- Hi, thanks for joining us for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

I'm Chris Cooper.

Trees are the backbone of the landscape.

Today, we're looking at some unique varieties.

Also, bird houses invite winged friends to the garden.

That's just ahead on The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

- (female announcer) Production funding for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South is provided by the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund, and by viewers like you, thank you.

[upbeat country music] - Welcome to The Family Plot.

I'm Chris Cooper.

Joining me today is Camille Newsom.

Camille is the garden manager right here at UT Gardens Jackson, and Debbie Bruce will be joining me later.

Camille, good to have you today.

- Hi, thank you, I'm happy to be here.

- Well, we're glad that you're here.

We're gonna talk about some common landscape trees.

I see we got a ginkgo behind us.

- Yeah, this is one of the trees that, if I'm giving an arboretum tour, if I'm showing people around, I always have to stop by here because we have a really unique specimen here.

Our tree was planted in the 1950s, and then it got mowed over in the 1960s.

And so instead of dying like most of the time that would happen, it re-sprouted into a bunch of different trunks.

And so it looks like it's a super ancient tree, but it's not even a hundred years old.

- Wow.

- But speaking of ancient trees, I like this because it is such a unique tree.

It is one of the most ancient species that is still alive today.

It's a 200-million-year-old species.

- That's old.

[laughs] - Yeah, yeah!

And it's got a very unique fan-shaped leaf.

It's a great one for homeowners to plant because it's completely resistant to pest and diseases.

They don't encounter a lot of problems and they're really good in urban environments.

So they're planted a lot of times in cities, and it can be a great street tree.

They're not gonna struggle with watering or anything like that.

And they have beautiful fall color.

- Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that.

- So if you planted one in your yard, it would just have one trunk usually.

But it'd be a very reliable, slow-growing tree that would last a long, long time.

- Right, so again, no major diseases, no major pests?

- No, no.

- Don't have to worry about fertilizing or anything like that?

- I mean, any tree that you newly plant would benefit from a little bit of fertilizer every year to speed that growth up, but only a regular amount.

It's not gonna be bothered by pollution or drought once it's established.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

- And it does have winter interest.

I do like the leaves in the wintertime.

- Yeah, it's one of the most beautiful fall foliage colors, bright gold.

You can see it from a mile away.

- Okay, all right.

Let's go see the next tree.

- Yeah, let's go.

- All right.

All right, Camille, tell us a little bit about this tree.

- So this is an American yellowwood.

It's a tree native to the Southeast that I'm a big fan of.

I planted this one about two years ago.

It was about this tall when I planted it, and so it's grown quite a bit, almost doubled in size in two years.

It's one of my favorite trees because it produces fragrant white flowers in the spring.

And it'll kind of alternate years on having a really big bloom year.

And so whenever it is in bloom, it puts on quite a show that's very fragrant and just really enjoyable.

Tons of bees visiting it.

- So it attracts the pollinators.

- Yeah, it gets its name from yellow heartwood.

So if you cut into it, you'll see right in the middle the wood is yellow.

But it grows to be about 30 to 50 feet tall.

It can get bigger, but that's about average.

And so it's a great plant to put at a home.

It has beautiful fall color.

But it does need pruning when it's young, if you want it to grow correctly.

It often branches.

- Okay, don't know if you can see from here.

- And so if you plant a young one like mine, you'll want to come in and take off all of these so that you have one strong leader.

You would want to take this off, this, and prune this upright so that you have one strong trunk because it's not the strongest type of wood out there.

So it will break if you leave forks in it.

But you prune it in the summertime.

And if you train it up, it'll grow into a nice, big, strong tree.

And you only have to do that while it's young.

It might be harder to find it at the local nurseries.

You would want to ask them for American yellowwood specifically, and they should be able to get one without much difficulty if you ask for it.

Or you can look online and buy it from a native nursery.

- I think that's good.

You got them at pollinators, so I think they're fine.

I think they'll love it.

So let's go see the next tree.

- Okay, it's right over here.

- Okay.

All right, Camille, who do we have behind us?

- This is a black gum or black tupelo.

It's a wonderful native tree that I wish we would see more of, honestly.

It's not all that commonly planted, but I think it should be.

It's one of a landscaper's favorite because it has the most amazing fall color.

