Bill Sittig: Good morning everybody. Welcome to today's program. I'm glad to see you all here. I'm Bill Sittig, chief of the Library's Science, Technology and Business Division, and this event is one of our series on topics of interest in the various fields of science, technology, business and economics. Before I introduce today's speaker, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Alison Kelly and Mary Jane Cavallo of my division for all their good work in preparing for today's program. I'm going to get right now introduce our speakers. We have three today, all of whom you probably know or have seen around the library or heard speak here before. Holly Shimizu has been the executive director of our neighbor, the United States Botanic Gardens, since November of 2000. In that position, she has been responsible for renovations and innovations and has received numerous horticultural awards and honors. We were fortunate to have had her speak to us twice in the last year. Once about a year ago about herbs in the garden and then last September she spoke on fragrance in the garden. We are honored to once again welcome Holly to the Library. Matthew Evans, who we are pleased to have a neighbor of ours in the Adams Building, is a senior landscape architect and horticulturist of the United States Capitol. He has been a practitioner of landscape architecture for 35 years, 20 of them in the private sector followed by the past 15 years with the office of the architect of the Capitol. Matthew has designed over 2,000 projects, has written a book and numerous journal articles, has appeared on television, and lectures widely and he has received numerous public service awards for his work. Like Holly and her husband, Matthew and his wife enjoy digging around and relaxing in their award-winning gardens in the Washington suburbs. Carl Morgan has been with the Office of the Architect of the Capitol since 1981, starting out as a gardener at the U.S. Botanic Garden. In 1988, he obtained his present position as the Garden's supervisor at the Library of Congress where he is responsible for the care and maintenance of the grounds surrounding all three library buildings, as well as supervising a staff of five gardeners. In addition to his work on Capitol Hill, Carl has professional turf care classes in Northern Virginia and has practiced his secondary professional as a certified massage therapist. If you stay after the program, you can sign up. [laughter] I do not know if he has won any formal awards or honors, but I know that he has won the admiration and gratitude of the staff and visitors to the Library for the good work that he and his crew have done over the many years in keeping the Library's gardens and grounds looking so good under often disruptive and difficult circumstances. And now to hear about the latest project to enhance the beauty of the Library's grounds, we will hear first from Carl Morgan. Carl? Carl Morgan: Basically, I just want to give you a sort of brief overview and then turn it over to Matthew and Holly. Approximately about a year ago, I was contacted by the Facilities Branch here at the Library of Congress, and they said, "Carl, we have a problem here. We have a rodent problem." Rattus Norvegicus, otherwise known as the brown rat. And it had taken over the six planter beds in front of the Madison there. Due to the hollies that were in there, it was impossible for the exterminator to go in and eradicate the rats. So, I looked at it as an opportunity. One for customer service to get rid of the rats, but also an opportunity to create a new landscape design. And when I was thinking about it I said, "Let's get rid of the rats, and let's soften the existing hard scape of granite and marble. Let's provide seasonal color. Let's make it educational; let's use labels so you can see what kind of material that were using. Enhance the sitting and eating areas because the staff uses that out front, and sort of to tickle the senses of sight, touch and smell." So, we actually immediately started removing the Ilex hedges in front with a crew of five gardeners: Lonza Watkins [spelled phonetically], Mike Lopez [spelled phonetically], Tina McBride [spelled phonetically], Jessica Amerson [spelled phonetically] and Gavin Fisher [spelled phonetically]. And we started on First Street, did a couple boxes there, and then jumped over on Second Street and removed a couple boxes of there and worked towards the middle, because we figured the rats were moving as we were doing this. [laughter] So we figured once we did the middle two, they couldn't run to the other two because they had been emptied, so hopefully, they ran over to the wherever else, but not here anymore. [laughter] So, just like, here's one of my little prop things. This is a stool top and just like this, the project needed legs to stand. We just, I would say the first leg of our project, we could say it's myself and my crew. You know, we could remove the hedges and we could amend the beds, but we needed a really good design. So, I wanted something different. I wanted something more than what you would normally see around. So, I have a dear friend, Holly Shimizu. I went to her and I said, "Holly I want something very special." She agreed to help. She knows what it takes for fine gardening. And so I want to her and she agreed to help. So, just like the stool we added another leg. But this two-legged stool just won't stand on its own. We needed someone to help put it together, really to tie it all together. So I have