This spring, I was fortunate to be able to visit the former garden of the late Camellia guru, Dr. Clifford Parks. One of the many plants that took our breath away was this unlabeled evergreen azalea. We were able to root cuttings, but now, I’m hoping someone out there in horticulture land will recognize it and give us a name.
I recently had the opportunity to visit the grape breeding trial garden of grape savant, Jeff Bloodworth of Orange County, NC. I didn’t realize it until my visit that Jeff, now 73, and I were in the Horticulture Department at NC State together from the mid to late 1970s. While I was starting on my undergraduate work, he was working on a Masters and later a Doctorate. After school, Jeff went on to become a Research technician with NC State grape breeder Dr. Bill Nesbitt, until he unexpectedly passed away in 1983 at the age of 51.
Departmental leaders decided to do away with the grape breeding program due to a lack of commercial interest in NC, so Jeff saw an opportunity. Scrambling quickly, he found and purchased 12 acres in rural Orange County, where all the NCSU research genetics found a new home. Jeff, and his wife, Peggy, still live on the same property today.
I’ve grown and studied muscadine grapes for almost 40 years, but Jeff’s little finger has far more knowledge than I dreamed existed. To say Jeff is obsessive about his work with grapes is a grand understatement.
We were joined by video producers Bill Hayes and Erin Upson of Carboro’s Thunder Mountain Media, who are working on a video project to help tell Jeff’s amazing story.
Until 2013, Jeff had never introduced a single new grape. Part of the reason is that his breeding goals were regarded as impossible “pie in the sky” ideas. Jeff was trying to cross seedless bunch grapes (pictured below), which grow well in California, but sulk in our summers, with the Southeast US native muscadine grapes.
After 10 years of no success, he finally was able to secure a viable offspring, and so was off to the races. Despite this eventual breakthrough, Jeff struggled to get any commercial or academic entities interested in his creations.
That was until plantsman and Gardens Alive owner, Niles Kinerk and his team, heard about Jeff’s work, and soon after, hired Jeff as an employee, providing some welcome financial support. Below are Jeff and Peggy Bloodworth with Mark Wessel, Gardens Alive Director of Horticultural Research.
Jeff’s first introduction through Gardens Alive, in 2013, was the light purple Vitis ‘Razmatazz’. This small-sized grape was the first seedless muscadine hybrid on the market. Although the fruit size is small by conventional standards, it is long producing as well as deliciously sweet. This was followed a few years later by Vitis ‘Oh My’, a bronze fleshed, larger seedless muscadine hybrid.
My trip last week was to join the Gardens Alive team as they sampled the new hybrids and made their final selections for future introduction. I was particularly excited by one of Jeff’s hybrids with 1″ seedless bronze grapes, but Jeff explained by slicing the grape in half and examining the ovary, that this was a female grape, which would need a male pollinator. Most commercial muscadine varieties are “perfect”, with both male and female flowers on the same plant. The size of Jeff’s seedless grapes continue to increase, and the variance of sweet flavors are astounding, so the future of grapes in the Southeast US is very exciting.
Nearby Jeff’s farm, investors have purchased much of the regional farmland with the goal of large scale production, including hundred of acres of Jeff’s grapes. We salute Jeff’s brilliance and persistence in this amazing endeavor!
Back in the early 2000s, we grew the spiral ginger, Costus speciosus for many years, before finally loosing it in a very cold winter, but its potential hardiness has always fascinated us. In 2013, Georgia plantsman Ozzie Johnson collected a specimen near the border of North Vietnam and Southern China at 3,900′ elevation. Below is Ozzie’s collection this week at JLBG, after our recent winter of 11 degrees F. The same plant, growing in Atlanta, survived 5 degrees F this winter without protection, so I think we can safely say we have a Zone 7b hardy form. This exceptional clone has been named Costus speciosus ‘Wizard of Oz’. It will take a few years to build up stock, but we’ll get this one ready as fast as possible.
