Rhododendron Sappho Labels

Hope Johnson, Queensland University of Technology

Rhododendrons have many praiseworthy characteristics.

My Rhododendrons were in full bloom when a late frost caught them quite badly. Winter has been wet and mild but if the USA is anything to go by hard frosts may still be on the way so look after your early flowering Rhododendrons.

Arduaine Garden in Scotland is well-known in international Rhododendron circles for the number of wonderful species grown here, many of which are considered tender elsewhere and grow unusually under a canopy of mature Japanese larch. To some people, rhododendrons are those unpleasant purple-flowered objects which clog up our native woodlands. This is but one species, Rhododendron ponticum or a hybrid of it which spreads rapidly both by seed and sucker. Arduaine’s collection is extensive containing about 400 distinct species. The rhododendrons range from the large-leaved giants such as Rhododendron protistum, Rhododendron sinogrande and Rhododendron macabeanum to the small-leaved, high altitude plants which are often classed as rock plants, a sample of which would include Rhododendron fastigiatum, impeditum and orthocladum. In between these two extremes sit the majority of species of differing sizes with a variety of foliage shapes and an astonishing range of flower colour and form. One of the specialities is the only Rhododendron from Ceylon – Rhododendron arboreum subsp. zeylanicum.

This garden centre label is colourful and was surprisingly close in colour to the plant it was selling.

Rhododendron Widgeon was been beaten to a great post by Jo Hanslip on insane journal

Kenneth Cox at Glendoick   Offers some of the best advice on rhododendron identification and recording. …..Using GPS handheld devices would allow reasonably accurate mapping to made by taking positional readings in each area of the garden and recording what is planted there. If you want  you can then allow garden visitors to access these records on their own devices. There is no limit to the interactive potential if you are prepared to invest time and money…..

BAD NEWS, GOOD NEWS: Proposition 37, the California initiative that would have required labeling of foods containing GMOs, was outspent by its massive corporate food opponents and went down to defeat last week, in a flood of deceptive and expensive ads. But I want to think that the awareness that this fight created was the start of something good; that it got us all thinking, and forming an opinion.

I promise myself I’ll do this every spring: cut one of each kind of daffodil here, record it with the camera, track down its name. And then spring gets away from me. I did manage to get the dozen above and another few below so far, though, before they withered; I missed the little extra-early guys–again.Comparing old notes and current catalog photos, I did pretty well with this batch, but that small-cupped yellow beauty (bottom row, far left, of top photo) with the orange rim is going to elude me, I can just tell, and some of the others look like certain varieties except they’re smaller or bigger than they’re supposed to be according to the listings I can find. Here’s where I am so far (with my “notes to self” in parentheses):Top p

I AM A FOOL, but thanks to reader Debi, who added a tip to the site in a comment today, you don’t have to be. You don’t have to buy special wooden plants labels as I just did for far too high a price; you can buy non-sterile, 6-inch tongue depressors from your local pharmacy (or even Staple’s, apparently, or e-Bay or Amazon).

Though we’ve never met, apparently the sender of the note,Nancy Duffy, a North Carolina-based garden designer with an extensive home garden of her own, has either been spying on me remotely, or can read minds—or so it seems based on this paragraph in the message (echoed on her website):“Bags of saved tags. Scattered notes in journals. Streams of photos on the phone and computer. Wouldn’t it be nice to have all of your plant records in one place?”Both in her clients’ gardens and her own, Nancy says, she’d watched this frustrating scene play out too many times:“Someone asks th