It won't just be one color.

Even on one branch, it can show like red, orange, yellow, and even purple.

- Ah, really?

- It's really known to hold onto that red color for longer than a lot.

You can see even the emerging new growth has a beautiful color to it.

So it's just a really attractive, fast-growing tree native to our landscape, and it's an amazing wildlife tree.

So it'll make a lot of flowers that they're, you wouldn't notice them, but the pollinators are all over them.

And then it makes these little bluish/black berries that the birds and the squirrels, small animals really need.

It's great for biodiversity and feeds a lot of different animals in your yard without you even thinking about it.

So it's just a really beneficial tree to plant in your yard.

It's also a really strong tree.

It doesn't split.

It's got very, very hard wood, and so it's a very reliable, long-lived tree in the landscape.

- Now, how fast does it grow?

'Cause I think you told me, what, this tree is what, seven or eight years old?

- Yeah, so this tree is older than that because it had a few years on it when it was planted.

But we planted a pretty small circumference trunk seven years ago, and it's grown this big.

It looks way older than a tree you planted seven years ago.

So it's a fast-growing tree.

If you want something that'll have some good size on it quickly, it's a great, a great one to pick.

- How tall will it get?

- It'll be 30 to 40 feet at mature size.

- Okay, so I guess we'll move over to the next tree, right?

- All right, let's go.

- All right.

- All right, Chris, here's another tree I'm really excited about.

It's in Osage orange.

They're known for their extremely hard wood.

It has thorns.

- Yeah, I can see those thorns on there.

- They used to use these on old farms as hedgerows.

So they would plant them close together.

And because of the hard wood and the thorns and their really strong nature, they made an impenetrable hedgerow.

And you could use it to keep in horses.

- I could believe that.

- And so they make these big things.

They actually used to call them horse apples or Osage oranges.

They're huge.

So we found one that would make those fruit on purpose.

They're a bit messy, but we wanted to have it as a teaching device so that we could tell people about this cool tree.

- So how old is the tree and how tall does it get?

- I would have to guess that our tree is about four or five years old.

We found a pretty big one in the woods.

And I don't think that it gets very tall.

It kind of has like a shrubby, bushy nature, and we're gonna train it to have one, one strong trunk.

But it'll probably top out around 30 feet max.

- Okay.

So if a homeowner wanted to purchase this tree or plant this tree, what would you tell them?

- I would say contact your local nursery and ask them to order one for you.

Usually your local nurseries can ask their suppliers where to get one and find something like this for you.

It's not that rare, but it's not that common for them to just sell without you asking for it.

- Okay, yeah.

Tell them be careful of the thorns.

- Yep.

- They might bite you.

- Yeah, don't climb this tree.

- Yeah, don't climb it, I like that.

All right, let's go see the next one.

- All right, it's right over here.

All right, here's another tree I'm really excited about.

- Ah, good.

- We planted this two years ago, and I actually relocated this one this spring because I didn't like where I had planted it originally.

I planted this sourwood tree because I saw one at the Memphis Botanic Garden and I was so inspired by theirs.

And it's just a beautiful layered branch tree.

And I saw it in the fall when the fall color really just struck me.

It was a deep red, almost purple, it was so deep.

And so I was just inspired by this native tree.

I hadn't really seen it anywhere.

And so I wanted to plant two out here, one in the sun and one in the shade, so that I could advise homeowners down the road on what to do with theirs and how to grow them best.

- Okay, so what have you found out so far?

- Well, it's growing its blooms right now.

So I know that they bloom in the summertime.

And it's actually prized for the honey that those blooms make in Appalachia.

It is doing equally well in the sun and shade.

I have to water this one more.

That's just the only advice that I've read.

If you plant it in the sun, it'll have better fall color, but you do have to keep it watered more often in the summertime especially.

- Ah yeah, that makes sense to me.

So how tall will it get?

- So I'm expecting ours to grow about 25 feet tall.

In theory, it could grow up to 50 feet tall, but I'd be really surprised if it went over 30.

- Sure, so thank you, Camille.

- Yeah, thank you.

- So again, these are common landscape trees, right?

- Yeah, trees I highly recommend adding to your landscape if you want some interesting, beautiful trees around your yard.

- Camille recommends them, so plant them.

