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US (GA): Conference brings top plant experts to UGA

Top plant experts from throughout the Southeast are in Athens, Georgia, this week for the International Plant Propagators’ Society annual meeting, but also to tour area gardens and nurseries, which are among the top producers of ornamental plants in Georgia. Nursery owners, ornamental plant breeders, plant scientists and others, are learning about newly developed plant varieties, new wrinkles in propagation and other things relevant to their work in three and a half days of meetings at the Georgia Center for Education.

On Monday, for example, they heard Louisiana plant propagator Rick Webb talk about using native plants in landscaping for homes and businesses. "We should be talking advantage of a national trend in marketing,” said Webb. “We are also trying to bring wildlife into the gardens,” he said. Birds are a good way to control insect pests, he said.

By contrast, Pennsylvania propagator Barry Yinger talked about camellia varieties he collected from remote islands off the coast of South Korea, hoping to find hardier plants.

They also heard research and advice on topics ranging from fungicide resistance to shipping, shrub evaluation and even edible landscapes. “This is the premier nursery and floriculture meeting in the southeastern U.S.,” said Matthew Chappell, a UGA horticulture professor who was one of the organizers of the meeting.

Unlike many meetings, the plant propagators meeting brings researchers and growers together to learn from each other, he said.

Conference attendees also spent a lot of time away from the UGA campus on nearly a dozen tours of area nurseries and gardens. On Monday, some went to see the camellias, hydrangeas and Japanese maples in former UGA football coach Vince Dooley’s garden, for example. Touring Oconee County’s Specialty Ornamentals was a treat for about 50 attendees, including Stanley Brown of Blossomberry Nursery in Clarksville, Ark.

“I’ve seen things here I’ve never seen before,” he told Flo Chaffin, who owns the business on Colham Ferry Road with husband Joe Chaffin. “I travel all over the country, on the East Coast and West Coast, and I hit every garden I can get to.”

Some of the shrubs and small trees at Specialty Ornamentals are 10 to 20 years old, so you can see what they’ll look like when they grow up, he said.

When the business started out about 24 years ago, the Chaffins sold plants at wholesale to boutique gardening stores throughout Atlanta, but about four years ago they converted to a retail business model, Flo Chaffin said. The propagators also toured Southeastern Growers and Griffith Propagation, along with several other businesses in northern Georgia.

On Tuesday, there were able to view the garden of Michael Dirr, a retired UGA horticulturalist who has been a mentor for Dooley. Dirr, world famous for his work with woody plants, along with other UGA horticulture professors, have helped to make Clarke and Oconee counties two of the state’s top agricultural counties for ornamental horticulture production.

According to the UGA College of Agriculture’s 2012 Farm Gate Report, the value of Georgia’s ornamental horticulture production last year was more than $750 million, including about $35 million in Clarke County and $15 million in Oconee.

Source: onlineathens.com
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