Gardening Basics - Monthly Tips

Monthly Tips

October - Tip of the Month

Chionanthus retusus - Chinese fringe tree

Seeking: Ideal tree for small urban yards.
Requirements: Year-round appeal, rapid growth to 15-20'x15-20' (and then stops and stays alive for @40 years), drought tolerant, disease free, non-messy, likes sun or shade, is fine with root competition and compacted soils.

[Cover photo Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades]

If anyone knows of a tree that meets all these requirements, please let me know. In the meantime, you could try out Chionanthus retusus, the Chinese fringe tree.

In June C. retusus blossoms with delightful white, narrow-petaled flowers that cling in clusters to the branches. From a distance the tree looks like it is covered in white puffs of cotton. Up close the panicles of flowers look like fringe, hence the name

Chionanthus has male and female plants. The male blooms more profusely but you get no berries (less mess but less beauty in the fall). The bark is furrowed and plants are often multi-trunked. The tree supposedly only reach 15-20'x15' at maturity.

The Chinese fringe tree likes sun and is pretty easy-going where soils are concerned. It is drought tolerant once established.

Okay, Chionanthus retusus may not meet all the requirements of the ideal urban tree, but it certainly meets the 2 biggies - year round appeal and small stature - so give it a try. I know there are some around but they certainly aren't common, and I'd like to know more about them, so please plant one and keep me posted on how they do - don't forget the pictures!

(Photo from the PNW Garden website.)

Dr. Linda Chalker-Scott from WSU and other horticulture professors have a great gardening blog The Garden Professors. In a recent entry, one of the profs takes on the dreaded lawn problem - dog spots. If you have a dog, particularly a female dog, and a lawn, you've undoubtedly faced this dilemma. Little brown dead spots surrounded by areas of luxuriant growth. Why death surrounded by such abundant life?

Plants take up nutrients from the soil that are dissolved in water as salts (a salt in this situation is any ionic compound [Think NaCl - table salt]). Dog urine is basically a salt that contains quite a bit of nitrogen, a necessary plant nutrient. Too much of any salt damages or kills plants. (I won't get into the why here, that'll lead to osmotic potentials and other things almost no one cares about.) In the center, the salt is clearly too concentrated. At the edge of the target zone, the salt is less concentrated and the increased nitrogen levels cause lush growth.

The moral(s)? 1)Too much of any "salt" - and this includes fertilizer - can be detrimental to plant growth and 2) If you just followed your dog around with a gallon bucket of water, you could have a lush green lawn (in spots) without buying fertilizer.