a dear friend and Holly has a dear friend, Matthew Evans, who's our senior landscape architect and horticulturist. We asked him, and he was the third leg of our stool. And with him, we got our project off the ground and running. And, so basically since that time, they worked on the design. We have over 50 different varieties of plant material, including ornamental grasses, trees, shrubs, perennials; the material that was selected was selected based on light requirements, we'd meet up here, look at the lighting, growth habits, heartiness to this area, and they did a really fine job, as you will see here shortly. We have amended the soil after we took out the Ilex hedges. I just brought some, glad to pass it around with leaf mold, which acts as an really good organic nutrient, great for plant growth. We actually also added a product called Ecolite, which is good for drainage to improve the soil texture. So, a combination of these, we roto-tilled it in. Again, after the design I spent from fall to this spring, looking for sources of plant material. And I tried to stick with the integrity of the design. I did make a few changes. Like one of the roses out front is a knockout rose which is a change. But, it's one of the best in the market. But basically, I stuck with the original design that they came up with. So, what else. The new irrigation system: the plumbers have been working to update that. That's very important for the success of this project. The stone mason shop: they power washed the granite and marble Basically, that's about it. We do have a couple more orders of plants arriving here soon to complete it. I guess that's about it. I guess if you guys could ever volunteer to help out, we could add a fourth leg to this stool. [laughter] Thank you so much. I'll turn it over to Matthew Evans, senior landscape architect and horticulturist for the United States Capitol. [applause] Matthew Evans: Carl, you're a hard act to follow. That was wonderful. That was a great overview, and I think what you will find this morning with the three of us, lending our own perspective to describing this project, Carl has talked about the very practical nitty gritty aspects of the project. And what I would like to do is talk more in the abstract. So, Carl has mentioned our little four-legged friends who, I never thought I'd thank a rat for enabling a project to get in motion, but that really was the stimulus. But, from my experience over three and a half decades, people who design, whether it's gardens or houses or skyscrapers or cars, whatever the end result is to be, can get writer's block just like a writer, or a researcher can get stumped sometimes as to where to go next. So, when, I think the best training I ever had was a practical experience offering, I developed a little class that I offered at the Smithsonian Resident Associates and some of you may even have taken it. I called it "Landscape Architectural Improvements for Your Home." And about 15 people would come. That was the maximum number I could accommodate. And I would just have to think on my feet and do a design for somebody's property based on photographs, based on the survey, based on their wish list, and their problem list. So, I had to move quickly and what I developed there is something that you may want to pay mind to is, instead of jumping ahead, most of us when we talk about gardens, we say, "Oh, I just have to have hydrangeas. Ooh, I love to have roses. Oh, boy, I would look forward to having Lily of the Valley to give to a loved one on May 1st," which is French tradition. But, really for me, that is jumping the gun. We all keep those things in the back of our minds that we do want to incorporate certain elements. But, my way of getting started is to talk about aesthetic elements And, if you notice here, I've chosen as an organizer, a line of something that's going to be evergreen and will give the plants something of a frame, a loose frame. So, line is one of those very first aesthetic elements. Then I go to form, then I go to color, then to texture, then to variety, then to repetition, then to balance, then to harmony, then to pattern, then to rhythm. It goes on and on. But it's my little built-in checklist. And I figure fragrance is another one. I figure if I have left any of those out, I've flunked. I didn't pass the course. One of the most overlooked elements in the garden, you know everybody is nuts about color. I'm nuts about color. I love color. I live for color. But, I have seen some magnificent gardens that were just splendid for their textures. Different textures of cremes, leaf, leaf shapes that contrast with each other so handsomely. And that's been done here as well. So now, having told you that, which is more academic perhaps, what I'd like to do is back up and talk about these six planter beds as children. I've even given names to each of these children. On their birth certificate, they have these long, scientific, sometimes they are Latin, sometimes they are Greek, names, some of them I've given nicknames. And I've named them because they have some characteristic that makes me love them as we all love our children in different ways. So, Carl mentioned that we had begun up at Second Street. And, is that right Carl? Second Street where you began removing the old bushes that have been there for decades? And, so if you look at the left side of the screen, that is what we'd call Bed A. We just gave them letters, alphabetical names too, so we'd have some point of reference. We'll call them