Thank you, Camille.

- Thank you.

[upbeat country music] - This is Salvia Amistad.

It's one of my favorite perennials for home gardens.

You can see it has some really good height on it here, we're probably at about four feet tall, and has a really unique flower color.

This shade of blue is pretty uncommon in the flower world.

It's hard to get some true blue tones.

One of the reasons why I love this plant is because it's a non-stop bloomer throughout the summer months.

Once this spike of blooms begins to fade, we already have new growth coming up right behind it to replace it.

Another cool thing about the structure of this flower is you can tell it has this tubular shape here.

And this makes it a favorite for hummingbirds.

And of course, you can see all of the bees and other beneficial insects pollinating this plant.

It loves full sun.

It can grow in part-shade, part-sun conditions, but it's just not gonna have as many flowers.

Once established, it's heat-tolerant, drought-tolerant, is not a plant that wants to be sitting in a wet area, but does fine in heavier soils.

No leaf diseases or insect pests really to note.

Just a solid performer and one that's gonna come back for us year after year.

[upbeat country music] - Ms.

Debbie, I see we have birdhouses.

So let's talk birdhouses.

- We do.

Well, this is a very fun time of the year.

Spring and summer is the time when birds are gonna be nesting.

We have a number of birds that actually come all the way from the Neotropics and different parts of South America just to come and nest in our area.

So we should be very honored to have them come into our yard.

But having said that, some of them are open-cup nesters, such as birds that you might see every day, like your cardinal that would build an open-cup nest in a tree or a shrub.

Or some of them are cavity nesters.

Another bird you're familiar with as a year-round resident would be your chickadee.

And it would take a bird house or an abandoned woodpecker hole in a tree.

But because of urban sprawl and things such as that, so many of our dead trees have been removed.

So we can help birds along by placing birdhouses for them.

Some birds, believe it or not, build in very peculiar places.

We always hear about birds nesting in hanging baskets on a front porch or the wreath on the front door, which changes our routine somewhat for a few weeks.

Some of them use unusual nesting material.

I've seen a robin's nest lined with milk straws in a school yard.

- Wow.

- Yes.

Unusual.

- Yes.

[chuckles] - And you can actually tell who nested in your tree or your shrub or your birdhouse by what materials are used.

Such as if you open a birdhouse after they're finished nesting and you find a very soft cushion of moss filled with some plant down and maybe some animal fur, then it's maybe a chickadee that was nesting in there or a tufted titmouse.

So there's things that you can do to help them along.

You can hang up a nesting ball.

This is cotton.

Now, all species of birds, each species will use the same type of nesting material.

So if you were to hang this up, you'd probably have maybe a chickadee or a finch or a tufted titmouse pull from it.

If you have some pine straw out in your yard, you probably would have, if your area has bluebirds, they would like the pine straw or the grasses.

But don't put out dryer lint because dryer lint will disintegrate when the rains come, and then the nest will collapse.

Another thing that you could do is put out short pieces of string, not long, three inches or less, so the little nestlings don't get tangled up in it.

But you can put houses up.

Smaller birds are gonna use a smaller house with an opening of one and a half inch to one inch.

The most common is a one-and-a-half-inch opening, and that's gonna take your chickadees, your tufted titmice, your nuthatch, Carolina wren, downy woodpecker.

Some of them birds, your larger species, like your kestrels, your flickers, eastern screech owl, they want a bigger house with a three-inch opening, two and a half to three inches, and of course, a larger structure.

This house is designed to be mounted on a pole where some birds like to have their house hung in a tree.

- Yeah, that's nice, I like that.

- If you're hanging it in a tree, you want to hang it, wedge it in between the branches so it doesn't swing too much in the winds, because those eggs are fragile in the house.

Now, if you're doing a house such as for a smaller bird, one-and-a-half-inch opening, and a four by four or a five by five floor space.

If you're doing your larger one for let's say your eastern screech owl, you want a eight by eight floor space and quite a bit taller, a 20-inch frame going up.

If you're mounting this one on a pole, or this one, sometimes folks like to see things that are aesthetically pleasing to them.

The birds aren't gonna be concerned with the appearance.

The birds are looking for this cavity here, yeah.

So you can mount it on a pole five to ten feet high.

