- The temperatures are rising, but hope is falling, the hope that those crisp brown shrubs in your garden will once again sprout green.

For thousands of West Texans, that's just not going to happen.

Historic winter storm Uri in mid-February prove the death knell for millions of dollars in landscaping.

Gardens may seem a trivial concern, but after our needs for warmth and water and safety were met, we've had time to think about them.

So this week we ask, what are we going to do about our gardens?

I'm Becky Ferguson and this is "One Question".

(lively strings music) What are we going to do about our gardens?

On its face, that seems simple enough: pull out the dead stuff and replace it with live plants.

But not so fast, a series of unfortunate events have conspired to make re-landscaping this spring nearly impossible.

This week, we spoke with three experts in landscaping in West Texas about the challenges that lie ahead in rehabbing our gardens.

First, Elisa McMurrey is the owner of The Botanical Boutique.

I want to start off asking you what you're seeing around town in people's yards.

- Basically, everything is dead.

We are seeing some green comeback.

I commented last night in my neighborhood the trees are fleshing out, but you will notice on some of the trees the leaves are smaller this year.

I'm not sure they're gonna get larger.

That means they've been stressed.

It also potentially means that they will die over the next few years.

What you'll see is tiny leaves instead of what it should be, they won't mature, and the next year they'll even be smaller or you'll start seeing branches that don't have any leaves and it'll finally die out.

- Wow, that's kind of depressing.

- It is depressing.

And then shrubs, I mean, the freeze took out pittosporum, palms.

The things that we saw live were some boxwoods, some hollies, some of the Indian hawthorn are trying to flesh out.

But overall, you lost all the shrubs in your yard.

- Absolutely.

Okay, so how difficult is it going to be for us to replace what has been lost?

- It's almost impossible right now.

The shortage is not just... We have a plant shortage.

It is real.

I'm living it every day.

I had no idea what to expect.

I don't even think I thought about a plant shortage when this happened.

- And it's not just a plant shortage in Midland.

It is a plant shortage in Texas.

It's a plant shortage in the United States.

- Yes, it's a plant shortage in the United States because all of Texas froze.

And it started, though, with the pandemic.

- Some of the growers responded in a different way.

Didn't you tell me they pulled back?

- They pulled back.

So the spring break announcement was the growers have already grown for the spring, but they're buying liners and seedlings from, and I didn't know this until recently, they're buying most of them, 50 to 70% of their starter plants come from other countries.

So they pulled back on their orders and their orders at that time would be for late summer and fall.

- They pulled back because they thought people are not- - They thought we were not gonna be open because at that time we weren't reading the fine print.

We didn't understand that agriculture could be open.

We didn't understand we fell under essential.

And so they pulled back, they didn't think anybody would buy.

Even if I was open, they didn't think that people would buy plants not knowing what was happening in the world.

We were fighting for toilet paper.

I mean, they weren't gonna be fighting for a plant.

- Kind of the opposite happened, right?

- Exactly.

We were so busy.

So by the time they realized that and tried to gear back up and get ready for the fall, ports were closed.

We're talking countries, Thailand, China.

- And that's where the seedlings comes from.

- That's where the seedlings and the liners come from.

They couldn't export to us.

We couldn't import it in.

All the ports were closed, so that was a huge problem.

And so by fall, one of my big selling plants is a croton, and I use a broker for a lot of my plants and she called and said I have crotons right now.

I think she called in August or September and she said I don't typically take them until late September, October.

We're too hot here.

People aren't thinking about fall color yet.

And so she calls and she says if you don't take them now, you will not have them.

I got one shipment of crotons last year because that's the first planting season and the first plants that the growers had pulled back on.

- Okay, so you had this huge pullback.

So we have a shortage that's caused by attitudes related to COVID, importing and exporting related to COVID, and then we have the freeze.

- And then we have a freeze.

Put the cherry on top.

And I mean, I think it was 10 or 11 years ago, I have seen six degrees here, I've seen the damage that can do.