A, B, C and then the other half, D, E and F. Bed A, I, Bed A has a plant and its common name is wormwood. Its scientific name is Artemisia. What a beautiful sounding name. That could be a goddess. So, I call that child Artemisia. The next bed, just moving from the upper left towards that miserable intersection at Independence Avenue and Second Street. That's got to be one of the ugliest, noisiest, filthiest, God- awful intersection I've seen anywhere. I've named that bed Baptisia. It needs all the spiritual help it can muster. There's a plant in that bed called Baptisia australis. Its common name is wild indigo. And plants for me are like words; they are like names. Just to look at them creates a certain mood within me. And wild indigo makes me think of Duke Ellington and blue indigo. It's a kind of wistful looking plant. And it's soft and the color, which is sort of a blue violet. We have several plants that are blues, that are purples, violets. They contrast so nicely with some of the others which are the, the bright primary colors. The reds, the oranges, the yellows and so on. So, Bed B, to me, along with Bed A, and then the other two to the right side of the screen, Beds E and F. They are the kind of people, have you ever noticed family members when there is a group photo. There are some members of the family that always want to be off to the edge. And then there are the people who want to be center stage, and they are always right smack front in the middle. So, these beds are designed somewhat like that. The plantings in the beds at the extremities of the building aren't necessarily big showstoppers. They are not the big money notes. They are supporting cast. So, you have the Lily of the Valley down at the right side in the upper beds, you have, there are no roses, but you have things like inkberry which, Holly and I were talking. We tried to use as many native plants as we could. It's about 50 percent. But you can't always pull it off. This is not the native variety by any means. So, now, we get to these two center beds. And I've given kind of a funny name to Bed C. [Inaudible]. Bed C demonstrates that the goal here was to have these beds have their own personality. When the old bushes were in those beds for years, there was no point in walking from one bed to another because one was just like the next one, or the one you just come from. There was no variety. Remember variety is one of those aesthetic elements I talked about. So, the center beds have this rather flamboyant line of boxwood to give a large swath for the plantings that are featured in those beds. Now, with, so this bed, each is different I'm saying, and I did not want to try to create a tit-for-tat kind of symmetry because every time you try to do that, you're cursed from the beginning, because the light conditions are a little different, the micro climate's a little different, the configuration of the building is such that the shade and shadows are a little different; it's subtle. So, there's no effort here by intent to create, you know, a tall skinny plant hear a tall skinny plant there. A short fat plant here and a short fat plant there. There's none of that. Now, this bed's called Cucumber. This, some of these names are very noble sounding. Cucumber refers to the big tree in the center. It is a cucumber magnolia. They get huge, huge, huge! It'll probably break that planter apart one day after we've all gone on to our [inaudible]. But I don't care. It's such an interesting tree. I'll be gone. They can't do anything. Now, with children you can't help but, we'd never say, "Oh I love this child more than another." But, maybe one child has characteristics that are more harmonious with your view of the world and how things get done. Well, this is my favorite bed of them all. It has to do with the plant choices. So, there are a lot of plants in here that I have worked with before. They are a lot that Holly, God love her, introduced me to. And this bed I might call Hack. There's a, that major swath of yellow there in the center, this is the ground color. Under that tree that is colored yellow. Oh that's no coincidence. It's a yellowwood. A yellowwood is a fabulous tree. It doesn't get too big, but it's wonderful deciduous tree. It blooms nicely. It's got everything going for it. So, Hakonechloa grass, it's a variegated grass. Nice contrasting color to all the greens in the garden. But, that name Hack. I wrestled with that. I thought no, I'm going to call this bed Mully. This child is named Mully because there is a grass above that called mully grass. And it is most interesting. And it's one that I just getting to know. It's amazing a lot of these plants have really taken off in just a matter of a very short few weeks. Okay, Beds E and F, I tried to redeem them. These were tricky to design. If you look at E and you look at F, as in Beds A and B, they have those three mature Magnolia trees, southern Magnolias in the upper tier. So, on the lower tier, you don't have much width to work with. And it's one of the frustrations of urban design is buildings and sidewalks and fire hydrants and street signs and traffic signals and security bollards and on and on and on, eat up so much space there is hardly any left but just a skinny little ribbon of space. And space is that thing that we fight over all day long at the Capitol. On Capitol Hill we fight for office space, we fight for parking spaces, we fight for space to get into hearings. People were lined up for this and that. It's a challenge. So, Beds