Or if you're doing the larger birds, you can mount it on a pole or a tree trunk 10 to 30 feet high.

But you want to see what's going to make a good house.

And just as when we're looking for a house, there's certain things that we're looking for for our families.

The birds are looking for a house that's going to have thick enough wood for insulation.

They want a house that is gonna be easy to open.

This one happens to have two ways to open.

You can view from the top or you can clean out on this one from the side.

- Nice.

- Cleaning out is very important because if you don't clean out after each brood, remember the story of the princess and the pea and the mattresses getting higher?

Pretty soon, after maybe four broods, three broods this summer, the nestlings would be right at the top, and it would be easy for predators to grab them out.

So you want to be able to clean out.

- What would you use to clean it out with?

- You could use a stiff brush, garden hose.

Birds aren't clean.

They don't clean up after themselves.

Although, the parent does take the fecal sac every time and fly off with it.

But there might be some whitewash in there you want to clean off with a stiff brush and maybe some vinegar water.

- Okay, vinegar water.

- Also, you want to have drainage.

A good house is going to have either corner cuts or holes in the bottom.

So when the rains come, you're not sitting in a wet mattress or a wet nest.

This one has a slight overhang.

This other one has even more so.

And that's to prevent the rains from blowing in.

And that'll help to keep them drier as well.

This one also has that round circle on the front.

And that's to prevent predators from reaching in and taking a nestling.

If you have an existing house that's just flat across the front, you can add a block of wood to the front with the same size opening.

And that would make the reach farther in for your predators to get in.

Or if you have squirrels that think that it's a house for them, [chuckles] or woodpeckers are making the entrance too big, you can add a metal ring to it, and that'll prevent them from entering into it.

So if you do put up a house, make sure that you're targeting the species that is in your habitat.

For instance, if you live in the heart of the city and you want bluebirds, I'm sorry, you probably won't get them.

- It's not gonna work?

- But if you live in an area that's more open, like a park setting or a golf course or has open field with just a few trees, yes, you could possibly have our eastern bluebirds, who are year-round residents here, mount it on a pole five feet up or higher.

Keep predators out.

Predators can be raccoons.

They can be snakes.

- Snakes.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking.

- So you want to put baffles on the pole and you want to put predator guards onto your house.

Be patient.

It might take a while to get a response.

If nobody comes within two seasons, move your house to a different area.

And try not to use pesticides 'cause many of these birds are gonna use insects for their nestlings.

Which brings me to if you want to try to attract nesting birds, provide live mealworms as a food source in your yard and always have water.

But just put your house up, sit back and enjoy.

Oh, and I forgot to mention one thing.

Keep your house away from your bird feeders.

Birds like privacy, and they don't like all that activity of the other birds.

So just have a good time with it.

- Have a good time with the birds.

- That's right.

- And the birdhouses.

Thank you, Ms.

Debbie.

We appreciate that.

- You're welcome.

- Thank you.

- Good information.

[upbeat country music] - Today we're gonna cut some zinnias to take inside.

They make a gorgeous cut flower.

They have really bold colors.

But when you cut them, it's important that you don't cut off the next set of growth.

So when you look here at the flower, down the stem, you can see two new points of growth coming out.

Those are gonna be more flowers.

So we want to cut what we're bringing inside just above that point so that we will be able to get more blooms.

Same thing here.

He only has one shoot coming out the side, but that's gonna be a gorgeous flower.

So we're gonna go ahead and cut just above that point.

I'm gonna take the leaves off 'cause all they're gonna do is swim in your vase and create mucky water.

And then we just add them to our vase.

Right here, you can see where I cut a bloom a few weeks ago.

And then on each side, you've got those new shoots growing up.

They'll make some gorgeous cut flowers in a week or so.

Blooms on the zinnias attract all of our pollinators.

They are so great for the pollinators.

So I will leave some out in the garden.

I will cut some and bring them in.

And eventually, I end up with flowers where it's really obvious that I am not gonna cut this one and bring it in.

He's gonna stay out here because this stem is so tiny, and you can see that new growth right next to it.

So leave some flowers for the butterflies, take some in.

Enjoy them.

[upbeat country music] - All right, so here's our Q&A segment.

Y'all ready?

- Yes, sir.

- These are some great questions, all right?