I have never seen zero here.

And for us to get it would not to me be unusual.

I mean, we're in that spot where...

I watch the weather all the time, I have to know the weather, and it just sort of will just dip down and grab us.

But to go all the way to Corpus Christi, Galveston, Houston, and went over into Louisiana, I'm originally from New Orleans and I know a lot of people that lost everything there and it pushed over into Florida, you're talking about a widespread freeze that no one has ever seen before.

- So what are the chances of folks being able to get plants?

Who's getting the plants and who's not getting the plants?

- What happened was, let's just talk about Houston.

Houston is so large.

Everything died there in their yards just like here.

So imagine that they've never seen that happen.

The retailers there will take X amount of plants because there might be new builds or somebody might change out, but they don't sell as many shrubs as other places do, and they sell color.

And so when they froze and they saw the damage that they had, they immediately started pulling from the growers.

They're not gonna have another freeze.

So our freeze was in February.

Well, we're gonna freeze again.

We had a scare last week to freeze.

So we can't, I can't consciously start planting everything until I know the last freeze is gone.

So by the time I would want these plants, Midland would want the plants, other places north of us would want the plants, Houston took them.

- They're gone.

- San Antonio took them, Dallas took them.

- So we have the growers pulling back, we have the freeze, and then I believe you mentioned something to me about the Suez Canal, so talk a little bit about that.

- Yes, well, the canal has affected us.

I get pots, especially my large pots, but everything, everything in this store pretty much is important, it's what we do, and I have some pots for a customer that are back-ordered, and I knew they were back-ordered early on.

And I called to check on them, and this was right after the canal happening, and I said can you just give me an update?

And she goes, I don't know, they're in the canal, and I was like you have got to be joking.

So we are hearing again, the canal, there were barges stuck with a lot of our product.

We finally opened, ports are open, everybody can start trading again, and now it's stuck.

So it feels like every...

I get up every day and wonder what's today.

I actually turned the corner on many people last year, 2020, they could not wait, I cannot wait until 2021, and I just had this uneasy feeling.

And I would look at people and say I'm old enough to know that when it's bad, it can get worse.

And I turned the corner into 2021, and it has been a challenge.

- And it looks like you have risen to the challenge.

Okay, if you could give folks one piece of advice as they look at their dead yards, they're dead beds, what would it be?

- First of all, I keep hearing I'm waiting to see if it's going to come out, and I have an old saying that I get from Tom Manning and it's dead is dead, it's not gonna get any deader.

And it would look a whole lot better if we would just go ahead and clean the yards up.

And I know it's depressing, but that's the first thing.

I go into a yard, even if I can't replace right now, let's clean the yard up.

It looks better to drive up and have a blank slate than to have the dead sitting.

So that's what we're doing first.

Get it cleaned up.

Look at what you've got.

The pittosporum, the large pittosporum, they are not coming back.

The palms, I was at a customer's last night.

She had a little bitty frond that had come up this big off of a huge, you could tell it had been a huge Mediterranean palm and she's like it's alive.

And I said, yes, the root ball is alive or otherwise you wouldn't have that little bit of green.

But what it's gonna do is it's gonna do that for two or three years.

It's going to try and abort, try and abort.

That's what we're gonna see with the trees also.

So for me, and it's not just because I'm trying to sell it to you, I would take it out.

We're not in a place, Midland, Texas is not a place to regrow things.

We went from that freeze to high winds, we'll be 110 before we know it, and we're gonna be in a drought.

- So our beds are all bare and we just wait till the fall when the supply is better.

- I'm not sure when the supply is gonna be better.

I actually confirmed that this morning because I knew you would ask.

We're looking at two years, at least two years, before it would even resemble normal.

So my advice to people is there's a lot of people who don't want to replant right now, like it is overwhelming to them and they could care less.

But my advice is to get on someone's list.

And what I have is a list of customers, and I've got their wishes for what we need in their yard.