A, B, E and F, they have their names, too. B, I refer to as Snow Bell because it's beautiful fragrance snowbells. Styrax Obassia, which is a big, beautiful, broad entire leaves. And then Bed F, I call Mattie or Connie. Mattie in reference to Matteuccia, which is Ostrich fern, which we have in abundance there. Connie in reference to Convallaria, which is Lily of the Valley. So, here are all these children, a family of six, an instant large family. And know these children will do their work. They are already blooming. They are multiplying. But it will be a huge responsibility to the caretaker to see to it that they flourish. We've got a great staff here. If you see anybody pouring their Pepsi Cola into the soil or leaving trash in these cribs or bassinets for these little children, call the police immediately. Thank you. [applause] Holly Shimizu: Remember that whenever we are putting in a garden, it really does take us three years until the garden begins to really show us the beauty that it can offer to us. It's got to settle into its new home. And it is true. Here we are. We are surrounded by cement. We don't have the luxury of nature and all that beauty that has come to us, so we have to create that. And I think this building has way too much hard scape but it's a small attempt for us to soften it with some plants. So I was delighted when Carl Morgan gave me the opportunity to play a part in this and hope that we'll see a lot more of this around the Capitol complex. Because we need it. We are stressed out in our work everyday. And we find that if we give people a chance to connect with the beauty of nature, then we can enhance that day. And that's very important. I'm going to give you some take home information about why some of these plants were chosen. And my assistant Stephen [spelled phonetically] helped me put this together, and some of the plants you can see in better light and some of them you'll see how they might mature here in the Library of Congress. So, I'm beginning with the boxwood because boxwood is really not a plant I strongly recommend if you have difficult conditions and particularly wet conditions. But here, the conditions are fine for boxwood. So we picked one of the best and that is Green Velvet. Look at the texture that it has. Boxwood does have a uniqueness about the softness of its leaves and the rounded habit. And that's why we chose it. Because it's beautifully green in the middle of winter. If you are growing boxwood and you are having trouble with it, changes are you might have nematodes which eat the roots of boxwood. But you don't really get nematodes until the plants themselves become unhealthy and that can often happen because they have had too much water or most likely you have over mulched them. Because America, as a country, is being over mulched. And you look around and you see all these plants dying because mulches are being placed all around the crowns of the plants. Please don't do that. Mulch is great when it's used appropriately. We're going to try to use here the best mulch which is the fine pine. It's the small attractive chunks, that is useful, not only because it looks beautiful, but because it works into the soil and enhances the organic content of the soil, which is great for the plants. So, if you're wanting boxwood, too, to be healthy, you can think about going out at the Christmasish time, holiday time, and you pluck it, and you can use those green for decorations, but it also allows air and light to get into the center of the plants which also makes the plant more full. And if you are going to think about clipping boxwood, timing is everything. Clipping boxwood should only take place before the new growth is emerging, but it's about to emerge. If you wait until it is already emerged, and you cut it back, the plants might die. So, what you want with boxwood is that beautiful tufted look. Now, here is a native plant that has been selected for the purple leaves. And you know, purple foliage can be as beautiful, if not more beautiful, than flowers. Why, because it has a long, long season. And that's one thing we thought about here. We want four seasons of interest to the degree possible. I'm not going to promise it, but I'm going to say that we thought about at least season extension. Not a spring garden, or a summer garden or a fall garden, but a real garden I hope is beautiful all the time. And that's what we always want to think about. So this native plant is a purple-leaved version. It's fragrant in bloom, blooming in the autumn. Easy to grow. It does like some shade and you can see in this particular combination it's growing with hosta. You can find it. There are a number of different cultivars. There is one that's called Black Hillside and several of the dark leaf varieties, but it is originally a native plant. Now, here's one we picked because of the summer beauty and it's got this blue flower. Look at that color of blue. It's a true blue and that's something very important. It's Caryopterus and it's a sub-shrub. And the sub-shrub is something in between a perennial and a shrub. It's in between. So it's woody-stemmed and a nice rounded plant with gray blue leaves which are gorgeous, and it's covered with blossoms in July and August. So it really brings a fragrant blue beauty to the summer garden. Now, here's our Artemisia which was named for one of our gardens, and we picked Artemisia Powis Castle because it's a nice large rounded plant with this particularly gorgeous foliage. These are all hardy