Episode 154: Putting Plants to the Test with Richard Hawke

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Richard Hawke is the Director of Decorative Plant Analysis at Chicago Botanic Backyard, the place he oversees comparative evaluations of decorative crops. The CBG Plant Analysis Program has included 117 distinct trials over the previous 4 many years, with 26 comparative trials at the moment underway in three analysis areas. In 2011, Richard started reporting trial leads to Superb Gardening journal, and has since written dozens of function articles that may be discovered by visiting his creator web page.

On this entertaining episode, Richard Hawke discusses his earliest reminiscences of crops and gardening, the schooling and internships that laid the muse for his profession, and the thrill and challenges of creating a world-class plant trial program. He additionally digs into the day-to-day particulars of plant analysis and talks about some trials that yielded shocking outcomes and a few that had been specific favorites, together with evaluations of clematis, baptisias, butterfly bushes, and tender salvias.

Richard Hawke at Chicago Botanic Garden in the 80s — Richard joined the employees of the Chicago Botanic Backyard within the mid-Eighties. *Photograph: courtesy of Chicago Botanic Backyard*

cuttings of various tender salvias — CBG’s trial of tender salvias recognized many vigorous cultivars that do properly when grown as annuals.

new heucheras — *Images, clockwise from high left: Visions Premium/gapphotos.com, Nova Photograph Graphik/gapphotos.com, and courtesy of Richard Hawke*

The Chicago Botanic Backyard has trialed 198 heucheras since 1995. Discover out which cultivars carried out higher than the classics right here.

The Chicago Botanic backyard was constructed on a collection of islands, and soil circumstances usually are not supreme. The unique trial beds had been atop a substrate of clay soil compacted by heavy tools; the water desk may be very excessive, and drainage could be problematic. Richard talks about these soil woes, and the options which have improved soil construction and drainage within the latest plant analysis space.