Protea Archives - Oceanside Garden

Becoming a Plant Collector

I admit, I am not a traditional gardener. While I share some common motivations with other people, like finding gardening to be therapeutic, relaxing, a reasonable level of exercise, excuse for getting out of the house, etc. – I also see gardening as a challenge.

Gardens around the World have often seen the garden as man exerting control over nature – the more formal, the more controlled, the better. That is not me.

Gardeners are often corralled into using certain plants because that is what everyone else uses, so they are plentiful in the garden stores and that creates a self-fulfilling circle. That is not me.

Do I like a challenge – certainly, but not in the manner of trying to fight nature. I do not want to spend hours and dollars trying to modify my soil as we are told to do all the time in books, magazines, and TV programs. Oceanside Garden has very sandy, impoverished soil that holds almost no water.

Becoming a Collector

I have become a plant collector, but what is the point of a collection if it isn’t somehow special or has a certain level of difficulty associated with it? Perhaps no one initially expects to be a plant collector, but when you become hooked on something, it becomes a passion.

I am a believer in giving nature every opportunity to survive in a World of climate change. Nature evolves on its own. Plants can either move slowly towards the poles as the climate warms or seek out higher elevation. They can also become more tolerant of the changing conditions. But that takes time and climate change is moving at a pace never before seen on this planet. Evolution, quite frankly, doesn’t stand a chance right now. I can help with that.

Many of these factors drove me to look at a family of plants from South Africa. They have a climate very similar to mine on the coast, the plants are very happy in the type of soil I have, they are difficult to find in this country and plants from South Africa are under extreme threat right now. Not only climate change but also development of their habitat.

South Africa is one of the seven floral kingdoms of the world and the number of species in that kingdom exceeds the total number of species in the whole of the Northern Hemisphere. Those plants can’t gravitate towards the pole because there is only sea between it and Antarctica. Could they survive and thrive in Oregon? They grow in California and Hawaii, but they are both much warmer climates than here on the Oregon Coast.

I did have a few proof points. They do grow in San Francisco that tends to much cooler than most of California. There are some that exist in botanical gardens as far north as Seattle, but I am sure they are highly pampered. Then I found a nursery in Portland that did have a few members of the family in the genus Grevillea. That got me started. They not only survived in my garden – they thrived.

The Start

How perfect – a plant that loves impoverished soils, blooms almost year round, doesn’t need watering in summer, doesn’t need to be fertilized, highly attractive to birds, bees and other wildlife, disliked by deer, and very pretty!

That is when the collector in me kicked in. I wanted more. Not just Grevilleas but the other members of the family – all the way up to the amazing Protea. If you have ever seen one of these flowers you will know what I am talking about.

I started to import seed from South Africa and Australia, New Zealand and places in Europe that had similar climates. These are not easy seeds to germinate, and plants take years before they get to blooming size. That did not deter me. I did manage to find a few somewhat mature plants available online and gobbled those up. Earlier this year, I also discovered that UC Santa Cruz had an importation program with Australia to bring some of their hybrids and cultivars into this country for trials in California. I was a gardener in a plant store. You have never seen a car packed with so many plants heading up I-5.

But through all of this a few big questions remained. Does my garden have enough heat to get some of these plants to set flower buds? I also do not have any plantable areas that have full sun in Winter. Neighboring trees cast a lot of shade when the sun is not that high in the sky. When I asked in online forums, they were skeptical.

Early Success

One of the genera, Leucadendron, can be grown purely for their leaves, which are often multi-colored or variegated. Many of the Leucadendrons I have were cuttings obtained from florists stems. Just after Easter I noted that one of them had a single flower on it. Leucadendron’s actually have very small flowers and are surrounded by large bracts. That means they tend to be “in flower” for a long period of time and that one blossom is still on the plant in June.

Leucadendron floridum 'Pisa' — Leucadendron floridum ‘Pisa’

About a month ago, my Leucospermums started to put on their growth spurt for the year. Lots of buds started to form on them. It is often difficult to tell at first if they are growth buds or flower buds, but as they developed it was clear that on two of the plants, there were two different types of buds. I still didn’t want to get my hopes up because Protea are well known to drop their buds if they don’t like the conditions. Now, at the beginning of June I am the proud gardener of Leucaspermum ‘Scarlet Ribbon’ in bloom.

So, I can grow them, and I can get them to bloom. Two important members of the family have yet to tell me they can bloom here – the Protea and the Banksia, but I am now much more hopeful than I was. Now I know I am safe to collect more plants and that they will be quite happy here.

Calendar

Gardener’s Log – May 2021

May 1st

Well, May 1st is meant to be naked gardening day. First, the likelihood that it would be warm enough for that makes it very unlikely. Second, that may be fine for doing a little weeding, but clearing new ground – probably not a good idea. So, I did the second best thing – I went shopping!

