria japonica D. Don) is an important conifer tree for industrial plantation production in Japan. Forty five percent of man-made forests in Japan is comprised of sugi cedar. However, a pollen allergy problem caused by sugi cedar and hinoki cypress is currently serious. For the solution of pollinosis, production of non-pollen male sterile clones by tissue culture is considered as one option. A complete pollen sterile sugi cedar was found in Toyama prefecture, Japan (Taira et al., 1993). By the year 2007, more than 20 individual clones of pollen sterile sugi cedar have been found in Toyama, Niigata, Fukushima, Aomori, Kanagawa, and Ibaraki prefectures, Japan. Here we describe the screening of surface sterilization, initial culture, and subculture media for tissue culture of male sterile sugi cedar.