here. That was another requirement that Carl had. We're not going to be putting in a lot of annuals, and we're going to be using just these perennials in good combinations to try to get this effect. So, that's why we chose the Artemisia. It's a wonderful plant to grow with roses, to use as a gray backdrop. Remember that texture is how plants look like they feel. Is that right? Something like that. It's the same with texture on fabric and the texture of everything that we look at. It's the same way in the garden. So this is a textural plant with a fine texture so you'd want to place it next to something with a different kind of texture, like a big shiny leaf, you know, then you'd get that textural look. Now, some people like to use this in a situation that is similar to boxwood where you want a green hedge. This is a native plant. It's the inkberry, Ilex glabra, and it is a great native plant. It's tolerant of wet soils. It has attractive blue fruit and the, as you probably know, there are a lot of people gardening now who only want to grow native plants. So, this would be an alterative to the boxwood, but it's a good hedge. We're using a lot of it in the National Garden, but we are also using boxwood which is not native. It actually came to us from Europe. A native grass, now, I'm very particular about grasses and the reason is that a lot of the Asian grasses that have been used in Washington region that are ornamental grasses are invasive as I'll get out. Have you ever tried to dig up one of those [unintelligible]? It's impossible. You need a pickaxe. And they become weedy after time. You see a lot of plants become weedy after they've settled into an area for a while and either through roots or seeds. So native grasses are I think a good way to go. This is the most beautiful of all to me, and it's called little bluestem. Little bluestem, it's also, the other name is Andropogon, and so, if you know a Latin name to connect with it, that would be why, and it's beautiful because there are so many colors to the stem. And this form, look at the way it stands up. It's got this gorgeous form, beautiful color. The color is stunning almost year round. Little bluestem. So, look for that if you go to a nursery. And if you want to have those hydrangeas, you need a fairly wet soil. And we put these in because these are color and, you know, it's true, everybody loves a hydrangea. I confess and I'm one of them, particularly this one, because it's got purple in the stems and the leaves are a long flowering season and as Preciosa drys, the flowers stay attractive through the winter. So then you've got some really, something beautiful to look at through the winter, Preciosa. And the photograph of the plant on the right is actually in the Bartholdi Park, so you can go and see a more mature plant down there. For summer blue color also, in addition to the Caryopterus, we included Vitex. Vitex is a fabulous shrub for Summer bloom here in the D.C. area. It's fragrant. It has these blue green leaves, star-shaped and it's spiky flowers. It's an ancient plant from the Mediterranean. It's called the chaste tree and the reason is when the Roman soldiers went off to war, they thought that if they put this in the beds of their wives, they would be chaste. So, this is the root of the name. [Laughs]. So you watch as it develops. It's a great shrub. A great shrub. And we again picked for purple foliage, the husker-red variety of penstemon because it's got the purple red foliage in additional to the beautiful white flowers. And one thing to watch for and I'm hoping that will attract a lot of pollinators as well to this Madison Garden. So, we're going to leave, Carl will leave some of the seed heads to get some of the birds. We will also have the flowers to attract a lot of butterflies, hummingbirds. Because I think we can really measure the success of a garden by the dynamic life that it attracts in addition to the plants that it has. Now, I love the shrub because of the way it arches. It falls. And with these, this whole garden is kind of in containers. So it was important to think about some things that could fall over the edge, and this is one of them. And its Stephanandra. It's a beautiful shrub, not grown much, but I want you to observe as it matures the way that the branches fall over. It's a lovely kind of nested plant and very nice in its textures. If you have cats, you know catnip because the reason the cats love it is that it contains a female sex attractant. And so, the cats both male and female go in there and they are absolutely drugged. And so that's why they like to stay in there and some of them eat it. So we planted a low variety of catmint, or catnip, in the garden because we wanted the kind of ground cover hedge, and if you smell, I hope there will be no more rats. There won't be rats. I know there won't, because we allowed for enough open space that the rats can't really recreate their army in there again. So we were careful about that. So you watch this catmint and for you I recommend it growing with roses, growing along a border. It's wonderful along a brick walkway. It likes sun, easy to grow and just a great perennial. It's blooming right now, and we're going to grow it in our National Garden with our roses because it does look so good with them. So, this is an old fashioned plant. It's the old fashioned garden fox. But, I rediscovered it. I live in Glen Echo and I ride my bike, I take by dog over at the Clara Barton house and there are a lot of old fashioned varieties