I needed some edging material to go around Whimsey Way so decided to pay the Oregon Decorative Rock company a visit. Even if I didn’t find something suitable, there was other research to do there. I always need basalt for retaining walls, so I knew the trip would not be a waste. As it was, I picked up some quartzite blocks. They are about 1 1/2″ thick and has some nice colors. I think it will do fine. I also needed something for the mulch that will go in the row of succulents along the boardwalk. For that I selected a white crushed rock that is less than 1/4″.

Now, there is not way that the car is not coming home completely full! Even after getting food from two Asian grocery stores and some stuff from home depot – there was space on the back seat and so had to stop in a nursery. Picked up a couple of small banana trees (already planted), a staghorn fern – see if I don’t kill this one, and some other wonderful additions to the collection.

May 18th

Finally, in the middle of May, April has arrived. Temperatures in the low 50s, showers, but mostly sunny, no wind – this is what gardeners have been waiting for! It is planting time!! That, plus the local hardware store may be calling any minute to say they have two yards of bark dust on their way for me. Nothing like a deadline to make you get something done. A Callistemon ‘Cane’s hybrid’ has been planted in the Garden of the Giants. It will be the anchor plant in the first main detour that the boardwalk makes. In years to come, once it has matured a little, it will look obvious why the boardwalk makes a detour rather than going straight. Some Artichokes that Jesse grew from seed have gone behind the giant Alliums.

In the cutting garden, a couple of Sunflowers have gone in – Red Courtesan and Lemon Queen. The dahlias continue to get eaten every time them manage to grow a bit. Poor things. I am wondering if I should cover them with some light fabric until they become a little more established.

Gondwana had a couple of casualties over winter. The Protea repens that I grew from seed disappeared. I think deer probably took a munch on it and uprooted it. It has been replaced by Protea neriifolia x magnifica. A little lower down by the steps, Helichrysum coralloides (just learned that this is no longer its correct name – it is now Ozothamnus coralloides) now occupies an awkward spot in the steps and wall. A new Banksia replaces Birthday Candles that was struggling. Banksia spinulosa ‘Stumpy Gold’ now commands that front row seat.

May 30th

Unfortunately, not a lot has been happening in the garden this month. Each weekend has been wet – which has been great for the garden, but not so much for the gardener. In addition, getting a house ready for sale is a huge time hog, especially when everything in the house has to go.

But there are a number of things blooming in the garden and the dogwoods are putting on a nice show. We look down on them most of the time which maximizes the coverage of the blossoms – which are technically bracts. The blossom is that small bit in the middle and those large white ‘petals’ are modified leaves.

Weather Summary

Unfortunately, Weather Underground is showing a large gap in our May data, so it is difficult to get a comparison. Last May, the high was 89.4, low 41 and average temperature 54.8. We had 5.39″ of rain, 1.4″ of that came in one storm at the beginning of the month and the rest was evenly spread.

This May was definitely cooler with many fewer days where we reached 60F. The high of 70.3F was on the last day of the month and the average was 51.5F – more than 3 degrees cooler. Total rainfall was 2.65″, only half of last years total. Winds were much higher all through the month, which is partly the reason for the cooler temps as the on-shore winds picked up much earlier this year.

General

Breaking Seed Dormancy

Getting seeds to germinate can be as simple as showing them some soil and moisture, waiting for a couple of days and seeing fresh green sprouts. But not all seeds are this easy. Many seeds in the Protea family, for example, have specific needs that have to be met to break their dormancy. This includes subjecting them to smoke. Others require scarification, or having the outer coating of the seed removed. Some want to be soaked in water. The list of special treatments is almost endless, with many seeds requiring more than one type of treatment.

You may be wondering why I am writing about seeds and germination right before winter sets in and not in spring. Well, many of the plants that interest me do sprout in the fall. This gives them the best chance to get established over mild winters, put on a lot of growth in spring and then prepare for the harshness of summer. Plants need to have built up a good strong root system if they are going to survive months without appreciable water during the summer drought.

Find Help

I have acquired a couple of seeds recently where there are no serious suggestions for germination. One offered – we don’t know how to break their dormancy, so we suggest you buy thousands of seed in the hope that one or two may do something, sometime. They also added that it may take a few years. Another seed had the suggestion that putting it in Emu dung may help. Fat chance of me finding much Emu dung laying around in Oregon!

In both of these cases, it is not that they would be problematic in the wild. Seeds have dormancy triggers for very specific reasons. They make sure that when they do germinate, they have the best possible chance of survival. Perhaps Emu dung is a good idea. Perhaps it indicates to the seed that it has a supply of food, and that there is something specific about Emu dung that sends a chemical trigger. There are some seeds that require a particular animal or bird to have eaten it. As it passes through their digestive system, the acid probably gets rid of the outer coating and it is delivered with a food source.

Many times, we don’t understand the triggers, or have to find ways to make the seed think it has been eaten. For many years, it was thought that the Proteas needed fire, only to learn that it was in fact chemicals from smoke that triggered them. People are still not certain what chemical it is, and different plants do want smoke from different things being burned.

Experimentation

When starting plants from seeds, these are some of the challenges that we face. We basically have to conduct small experiments to try and find out what works and what doesn’t. Whenever I try seeds that are new to me, I tend to divide them up into several batches. This assumes I have enough seed. Then I can do things slightly differently for each, such as putting some of them on bottom heat or not. I may subject some to wider temperature swings by leaving them outside.

