Over the years I’ve visited many trial gardens and even planted a few myself. But the garden managed by Dr. Stephen Love at the Aberdeen (Idaho) Research and Extension Center is unique. In the typical trial garden, seed companies and hybridizes submit seeds to the trial garden where they are planted out and evaluated. In Love’s garden, seeds are collected from the wild and the plants evaluated for their suitability for garden planting in urban backyards.
The planting is now in its 20th year and has evaluated over 4,000 plants. One might be tempted to think that any native plant is suitable for planting in an urban garden, but that is not the case. Some plants are so difficult to germinate and establish that even experts can’t pull it off. Others are, shall we say, just plain ugly. Some are so aggressive they become weedy when given a little TLC. Love’s idea is to identify wild-collected, seed-grown plants that are adaptable to the low-rainfall, inner-mountain West conditions but still have desirable garden characteristics.
These characteristics include things such as good esthetic appeal, a reasonable blooming period, adaptation to “average” growing conditions and the ability to be grown and marketed in a nursery setting. The plants he and his team have evaluated have been collected from the dozen or so states west of the Rocky Mountains from northern New Mexico and Arizona to Canada and west to the Sierra Nevadas. The region he is most focused on is perhaps best described as the high sagebrush deserts. Major population centers — the Salt Lake region, Las Vegas, Reno, Flagstaff, Boise and others — all fall within this climatic biome.
The trial garden is located in the Snake River Valley and has good silt-loam soil with a pH of 8.2. This valley is where many of Idaho’s potatoes are grown. The area typically receives about 12 inches of rainfall a year. One of the first things Love had to decide was whether to irrigate. Homeowners in the region irrigate heavily even though they are in the middle of a desert. Their bluegrass lawns are beautiful, but all the experts agree that population growth can’t support more lawn area. Finally, Love decided to irrigate, but at only 30 percent of what a bluegrass lawn requires. The extra water supplied above normal desert conditions keeps the plants looking good while reducing water usage by 70 percent.
Most of the plants included in the trial plantings are herbaceous perennials, although a few woody shrubs and annuals have made it through the sorting process. The plants are evaluated for garden worthiness through the growing season. Those deemed to be good candidates have their seeds collected and are grown for another three or four years. No hybridizing is done but subtle selection pressure is applied, namely choosing plants that will grow and look nice over an extended period of the growing season.
Finally, after four to six years of evaluation, the selections are deemed ready for release to the gardening public. Because the trial garden is not set up for growing commercial quantities of seeds or plants, Love and the University of Idaho partnered with Native Roots LLC, a native plant nursery in Twin Falls, Idaho, who took on the challenge of introducing the plants to the traditional nursery industry and ultimately the gardening public. Native Roots LLC is establishing a brand for the plants released from Love’s program similar to what Proven Winners has done with conventional nursery plants.
Native Roots LLC has blocks planted for seed and cutting collection. From these plants, they grow liners which they sell to nursery partners for finishing. In time it is hoped that gardeners will seek out these branded, performance-evaluated plants and add them to their sustainable urban garden plantings.
This is such a sensible thing, it seems amazing it wasn’t done years ago. But change is hard. People are used to beautiful green lawns with petunias, geraniums, marigolds and a whole host of garden perennials from Europe and Asia. Bringing these favorite but thirsty garden plants and practices into the desert might have made sense when population numbers were small, but the West is running out of water.
Things need to change. By using adapted native plants, a beautiful garden can still be obtained. Maybe a small patch of bluegrass can be maintained in a garden, but lawn plantings need to be seriously reduced if desert communities ever hope to achieve some measure of sustainability.