And if I get a call, and it might be that I can only get 20 shrubs, I have a grower that has told me they will have shrubs again in July, and I said, okay, I need 100 dwarf hawthorns, and he said we're only gonna allow each person to get 25.

I could use 25 plants, double in my own yard.

So 25, what are we gonna do, a lottery?

Who gets the 25 plants?

So it's going to be hard for awhile, but I would suggest that you find someone that you want to work with, you get a plan, you get on their list, because we are all trying to pull from the same source, and as we get it, then we will start planting.

It's going to be a project for two or three years.

- Monica Byars is the Turf Specialties manager for landscaping, interior plant installations, and maintenance.

We met her among the carnage of what used to be thriving variegated pittosporums.

I'm looking at these pittosporums and I want you to tell me are they gonna make it?

- Well, these look like they're probably not going to.

We've looked at them earlier in the year and they had some flexibility and I've scratched them and they had some fleshiness to them.

But what we've seen as the weeks have gone by, as things were either gonna start recovering some or they start declining a lot more.

And it looks like yours are declining a lot more.

When I scratch them, they're really not as fleshy as they were.

They've still got a little bit, but the ends have become really crisp, so they break easy.

So that's unfortunately not a very good sign, so I'm afraid probably the bulk of what you have here in the pittosporums you've lost.

- Okay, so what do you tell people like me that have this situation?

- What I tell them is you're gonna have to probably go ahead and take these plants out and replace them with something else or the same thing because I feel like we had a catastrophic incident that probably could not or could happen again but probably not next year or anytime soon.

So if you like this material, this plant material and that's what you wanna put back in your yard, don't be so gun shy over it because I think that... How long have yours been here?

Probably 20?

- Maybe not 20 years, but a good long time.

- Yeah, so you're gonna get a good life out of them.

If you prefer to try something else and now is a really good time, I tell people to try something new or change up the the scheme of what you were doing in your flower beds, it's a whole new time you can landscape.

You may not always be able to find what you're looking for right now, so I've also told a lot of people let's get them all cleaned out.

It may be fall or next spring before you can come back in and actually continue to plant what you want or plant something new.

- Because?

- Because there's a very big shortage in plant material, not only just because of the cold, but because last year during COVID, we didn't have the opportunity to have the workers at the nurseries getting the material ready for us because they were limited somewhat on their working hours.

Not to mention with people staying home a lot last year, there was a really large pool on nursery material because people were at home and they wanted to work on their beds and they bought a lot more material, I think, than what a lot of people had really anticipated.

So this year we're kind of seeing the effects of a little bit of both.

We're having to buy a lot of material out of state because a lot of material in Texas, if it wasn't killed during the freeze, it was just damaged.

So they've had to cut it back, and so a lot of it's behind.

So that's why you may wanna wait until fall or next spring.

If you're set on something that you can't seem to get right now, you will be able to get it again.

- What about prices?

- Prices, the only increase I see is because you're having to get it out of state, so it's a little bit higher product sometimes and a lot more freight.

It's not that anybody's trying to price gouge anybody, because that's against the law anyway.

And so nobody's out there trying, or they should not be out there trying to make this a situation where they can have a lot of gain over somebody losing all their plant material.

- Let's talk about trees.

The trees all seem to be coming out, or at least when I drive around I see that the trees are looking pretty good, but I'm assuming that they are pretty stressed.

So what are your instructions about trees?

- The trees that were stressed to begin with are probably the ones you see around town that aren't making it.

The ones that are making it probably were not that stressed, they've been watered properly, they didn't have a lot of pest problems.

But what I've been telling everybody is to make sure you're watering them very well especially because we have not had rain like we need, and the wind's been blowing which really dries everything out.

So the more you can water the trees, the better off they are.

They'll do a lot better for you and that'll keep them from stressing.

But for the most part, the trees came through really well.

- Okay, so water is the trick.

What about trimming them, pruning them?

- Don't do super severe pruning on them if you don't have to.

There's a lot of them that have some suckering that probably needs to come out.