Those who were heavily into gardening in the early 1990s probably remember the micro-mail order nursery, The Wildwood Flower, run by the unique and colorful NC plantsman Thurman Maness. While Thurman’s nursery lasted less than a decade in the mail order realm, his impact in the horticultural world continues though his many plant introductions.
Thurman’s probably best known in the plant world for his lobelia hybrids, as demonstrated by his 1990 catalog which listed 20 different lobelias. We’ve offered a number of Thurman’s lobelia hybrids through the years, including varieties like ‘Rose Beacon’, ‘Ruby Slippers’, and ‘Sparkle deVine’, and still carry one of our personal favorites, Lobelia ‘Monet Moment’.
Thurman was also a very successful fern breeder, and many of our favorite ferns today are some of his hybrids like Athyrium ‘Wildwood Twist’ and I still rank his Athyrium ‘Ocean’s Fury’ as the finest fern hybrid ever created.
Thurman’s old catalogs also included little known, but garden worthy natives like Scutellaris serrata and the Federally Endangered Silene catesbiae (polypetala). When I first visited back in the early 1990s, Thurman was running his own tissue culture lab, where he was both producing plants as well as conducting ploidy manipulation for breeding..
So, what’s Thurman doing today. At age 87, he’s still working in his garden and propagating plants, which he occasionally sells on site at his Pittsboro home. He tells me that he’s ramping up production because of the new 400 acre development just a few miles away…he’s determined that they all need hydrangeas.
He also still runs his antique business, now from an antique mall in nearby Siler City. When he goes out on the town, he often does so as his alter ego, Sparkle deVine, as you can see in this recent photo below. JLBG/PDN salutes a brilliant plantsman for a horticultural life well-lived.
It was great to get a chance to reconnect with Florida plantsman Nestor White at our recent Open Nursery and Garden, since it had been well over a decade since his last visit. Nestor has what is almost certainly the largest Crinum collection in the world with over 1,000 different accessions. If you purchase crinums on Ebay, you’ve most likely dealt with Nestor. Although we have nearly 400 crinum accessions, we’ll never have a collection as extensive as the one that he’s assembled. Well done!
We just discovered that one of our good plant friends, plantsman and former mail order nurseryman, Dick Weaver, 77, passed away early in the days of the pandemic in June 2020.
Dick and I had been corresponding regularly, but in a final note in late 2019, he indicated that Parkinson’s had now made it difficult for him to type emails. Although we chatted on the phone after that, I completely lost track of him during the COVID craziness. It was only when I tried to catch up last week that I discovered he’d passed not long after our last chat.
Dick and his life partner, Rene Duval, started We-Du nursery in Marion, NC in 1983, after Dick left his job as Assistant Curator/Taxonomist/Plant Explorer at Boston’s Arnold Arboretum (1970-1983). Armed with a PhD in Botany from Duke University, Dick gave up a good salary and stable job for the uncertain, crazy world as a mail order nursery owner.
As a young nursery owner, We-Du Nursery near Marion, NC was always one of my favorite stops to see and acquire new plants and chat with other plant nerds. Their nursery specialty was both North American native and their Asian counterparts–similar interests to ours.
After 13 years in the mail order business, Dick and Rene sold We-Du to move to Puerto Rico to run a coffee plantation. Dick thought mail order was difficult until he tried to run a farm in the mountains of Puerto Rico. In 2001, I remember a desperate sounding email from Dick, saying they needed to move back to the US asap…preferably to Florida. We made a few calls, and connected Dick to friends in the Gainesville area, which eventually led to Dick getting a position with the Florida Department of Agriculture in 2002. He worked there until his retirement in 2010.
It was great to have Dick and Rene back on the mainland and to once again be able to visit in person, this time at the fascinating home and garden they created in North Florida.
In 2016, after Rene passed away, Dick moved to Pennsylvania to be near his remaining family, starting yet another garden. Sadly, we never got to visit his final home. We’ll miss the plant chats and plant exchanges, but thanks for adding so much to the world of horticulture!