Let's catch up this week on some gardening news and interesting tidbits ...
Bird and pollinator gardens coming to Penn State
Construction begins this spring on an elaborate and greatly expanded Pollinators' Garden at the Penn State Arboretum in State College, including a Bird Garden that will be a large part of it.
This pollinator garden aims to do much more than show off plants that home gardeners can use to attract butterflies, bees, and hummingbirds.
Its ambitious goal is to create such plant-rich habitats that the space attracts every pollinator native to the region.
Being built in partnership with Penn State's Center for Pollinator Research, the Pollinators' Garden will have sun and shade gardens, an Evening Garden, a garden of edible plants attractive to pollinators, habitat gardens, a Backyard Pollinator Garden, a garden that highlights the economic value of insect pollinators, and research plots.
Also getting under way this spring is the garden's half-acre garden devoted to birds.
This one will feature bird-friendly plants, feeders, water features, nesting boxes and a pavilion for bird-watching.
Multimillion-dollar donations from Charles "Skip" Smith and his sons made both gardens possible.
Penn State's Class of 2019 announced in October that its class gift will be an ornate entry gate to the new Pollinators' Garden.
The region's newest public garden
Delaware Botanic Gardens is set to open late this summer. Here's a rendering of part of it.
A whole new public garden is set to open this September - the 37-acre Delaware Botanic Gardens, about 11 miles from Bethany Beach, near the little south-Delaware town of Dagsboro.
It was conceived in 2012 by garden- and nature-lovers who decided that this part of the East Coast needed a public garden.
Delaware Botanic Gardens will have a naturalistic bent with meadows, woodlands, lots of native plants, and 1,000 feet of tidal waterfront.
The crown jewel is a two-acre meadow garden designed by famed Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf, best known for designing New York's High Line park and Chicago's Lurie Gardens.
Most of the meadow was planted last year and will have 65,000 perennials and grasses when done.
Besides the meadow, three other areas are to be ready for the late-summer opening - a woodland garden with trails, an entry garden, and a wetlands classroom. The Welcome Center is already up as the centerpiece of the Entry Garden.
Other gardens in the works or on the drawing board include a holly collection, a Children's Discovery Garden, a three-acre pond, an edible garden, a labyrinth, dune gardens, and a peaceful garden with a view of Pepper Creek to be called The Knoll.
The Gardens' website gives a virtual tour of the project.
Oak alert
This is what wilt-infected oak leaves look like.
Last year was a rough one for oak trees because the wet spring fueled a fungal disease called anthracnose that browned leaves and caused some trees - especially white oaks - to almost completely defoliate by early summer.
While otherwise healthy oaks should recover and leaf out normally this year, another and worse disease is lurking.
A fungal disease called oak wilt has been spreading from the west (it's been killing oaks in western Pennsylvania for several years) and has made it as far as the Susquehanna River.
Red oaks and pin oaks are especially vulnerable. Beetles typically spread the fungus, which can then kill an oak in a matter of weeks by clogging its vascular system. Removal is the only option, especially in red oaks.
Oak wilt differs from anthracnose in that the dieback usually starts at the top or outer part of the canopy and quickly works its way down. Anthracnose causes brown spots on leaves, curling leaves, and leaf-drop throughout the tree with telltale pimple-like growths on the leaf undersides.
Oaks also can run into a bacterial leaf-scorch disease and several root-rot diseases.
The bottom line is to keep an eye on those oaks and have a tree expert evaluate them if trouble brews.
Leaf and branch specimens also can be sent to Penn State's Plant Disease Clinic for diagnosis. The service is free for Pennsylvania homeowners.
Plants and our changing climate
Cornell University has an interesting new "Climate Smart Farming" web tool that lets you see how the climate has been changing - county by county - since 1950.
It also projects what we can expect through the rest of this century.
The map first lets you pick your county, then you can call up charts on such garden-relative, year-by-year information as average annual temperatures, growing season lengths, number of days with heavy precipitation, number of days with temperatures above 90 degrees (the point where many plants begin to suffer), and more.
Click on the Tools button to find other useful weather/gardening info, including a "Springcaster" that forecasts the onset of spring based on current indicators, a growing degree day calculator (which helps predict when bugs and diseases will show up each year), and long-range seasonal forecasts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The new Pennsylvania Home Show
The Pennsylvania Home Show is hoping to stage more of this kind of landscaping display at future shows.
The Pennsylvania Home Show - that annual, late-winter event at Harrisburg's Pennsylvania Farm Show complex - is aiming to give the 2019 version a more outdoorsy touch.
The Home Builders Association of Metro Harrisburg plans to beef up the landscaping, hardscaping, and garden-design arm of the show and has changed the show's name to the Pennsylvania Home and Garden Design Expo.
This year's four-day Expo takes place Feb. 28 to March 3.
Hours and show details are on the Home and Garden Design Expo's website.
Stopping diseases and invasives
A big problem when it comes to stopping the spread of infected and invasive plants is that so many plants are sold online these days.
Growers and online vendors are finding it nearly impossible to keep track of where a plant might be quarantined or what states restrict certain species.
It's hard for national plant-sellers to keep track of regional issues, such as this boxwood blight problem that's occurring in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic.
That's made it extra difficult to stop recent problems like boxwood blight, the emerald ash borer, and the spotted lanternfly.
"When shipping live plants, the United States is not a single nation," says Jeff Dinslage, president of the e-commerce plant company Nature Hills Nursery. "It's a collection of 50 independent states."
Not only does each state have its own set of detailed and sometimes obscure rules on plant movement, those rules are constantly changing as problems pop up and spread.
Nature Hills hopes to remedy this by introducing a nationwide program called Plant Sentry.
The program compiles all of the states' plant regulations and restrictions into software that can then check customer orders by Zip code.
If an order includes plants that can't legally be shipped to that area, the software flags it.
Nature Hills and several other online plant-sellers are trialing the system through this spring.
If it works as planned, the idea is to offer it throughout the industry.
More details are on the Plant Sentry website.