But if you can just do light pruning on them and then wait maybe till the fall to do a more extensive pruning because it is kind of late in the season right now for pruning, we usually do that at the beginning of the year.

Some deep root feeding is always a good thing to do.

And those are the main things.

Watch for pests.

If you notice a tree sapping or anything like that, you might have bores.

I don't think this year we're really gonna have a big problem with aphids on the oak trees because we had the cold and hopefully that took care of those.

- Okay, an upside of the freeze.

- Absolutely.

- Okay, so tell me what things have been like in your business since the freeze.

- We've had our stressful moments.

We've got a lot of people calling and wanting things done in a quick manner, and with everybody being in the same situation, everybody's yard in town looks like this.

And so there's only so many of us and we can only get to so many people in a certain timeframe.

We've also had a labor shortage in our industry and it's hard to sometimes have as many people that you need to be able to get to everybody in a week or two.

So right now what we're looking at is we're probably into June, maybe July on a lot of jobs.

We're trying our best just to at least get everything torn out of as many flower beds as we can so when we do have plant material available, we can offer the customer the opportunity to do some planting.

- Why do you have a labor shortage?

- Well, it just seems like in our industry, it's a job that is labor intensive.

And as we've seen in a lot of industries, labor-intensive jobs are not the most popular jobs.

And we rely on an H-2B program and have a lot of great workers that we get through that.

- And explain what the H-2B program is.

- It's a program that we use, we have to go through the government and we bring in workers from other countries and they work on a work visa for an X number of months, and then they have to return to their country, and then they can come back like three months later.

- A complicated business that you're in right now.

Is there anything you'd like to add?

- I just want everybody to be patient.

It's a sad thing to see this happen to your yard, and I know of a lot of people are heartbroken, but it can also be looked at as an opportunity, an opportunity to update your landscaping, to do something different, to add maybe not a flower bed that you want so much shrubbery that takes a lot of maintenance.

You may want to space it out a little bit more, give yourself a few more pockets for seasonal color.

So there's a lot of different things you can look at it as a new opportunity.

- I like your optimism.

Thanks so much.

- Yeah, you're welcome.

- Susie Yarbrough serves as president of the Permian Basin Master Gardeners.

She is also a certified master naturalist and tree keeper.

We met her in a native garden in northeast Odessa.

She sees opportunities in re-landscaping with native and adaptive plants.

Thanks so much for visiting with us.

From your observations, what were the results of our most recent freeze?

- The recent freeze did take a toll on many plants.

Unfortunately, most of our homeowners landscapes are comprised chiefly of introduced species, but if you look around and find the native species, most of those came through with flying colors, or even if they didn't come through with flying colors, they're coming back.

So native plants are performing much better than many of the introduced varieties.

- So going forward, what would be your recommendation to folks who have lost a ton of plant material and kind of have to start from scratch?

- Certainly don't replant what you lost because they won't perform, likely they won't perform any better if we have similar conditions.

And people know that we're an area of extremes, so we will have these kinds of extreme temperatures again.

So we have to have those plants that are gonna be able to take the heat as well as the freeze and the wind and the water.

And so native plants are the best choice that anyone can make, and when we talk about native plants, we're not talking just native to Texas because Texas, of course, has beaches and mountains and forests and deserts.

So when we choose native plants, we really need to get plants that are native to our area.

- And what is a good resource for figuring that out?

Let's say I have to replace every shrub in my yard, what's my go-to?

- Your go to is the website created by Permian Basin Master Gardeners and you can find that at westtexasgardening.org.

We have lists upon lists of plants that are either native or adapted.

And we're currently working on that plant list so that it does clearly state which ones are native and which are adapted.

And so the list is there, and I always tell people westtexasgardening.org and study that list.

And then once you've studied the list, look at the pictures, but go out and look at landscapes where you see plants that are particularly beautiful and those are likely natives or some of the adapted.

- Okay, you use these words, native and adaptive.

Can you tell us real quickly what those mean?