of plants there. And this flocks paniculata in late summer is so sweetly fragrant that it's well worth growing. And Carl and I tried to find a plant that would not get the mildew. Because he certainly won't want to be doing high care out here. So, it goes without saying, that we tried to pick varieties of all the plants that were not going to require a lot of care. In one of the less sunny beds, we agreed on epimediums. Epimediums have beautiful flowers, but there are really more loved for the leaves. And it's a superb ground cover in some shade. And I know that I banned English ivy because it's taking over the trees on our Potomac. I banned invasive plants from my garden, even including Vinca and Asian, Asian pacasandra. But I did definitively have been increasing my Epimediums as a ground cover in some shade. It's a superb ground cover. It's beautiful almost in all four seasons. And so I want you to watch this evolve. It takes some time. It's slow at first as a perennial, but it gets solid over about a three-year period. Now, we picked an iris that doesn't have problems with iris spores. And so, that's why we picked one of the Siberian iris. Caesar's Brother is a fantastic cultavare. It has good blooming, beautiful foliage and that's one reason that you want to note the sibirica. Because some iris have foliage which isn't so pretty and this one is pretty. So, even without blooms, it's a very low care. It will take a slightly wet soil and it's really happy to take care of itself. Another grass which is a wonderful, small tufted grass and it will grow together over time is this Blue Fescue. Isn't it a great color? You know, I love that blue, [unintelligible] blue and I love when, the reasons the grasses are so loved is because they have so much texture. They just, they are so rich and they really just make the garden come to life. Here is our Baptisia. A native plant. And this one we picked purple snow because of the uniqueness of the purple flower colors. Now I want you to notice when the leaves emerge in the Spring, they look just like asparagus. They're beautiful. And after blooming, they have these very gorgeous seed pods which are dark blue, deep blue, and they're beautiful, on the plant, in the garden or cut and brought inside. We included a Stewartia which is a tree loved for every season because notice the bark in winter. It's so gorgeous, it looks like a snake exfoliating skin, beautiful camellia-like flowers and a rich autumn color. A lot of the trees that we used actually do have beautiful trunks. Because that was how we could make winter interest. And we even found some woody plants with purple foliage such as the Laura petalum which you see in the foreground here. This is a plant which recently became known in this area. Great purple foliage and beautiful pink flowers, Laura petalum. Now, notice there is a theme I think running throughout a lot of our choices of plants. We actually put them in order of bed, but I just wanted to mention some of the reasons. Notice they are sort of gray, blue and purple and then texture, and I think that's kind of the theme that we tried to move through. As well as the conditions of sun and light which we mentioned. But, there's the evergreen euphorbia with this really kind of interesting foliage. The myrtle euphorbia. It's got a nice habit, sort of a ground cover. Here we have the combination of the gray and the blue but it's a spike, so it really adds with the spikiness and it's the Russian sage. A great low maintenance perennial. Gets about three feet tall. And a native called guara: this one even grows in totally neglected prairies. So, I really like this. I love plants that thrive on neglect. And guara is one of them. And there's a pink version of it as well. So you'll see these used a lot because the many of the designers are recognizing that if you chose native plants, a lot them are already adapted to the weather we have: extreme drought and in summer, extreme wet in winter and then a lot of the real highs and lows. Now, the tree which you see in, with the white blooms is the Helesia diptera, the snow bell. It's a fabulous native tree. The show with the pink and grass is actually in the Bartholdi Park showing the beauty of the trunk with the textural Stipa at the base. Whey we also used in the garden. The silver bell tree is one of the best native trees. You think about that next time you are trying to find a small tree for your garden. Or if you want fragrance and you want something large, you might think about the cucumber tree, Magnolia acuminata butterflies. They are intensively fragrant but they will get huge, and they have great looking leaves, beautiful leaves, and beautiful flowers. And then we had to through a little bit of gold in because some of the grasses offer very pretty gold foliage and this is Carex. Carex or sedges are excellent grasses. They tend to not take over and they tend to be evergreen, and so they really give us some form and color in the winter garden. And I like this because if you use gold in a garden that is sort of dark and dark green, gold is like a light. It's like turning the light on and that's one of the reasons that garden designers really do want to use it. Now, the Chinese rose is one of the prettiest, you need to observe, it's in bloom now, but they are very small, but you need to observe how the flowers change color as they mature. Everyday they change color. They actually come out orangey-bronze and then they change into gold and pink. And that change is something