Here's our first viewer email.

"How do I get rid of bishop weed?"

And this is Patty from Ithaca, New York.

She says every time she uses a spray or hand weeds, it seems to come back double.

And she says she gets as much as the roots as possible, Celeste.

Bishop weed.

- Bishop weed is tough.

It's perennial weed.

It can regenerate from every portion of its plant self.

So even if she's being really good about getting out all of the roots, that's gonna be a really tough, a difficult weed to control.

So she's not doing anything wrong.

I would give her a couple other tips though, if she wanted to try a different approach for controlling that weed.

So definitely pulling it out like she's been doing.

We could do some cut treatments where you come back and shear off that foliage and then apply a fully concentrated systemic product, say like glyphosate, for example, to that cut stem area, and that can translocate into the roots and help to kill that plant in that fashion.

So that's one option.

But that is just a really, a really difficult weed to control.

And I would also tell people to be careful because they, you can buy a cultivated variety of that plant at garden centers.

It has a really beautiful variegated foliage.

And so you might be putting that into your garden and not meaning to put a plant that's gonna spread to places that you don't want it to be.

- It might escape.

- Yeah.

It's just a very aggressive grower.

- It's aggressive, okay.

Anything you'd like to add to that, Camille?

I know you talked about that a little earlier.

- Yeah, you could try to smother it out.

If you cut it back and treated the stumps, you could cover it with black plastic if you had a really big area that was really tough, and then mulch over that so that it looked better and keep it like that for about a year.

And then the next year, if you uncover that, take up the plastic, then you should be free of it.

And that could be a good way to deal with a big area where it was a problem.

- Yeah, I like both of those options.

Yeah, so Ms.

Patty, two Ps for me.

Patience, persistence.

That's what it's gonna take.

- You just have to stay on top of it.

- You gotta stay on top of it.

All right, we appreciate that question.

Here's our next viewer email.

"What are these dark spots on my mums?

"What are my options to get rid of them?

I do not use pesticides."

And this is Chris from Hyattsville, Maryland.

So what are those dark spots?

- Well, first of all, that picture was really great.

- Yeah, it was a good picture.

- That is feeding from a fourlined plant bug.

So that feeding pattern is very distinctive, a nice round circular pattern.

As those insects feed on that leaf tissue, they actually inject a little toxin that liquefies that plant tissue.

And then they're able to, with their piercing mouthpart, suck that tissue out of the leaf.

So that's why you get these kind of depressed, almost perfect circular areas over and over on the leaves.

And then over time, around those circles, you get those darker leaf areas.

- Yeah, it's very pronounced in that picture.

- Yeah, necrosis of that tissue.

So I think that's what's going on there.

As far as control, there's not a ton that we can do, especially if we're wanting to go the natural organic path.

But definitely, you could look at insecticidal soaps, horticultural oils.

- Neem oil is something else you can use too.

- Always be conscientious about the temperature.

Is it very sunny outside?

You could have some phytotoxic reactions from those products.

- He didn't want to use a pesticide, but if you wanted to use a pesticide, which one would you recommend?

- Permethrins would be great.

So they're broad spectrum.

Gonna have some longer residual to them.

So you can get a longer-term control and some pretty good effectiveness with permethrins.

Anything that falls in that pyrethrin category.

- Yeah, that and bifenthrin.

That's another one too, as well.

- In that same category, yeah.

- All right, Chris, we thank you for that picture.

Nice picture, nice picture.

Thank you for that.

Camille, Celeste.

That was great.

- Oh yeah, it's always fun to answer questions.

- Thank you.

- Love to hear those garden questions.

- I do too, as well.

- Help people find solutions.

- Remember, we love to hear from you.

Send us an email or letter.

The email address is questions@familyplotgarden.com.

And the mailing address is Family Plot, 7151 Cherry Farms Road, Cordova, Tennessee, 38016.

Or you can go online to familyplotgarden.com.

That's all we have time for today.

Thanks for watching.

If you want to learn more about anything we talked about today, you can go to our website, familyplotgarden.com, or head over to our YouTube channel, @FamilyPlotGarden.

Both places have lots more gardening information to help you and your garden.

Be sure to join us next week for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

Be safe.

[upbeat country music] [acoustic guitar chords]