Georgia (Caucasus) and Denver trees: two virtual booklets for you!

Paeonia tenuifolia in my garden in 2018

 Certain plants in all of our gardens are the "chocolate chips" that add that extra zip--and fernleaf peonies are certainly a perfect example. Although I have grown and loved this plant forever, now as I see it emerging through snow (again!) and surging up to bloom, it can't help but waft me back to Georgia--not the one with Atlanta! the one with Tbilisi!--where I spent a fantastic three weeks two Aprils ago. Finding this peony by the thousand in the wild was a high point of the trip (and of my lifetime of flower hunting!)

Flowers, scenery and travel with boon companions are recorded and celebrated in the publication below--which you can not only READ and enjoy (now that we're all on lockdown mode--it could be handier than at other times!). Just click the yellow caption below the cover of that issue (which is my picture--as are all the pictures illustrating the article, incidentally--most of which I've not shared on this blog.)

November issue of International Rock Gardener*

The full account of the Plant Collections Consortium expedition can be downloaded as a .pdf if you click on that link. Thanks again not just to P.C.C. and especially to Boyce Tankersley and Peter Zale, but to Denver Botanic Gardens for supporting my participation and granting me the time for that fantastic trip! Boyce and Peter were both veterans of traveling the Caucasus--and though I wrote the bulk of the text, they redacted it (rather severely!) and have written a vast quantity of notes I drew from that are published in another appendix, which alas, is not readily available on the web. Sorry!

Salvia compar

Although this same picture is in the publication, I can't resist showing it again: this has to be one of the most spectacular salvias I've ever seen--and of course it's not in cultivation. A year later I saw another half dozen stunning salvias in Tibet that are as beautiful as any in gardens--all likewise not in cultivation. This crazy world of ours is far from being explored.

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 The second publication you may wish to peruse, if not put on your virtual bookshelf is a .pdf of a report that was the focus of a good deal of my time and energy (along with that of dozens of others!)--namely a report about trees in Denver: I don't want to repeat the whole story, since it's told much better in the report, just click again on the yellow caption below the book illustrated by the maple leaf below:

Rollinger Collection publication

As a matter of fact, if you download the .pdf--you will only have half the publication: you can obtain the all important data from the whole research program if you access Denver Botanic Gardens' website about the project, which has the second half (Appendix B) embedded in it (or just click the second of the two yellow links in the previous sentence to get that too!).

Although I was the instigator of this project, I have to give the real credit to Al Rollinger above all--a dear friend and one of Denver's premier Landscape Designers. My associate, Ann Frazier, did the heavy lifting on the project: corralling the dozens--nearly HUNDREDS of participants and arranging for the relentless field trips to find and measure the trees--and she (with staff from Denver Forestry) are responsible for the enormous data sets--of which Appendix B is just the tip of the iceberg...

And you thought I spent all my time writing blog posts, silly!

*My profound gratitude to Margaret Young, Editor of the International Rock Gardener, for taking the text of our original Caucasus report adding MANY more pictures and publishing it in a format that makes it so easily and conveniently shared. Maggi and her husband Ian have made inestimable contributions to the art of rock gardening.