SILVER STATE GARDENER Volume XXVI, Issue 1

FROM THE EDITOR

Finally the weather has started to cool down. Our Clubs that were dark during the summer have started meeting again. And gardeners are more willing to get back out there and dig in the dirt!

“It is easier to tell a person what life is not, rather than to tell them what it is. A child

understands weeds that grow from lack of attention, in a garden. However, it is hard

to explain the wild flowers that one gardener calls weeds, and another considers beautiful ground cover.”

― Shannon L. Alder

We have many interesting events coming up in our Garden Club year. Several of our clubs have interesting speakers and would love to have visitors from other clubs pay a visit to their meeting. Please do listen when you are invited to these events. You might find a new passion!

2018-19 CALENDAR Oct. 6 – Fall Conference

Oct. 27-28 – Fall Flower Show

March 31-April 1 – Las Vegas Flower Arrangers Show

April 5-10 – Pacific Region Convention, Van Nuys, CA

April 13 – Sunset Flower Show

April 13 – Rose Society Show

April 13-14 – Iris Society Show

April 29 - May 2 - National Convention, Biloxi, MS

June 1 – Spring Meeting

ROSE GARDEN CLUB

Rose Garden Club resumed meeting this fall with a new theme: Creative with Native Plants. We will be studying Native Plants for Southwestern Landscaping by Judith Mielke. In keeping with the Pacific Region theme, we are encouraging planting of native plants in our own yards as well as in the community. At our first meeting, we signed two new members! Our Touch and Smell Garden has endured the long hot summer and the braille signs have been ordered so that we can once again conduct tours of the garden. Once again we are planning a pruning party in the Garden of the Pioneer Woman in February, 2019. We have purchased a bench from the City of Las Vegas, which sits at the door of the Nevada Garden Club Center. It is in honor of faithful Rose Garden Club Members: Erline Smith, Imagene Lindo, Thelma Henson, Lee Pearns and Linnea Miller Domz. We hope as you sit there and enjoy the beauty of this beautiful place, you will remember them. An appropriate tribute to Linnea Miller Domz was held at the Fall

Conference for Nevada Garden Clubs. A beautiful arrangement including yellow roses was created in memory of Linnea by Las Vegas Flower Arrangers Guild member Larri Tarver. We love and appreciate all that Linnea has done to further garden clubs in the State of Nevada and around the country.

Kristie Livreri President

CACTUS AND SUCCULENT SOCIETY OF SOUTHERN NEVADA

We have had some outstanding speakers this year. We are one of the clubs that continues to meet during the summer, and we have enjoyed hearing from local and out-of-state speakers. Ron Parker spoke to us recently about agaves of Arizona, and Gary Duke walked us through identifying various cactus genera. We’ve heard from Woody Minnich, a great friend of our club, about care of cactus and succulents, with some great tips about e.g. watering them in the evening, with water that is slightly acidic, as their preferred treatment.

We’ve heard about some books published recently in our field, and even about palm trees.

We encourage you to come visit our club. We have great snacks as well as great programs. We meet the first Thursday of each month, at 7 pm. We also have field trips, so contact us in advance if you are interested in coming.

Fall Flowers

BOULDER CITY GARDEN CLUB

We opened the season with a presentation by Angela O'Callahan on How Community Gardens Build Community. Special guests were Nancy Lee Loesch, Regional President and Art Loesch, President of the Sunset Garden Club. Also in attendance, much to our delight, were five members of the Boulder City Council. Overall attendance was 35, a great turn-out thanks to Secretary Johnna Mellor, who invited the council and followed up with a reminder.

With the Boulder City Christmas Parade four months away we are planning a float to hold the largest tree of lights that we can manage. Our 4th of July float, decorated with hundreds of handmade flowers, made by Libby Powell, was a big hit with parade attendees. Children wore red, white and blue hats and sat on hay bales in the center of the victory garden, consisting of buckets of flowers and signs denoting vegetable seed plantings. Adults passed out 500 seed packets along the parade route.

We are again applying for a Plant America Grant and are leaning towards a vegetable garden to supplement the canned goods provided by the Emergency Food Bank of Boulder City.

Members will soon be volunteering to assist with educating children of St. Jude's Ranch in the art of vegetable gardening. Former member Emily Beaumgard has overseen the creation of several raised beds and member Doug Merkler, retired soil scientist, will supervise instruction.

Our Harvest Party will be at the home of Johnna Mellor on Saturday, October 27, at 1455 Sorrel Rd. beginning at 4:00 pm. Members are asked to bring a potluck dish and a plant or other garden related gift for the exchange.

Members continue to maintain the Atrium at the Homestead, an assisted living facility, and the rose garden in the Boulder City Cemetery.

We purchased The Saved Seed, by Brenda Moore, illustrations by Emily Lackey, and offered through the National Garden Clubs. The book will be presented to the library, for the enjoyment of future gardeners.

We're looking forward to seeing you at the state meeting on October 6.