that you'll be able to, you know, see all the time that you are here because of working at the LOC. And you'll also see Goat's Beard which is one of the kind of late spring long blooming plants which is a close relative to the Astilbe. It's a great looking perennial because it's a kind of a poof of those flowers. And you'll enjoy the fragrance of Lavandin which is a perennial lavender which I always recommend because it's such a good performer. And if you cut it back after blooming, it will usually bloom again in the fall. So I grow a lot of this at home on my roof garden so I can harvest it, because I love to use it. She's in bloom right now. Marie Pavia. And you need to smell those beautiful fragrant flowers. I learned about Marie when I visited Antique Rose Emporium down in Brenham, Texas and I had been told by a rosarian that she was the best rose ever. And she's small and she has beautiful pink buds that open to white, ever blooming, meaning spring, summer and fall. And she doesn't have problems with black spot and powdery mildew. What more could you want? What more is there? A good hedge plant is very important. This happens to be one of my favorites at the moment. The American Arborvitae (Thuja holmstrup). Hedging is something I definitely encourage you to do in a mixed way at home. And I like mixed hedges because then you know, something dies, it's not the end of the world. You stick something else in. And then what you get is texture. You get rich texture, rich color. And then you might even use some mully grass. How pretty is this grass? This is the mully. And mully is, it's just like a pink puff when it's in bloom. I fell in love with this down at a garden in North Carolina where I saw it. And I just said, "I have to have this." And so you'll watch this evolve here as it gets this pink puff. It's going to take a few years. One of the great ground covers for shade is Hakonechloa macra aureola. It's the golden variegated Hakone grass. It's not a bamboo and it's not invasive and that's the good news. It's a little expensive to buy and a little slow to form a ground cover, but it's well worth the investment. I want you to watch how this settles in here and how very beautiful it is because look at the way that the grass kind of bends over the rich texture that it has. Another bluegrass which is native and this is the heavy metal panicum. It's kind of got a new age name, but it's probably just because of this rich blue color. So, you get that look and the rose will be ten times more beautiful than the image here of knockout. Knockout is the new rose. It's the new rose. It's the sensational rose because it blooms forever and it's no care. So you want the knockouts because they get better and better. And we have used a few geraniums and the germaniums we've have selected we think will do very well here. We've got blue flowering Cranesville and we have the very rich bark of the Crapemyrtle and this one is Natchez. Developed at the American Arboretum by Donald Egoff. And this is what we grow them for in my opinion. Don't take part in crate murder. Okay, that's what happens around the country where you butcher it back to stubs and you've lost the beauty of the tree. That's not what they are meant for. I think this is what we grow them for. Because that's really what brings the elegance. And you'll see the fragrant snow bell and that tree will perfume the entire front of the Madison and beyond when it's in bloom. And you'll see the ground cover of Tiarella which, as it fills in, in a shady spot, is really the flower's an extra benefit to the very beautiful leaves. And you'll see the browned grass which is also native of Carex buchananii. You don't really think of, I mean people when you first look at this, you think it's dead, but it's very much alive. And then you'll see nearby the spikes of Goodness Grows. Fantastic variety of Veronica which is low growing, long blooming and it also looks superb together with roses. Nearby, you'll see a stilby which is a great perennial. You can even leave the heads of your stilby blooming through the winter. They won't be blooming, but they will remain as dry, or you can cut them and bring them inside. And I mentioned the Stipa. The beautiful native grass. It's like feathers. It just kind of moves. It's so very beautiful in every season of the year. So if you were growing one grass, I think I would have to say, if I were growing on grass, it would be this Stipa. Matthew insisted on Lily of the Valley because he's so romantic. He said we had to have the fragrance of the Lily of the Valley, right Matthew? Yes. And we have a fragrant geranium which is called the Big Foot geranium. You will see that emerge with flowers and you will smell vanilla nearby from the eupatorium. This is a native Joe Pie weed and a lot of fragrances that we encounter were not even necessarily aware of, so I want to see if you can become more aware and have heightened senses as you move through these gardens because you will experience a huge array of fragrant days through the year. And, you will see a lot of things attracted to many of these flowers as well. Good, good insects, beneficial insects, butterflies. You'll see the texture of ferns. This is the Ostrich Fern. Easy to grow. I love, love ferns and this one is so easy to grow and it's, once a fern really because established in a glade look, it's so very beautiful. And that will end the slide talk because I want to leave time for questions for all of us and thank you all for being here today.