- Well, native does mean that it is born and raised here, that it hasn't been flown in from Europe or from the East Coast or other locations.

Native means it's native to our desert environment.

Adapted are plants that we may have even flown in from across the ocean, but they are from other desert climates, and so they are some that we consider adapted.

We have to remember, though, that the adapted species don't necessarily perform the eco services that we'll get from our native plants, while our introduced plants might bloom and have nectar that is tasty, they're not gonna serve all the wild populations that the native plants will.

- You're talking about attracting birds and butterflies?

- Birds and butterflies.

And we have to remember our underground bees and things like that as well.

So we want their lives to be benefited by what we change on the earth.

We want it to be beneficial to the creatures who live here with us.

- I know you are also a tree keeper, a certified tree keeper.

So will you give us some advice on what we should do to make sure our trees thrive after the trauma?

- I keep telling people just wait, please just wait.

Don't start applying fertilizers and don't start cutting on your trees.

Give them a chance.

It is still early.

If you think about it, just a week ago, we had temperatures that were 34 degrees, so many of our plants have not really come out yet.

So give them time to get beyond the spring.

The spring is when nature sends the signal to grow, this is your time to grow and flourish, and if we're telling them that's not enough by pumping fertilizers and things into their little systems, then they may grow too much and have delicate growth that's not going to be able to withstand our winds and our hot temperatures which are just around the corner.

So give them time.

And once, let's say, the end of May, June comes around and you still see that they're not performing well, I would say then would be the time to start taking some measures about removing dead wood or thinking about replacing those that are not performing as beautifully as you would hope that they would.

- Okay, you're a master gardener.

Tell us briefly, what are master gardeners?

What do you all do?

- The Master Gardener Program is conducted by Texas A&M AgriLife Extension, and it is designed to provide counties with an extension to their horticulture agent because, in our case, one horticulture agent covers two counties.

And many counties don't even have horticulture agents, but they're bombarded with phone calls.

As you can imagine that this time of year after the the winter storm, the number of calls that have come in, and one person just simply can't do all that.

So the Master Gardener Organization was created to be an extension to help provide sound science-based horticultural information to our communities.

And we do that through speaking engagements through our website and through demonstration gardens where we can bring the public out and actually show them this is best practice for our region.

- [Becky] Thank you, Susie, so much.

- Oh, you're very welcome.

- So bringing our gardens back to life may take many months, if not years due to severe shortages of plant materials brought about by COVID inspired grower cutbacks and import restrictions, and historic winter storm, a barge stuck in the Suez Canal, and a shortage of workers.

But our experts assure us come back they will.

Our painting this week is "Abstract Composition", oil on masonite, by Belle Klauber Cramer.

She was born in 1883 in New York City and spent her early adult years in Scotland and England where she began her formal art education at the Edinburgh College of Art, then at the Massey Art School in London.

Beginning in 1918, Cramer began exhibiting at London galleries.

In 1939, she moved to St. Louis where she began exhibiting when she was accepted into a juried exposition at the St. Louis Art Museum in 1940.

She exhibited for nearly 40 years at various galleries and at the St Louis Artists' Guild.

By 1971, she had become the grande dame of St. Louis painters, as described in the bulletin of the St. Louis Art Museum upon acceptance of one of her paintings in the permanent collection.

Cramer was a singular and beloved figure in the St. Louis art world during her nearly 40 years in the community.

One of her 1950 art exhibits was reviewed by Eliel Saarinen who called the paintings joyous, sensitive and imaginative.

Belle Cramer died in St. Louis in 1978 at the age of 95.

This painting and many others can be seen at Baker Schorr Fine Art Gallery in Midland.

Finally, thank you for joining us for "One Question".

We'll we back each Saturday at 4:30 where we will ask the questions you want to know of the people who know.

Other ways to watch "One Question" include Basin PBS Facebook, Passport, and YouTube.

If you have a question, send it to us at OneQuestion@baseinpbs.org.

I'm Becky Ferguson.

Goodnight.

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