DESERT GARDENERS Spring was in the air when activities for this issue of the Silver State Gardener were started. We were all getting our plants and gardens ready for summer but whoever expected so much heat! Our April guest speaker was Gail Brandys who taught us how to prune and feed roses. Gail was also our May speaker. Our club members are seeing more silver in their hair all the time so her talk about and demonstration of garden tools that have been adapted for older gardeners was well received. It’s early fall now. We are working on a Serenity Garden with the chaplain at the Women’s and Children’s campus of WestCare, a local nonprofit organization which serves clients in the Las Vegas Valley who are dealing with drug and alcohol addiction. Our member Muriel Scrivner led us in the design of the garden. WestCare clients from the men’s campus will do the actual labor; Desert Gardeners will provide supervision and plants. We’ve chosen a xeriscape design using drought tolerant plants which require minimum care but provide color. We’ve included a Zen area in the garden. WestCare will provide the furniture. We hope to complete the garden in November. We continue to work with Derfelt Senior Center located here in Lorenzi Park. They grow mainly vegetables in their raised beds. We have submitted our Youth Reading Program plan to the executive board. We plan to buy books, seeds, and plants to give to the children we read to so they can actually see what we’re reading about. We hope to do quick little hands on projects with them also. Our October speaker is our president Karen Elliott who will speak on, of all things, antique perfume bottles. It’s amazing how much that we see and do leads right back to a garden!! Karen Elliott

SEEDLINGS Former State President Vicki Yuen installed the new officers of the Seedlings at their first meeting of the new term in September. The new officers are Bonnie Graney, President, Kristie Livreri, Vice President and Mary Duffin, Secretary/Treasurer. Seedlings will follow the theme of Sowing Seeds. We will be studying the Las Vegas Valley Gardening book by Hobby St. Denis. We have fifteen active members now, and are growing strong. Only two members have been members of a Nevada Garden Club before joining the Seedlings. We are eager to learn and grow and will pledge our support of Nevada Garden Clubs, Pacific Region Garden Clubs and National Garden Clubs. Come join us on the fourth Tuesday of the month at 6:30 pm at the Nevada Garden Club Center. We have some interesting programs planned and would like to share as we learn together. We are planning a trip to Pioche, Nevada in May for the Installation of Officers and a planting at the Blue Star Memorial there. Kristie Livreri Vice President

LAS VEGAS FLOWER ARRANGERS GUILD Our year began with a very interesting program by Kristie Livreri, about drying flowers. As many of our designs use dried flowers, it was great to hear about how we can dry them ourselves. Arrangers will this year be focusing on some of the new designs that are in our new Handbook for Flower Shows, such as Low Profile and Cascade. We will have a Challenge Event on October 25: This is a project where three members are provided with flowers and a container that they have not seen before. They will then do a design, for an audience. We are holding this event at Derfelt Center, for the seniors there. We did this event last year at a different senior facility, but it seemed logical to reach out to our neighbor.

LAS VEGAS VALLEY ROSE SOCIETY

We are back to our monthly meeting on the 2nd Thursday of each month (except December) at the Nevada Garden Club Center. Everyone is invited to attend and enjoy the hospitality of our group and learn more about our National Flower. We have one more bloom before we can rest for a couple months. A good dose of fertilizer at this time will keep them until they go dormant in the winter. Once that bloom is done I don’t deadhead. I have found that by not deadheading it tends to push the bush to dormancy. I have no scientific proof of this, just 40 years of playing in the dirt. It will soon be time when we receive the catalogues for the new roses. If you are going to remove old non-producing bushes or ones you just don’t like, Nov/Dec will be the time to do it and prepare the bed for the new beauties you found in the catalogue or at the nursery. Adding soil amendments will now will give them a good start on life. November and December are rose growers time to rest before the pruning in January. The holiday season will be upon us shortly and we wish everyone the joy and fun of the season.

Steve Schneider. President

Las Vegas Valley Rose Society

IS THE DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE?

No, but he is hanging around the neighborhood. He must have followed me home one day because there he is, right outside my back door.

Dr. Huey is the name of a rootstock used in the industry to make the fancy roses offered for sale in your local garden store. It was chosen because of its vigor. It got those commercial roses off to a good start.

Dr. Huey throws up vigorous suckers. These cannot be simply cut off because this just pinches them and makes them branch and come back stronger. The suckers must be torn off, taking a chunk of the stem with it. The suckers may arise underground away from the main plant as well as at the site of the graft.

These suckers get first crack at all the goodness coming up from the ground. This makes it easier for the good Dr. to take over because the fancy rose is undernourished.

Our clubhouse is in a public city park, where it is framed with on one side with the enormous beds of roses in the Garden of the Pioneer Women.

Sometimes City employees come by and whack them all off to the same height, about one or two feet. The Dr. Hueys are pruned along with the roses that were planted.

The Rose Garden Club has an annual “Prune the Roses” event when we encourage the members of other garden clubs to come out and help us. And they do. We make it a fun workday and have hot soup waiting at the end of the day.

We are also hoping that we can eventually get rid of the plants where Dr. Huey has taken over and replace them with pink or yellow, but it will be a futile effort. There are well over 200 of them. There were pink ones, yellow ones, some white ones.

Dr. Huey is next to impossible to get rid of once he gets going.

Roses thrive here in Las Vegas. Once you know what he looks like, you will see him everywhere. We live in a sea of Dr. Hueys.

Interesting factoid - According to the fossil record, roses are 35 million years old. Chinese gardeners were cultivating them 5000 years ago.

Rosenotes.com is a wonderful website that you will enjoy.

LAS VEGAS IRIS SOCIETY

Las Vegas Iris Society is trying new things to bring in new members. We posted a video on our Las Vegas Iris Society Facebook page (over 700 hits). Our 1st Vice President, Michael Meagher plays the starring role, showing how to properly pot an iris rhizome. The video shows how to make the mound and place the roots. He also gives a great recipe for building the soil.

Our videographer is Vickie Booth who is a member; she also maintains our Facebook page. Please visit it. We hope to make this an ongoing project.

We reached out to some other iris societies who were willing to ship us some rhizomes. Some clubs have more than they can handle. We will enlist our membership to pot and grow these plants so we can have a continuous supply for sales, workshops, training and special events.

We have a nice relationship with Star Nursery and they allowed two of our members to have a private sale and the club members to invite the public to a meeting.