There are some other tricks that you learn along the way. For example, if a seed has a shiny, tough coat, it will not absorb water and thus the chance of success is very low in the short term. It is possible that if left long enough, that coating will break down, but that could take years. So, scarification can help. I have also been using hydrogen peroxide treatments more recently. It can really soften up a hard coating. A 1% solution for 24 hours seems to do the trick.

Another trick, especially for seeds that I expect to be slow in germination, is the use of fungicides. I have been trying two different techniques. The first is to dust the seeds in a powdered fungicide. The second is to water the plants in a liquid fungicide. The former is better when first planting the seeds. The latter really helps stop the onset of liverworts when germination takes a long time or the seeds are under mist.

Better Documentation

Both techniques are helping. I would often see dark patches forming in my nursery pots where a seed had been. Those had basically been attacked by mold. There is a lot less of that now. Results of my germination experiments will be included on the plant pages going forward, but not all of my previous attempts were properly documented.

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General

Proteoid Roots

The Plant kingdom is amazingly diverse and still quite unknown in many ways. As I have become fascinated with plants from the Proteaceae family, I have found out just how recent our understanding is about these plants and some of the things that make them special. I wrote about one of these some time ago, and that concerned their requirement for smoke as a way to break seed dormancy. In the past people thought they needed fire, but in the 1990s researchers found that it is chemicals in the smoke that was the important element. Since then, propagation techniques for many plants that appear after fire has swept through an area, have been revolutionized. Plants that used to have germination rates of a few percent, now see 90+% germination rates.

But what I want to talk about in this blog are roots. Again, this is a fairly recent discovery, this one going back a little further to 1960, but still not fully understood to this day. A hundred years ago, it was noticed that some Protea had roots that were different from others. Nobody knew why. The reason why I am writing this blog is because I saw these roots for the first time when I was repotting a Banksia. The term Proteoid roots was established in 1960 by H.M. Purnell who described them as a root with “dense clusters of rootlets of limited growth.” After extensive examination they were found in a number of species and genera within the Proteaceae family and today it is known that every genus except one grows these roots when required.

Proteoid roots on a Banksia ashbyi ‘Dwarf’

Purnell suggested that these roots were associated with the uptake of nutrients from the impoverished soils found in South Africa and Australia where these plants naturally grow – similar to the soils I have on the Oregon Coast. Most plants form a symbiotic relationship with mycorrhizal fungi.

Mycorrhizal fungi extract the minerals necessary for plant growth from the soil and give them to the plants in a liquid form that can be absorbed by the plant roots. In return, the plants support the fungi, giving them sugars and starches. But mycorrhizal fungi appear to not exist in the soils that these plants evolved in. This could be for one of two reasons: either the mycorrhizal fungi did not or could not live there, or that the soils are so lean that the plants cannot afford to give up any of their product of photosynthesis. These plants basically never shed their leaves.

Gondwanan roots

Proteas evolved in the ancient supercontinent called Gondwana, but proteoid roots could be older than that because they have been shown to exist in plants from the Northern Hemisphere and thus arguably evolved when Pangea existed (about 250 million years ago). Other species have been shown to use this technique, especially those from the Mediterranean region. Some researchers disagree and say that the Proteoid root clusters from the Northern Hemisphere are different and may have been an independent development.

One paper suggests that proteoid roots in Lupins only developed 2.5 to 3 million years ago and that the only plants outside of the Proteaceae family that have these roots are nitrogen fixing plants. While that may be true for Northern Hemisphere plants, other Gondwanan plants do have similar root forms, although they appear to not be called Proteoid roots. The White Lupin (Lupinus albus) is an interesting Northern Hemisphere example because it is a food crop that exhibits this root formation, and so this plant is receiving a lot of attention from agricultural companies. This may finish up solving some of the many unknowns about these roots, but they may also be different from the true proteoid roots.

Without the mycorrhizal fungi, the plants have to extract nutrients themselves and that is the job of the proteoid roots. Normally the phosphorous is so tightly bound to other materials that it is not available to the plant. Proteoid roots exude acid, carboxylates, and other substances into the soil that break down minerals and allows phosphorous, iron, copper and other nutrients to be absorbed.

This is not a slow process – it is done in a burst over a period of just 2 or 3 days. It is believed that this is done to stop other microorganisms from being able to sniff them out and taking some for themselves. They have become so efficient at doing this that if you were to feed these plants with a balanced fertilizer, you would probably kill them. They would literally overdose on phosphorous. Some studies have found that Proteoid roots are up to 13 times more efficient at absorbing phosphorous that typical roots.

More Research Required

A lot remains unknown. The plant doesn’t always have these roots. They are grown at times and then reabsorbs them at others. It is expected that they are created when certain nutrients are deficient, but research so far has been inconclusive. It is also unclear why they then remove them rather than just keeping them until needed. If you want to learn more about this you might be interested in reading this research paper from 1999.