Making It Grow Minutes

The annual sunflower, Helianthus annuus, is native to North America and was widely used by early indigenous people as a food, a source for dyes, and numerous medicinal purposes.

Sunflowers are the national flower of Ukraine. a major agricultural crop, until recently grown on one hundred sixty million acres, and most of it processed for oil. Some think the Ukraine flag represents a blue sky over a field of yellow sunflowers.

Clemson’s Ag and Art Tour, from mid-May through June, features farms, art venues and more in eleven counties is a wonderful way to expose your children to farm animals, vegetables growing in fields, and the results of artists’ creativity.

We are proud of our farmers and artist, but to be real, we aren’t Iowa or New York city for either group. But sometimes smaller means more exclusive and unique and that’s absolutely true for Clemson’s Ag and Art Tours coming up in May through June.

We paid a sneak visit to Fox Hideaway Farms, one of Richland Counties stops for the Clemson Ag and Art Tours taking place from mid-May to the end of June.

Clemson’s Ag and Art Tours when you can visit local farms and even some artists’ studios, is free on weekends from mid-May to the end of June.

Will Culler of Clemson’s Agri-business team heads South Carolina’s Ag and Art Tour, the largest in the nation. What a great way to visit local farms and let your kids see where their food comes from.

Hello, I’m Amanda McNutly with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. As a young child, I began using U S C’s McKissick Museum - at that time it was a library. Today its mission statement includes these words “The University of South Carolina’s McKissick Museum fosters awareness and appreciation for the diversity of the region’s culture, history, and natural environment.” When the state of Pearl Fryar’s topiary garden and Mr. Fryar’s health was brought to director Jane Przybysz attention, she began work on a way to preserve this regional and national treasure. Eventually, with cooperation with the Atlanta Botanical Garden, the museum got funding for a topiary artist in residence – I’m sure that’s a first, and Mike Gibson, a self-taught and self-described property artist, is working with Fryar in his Bishopville garden. McKissick is to me an overlooked treasure for our state, please visit it on the old horseshoe.

When Pearl Fryar was transferred from being a plant manager up north to being an assistant plant manager in Bishopville, he was unable to buy property or a house in many parts of town. Despite these slights, he eventually turned his landscape on the outskirts of Bishopville into a topiary garden celebrated internationally. The theme of his garden was and is to this day love and open to one and all. He also supported scholarships for average students who otherwise wouldn’t have gotten higher education. His ability to spot potential even had him retrieving plants that had been discarded from nurseries and giving them new life in his garden.

Team Making It Grow traveled to Charleston recently to the small garden behind St. John’s Reformed Episcopal Church. During a Spoleto outreach project many years ago, this garden showcasing two of national artists’ unique skills was installed. A master of iron work design and craftsmanship, Phillip Simmons, created unique and appropriate gates and wall openings. Topiary artist Pearl Fryar designed a small but exquisite example of his unique artistry. A committee of the Garden Club of Charleston has been tending this garden but recently took lessons in Fryar’s techniques from Mike Gibson to learn some of the specific techniques. The McKissick Museum at U S C got a grant to hire Mike Gibson, a self-described property artist, to work and learn from Fryar in his Bishopville garden, as that world-renowned topiary artist is aging and limited in his activities.

Clemson Agent Zake Snipes, a vegetable specialist who grows produce all summer in the heat of the Charleston area is offering a free, on-line, self-paced program to help those who want to explore perhaps a market garden or hobby farm.

Lonicera sempervirens is a native, non-aggressive honeysuckle wonderfully attractive to pollinators, including hummingbirds and butterflies.

For a home garden, you may want a medium-sized trellis as it tends to flower at the ends of vines.

Clematis armandii, named ‘Apple Blossom’ has buds that are a lovely soft pink, and even when the flowers open, the lower part of the petals retain that color against the pure white center.

During the twenties, thirties and through the forties tons of asparagus vegetables were shipped to northern markets.

When Hurricane Hugo came through South Carolina, Sumter County was really hit hard. The magnificent Swan Lake Gardens lost several hundred pine trees exposing camellias and azaleas to unwelcome sunlight. But only a few bald cypresses were lost. If you come across a young bald cypress, shake it and you’ll find that is flexible, even adult trees are not brittle like pines. The ones in water with their interlacing knees have a giant support system in play protecting them against strong winds, even hurricanes. In ice storms, they again have an advantage over pines as they are deciduous and have no needles for the ice to accumulate on and cause the trunks to break. You can grow bald cypress in a regular landscape – they don’t make knees in ordinary soils – just buy a bale of long-leaf pinestraw for mulch.

Dendrochronology is the study of information obtained from tree ring growth. It is used in several different fields – archaeologists can date wooden artifacts, dendrologist – tree scientists – can use tree rings to determine the local climate. But perhaps the most interesting is climate science. Professor Dave Stahle of the University of Arkansas told us at his talk at the Congaree National Park that the Lost Colony, called that because none of the original settlers survived, was ill-fated due to several factors but one fact that scientists have established is that those people who were trying to grow crops to feed themselves had no chance of a good harvest as they sadly were dealing with the drought of fifteen eighty-seven through sixteen hundred. Tree ring analysis shows that fifteen eighty-seven was the driest year in eight hundred years.

I attended an outdoor lecture at the Congaree National Park last month, an appropriate site as Dave Stahle, Professor of Geography at the University of Arkansas, and the world’s authority on bald cypress gave the talk, and the Park is home to the state-record holding cypress tree. Stahle takes very small and minimally damaging core samples from trees and studies them to age trees and document climate change -- he has sampled trees that are two thousand years old. The science of dendrochronology is studying information derived from tree ring growth. These ring samples allow to date exactly what years had normal, above normal, or subnormal rainfall as the rings are larger or very small depending on how much the tree grew. In our part of the country, bald cypress are the oldest trees and provide the most information.

If you feel cramped or overwhelmed, you should visit the Congaree National Park right outside of Columbia. Of its 26,000 acres, the core protected area is fifteen thousand acres.

You can easily see large majestic bald cypress trees if you walk the boardwalk at the Congaree National Park. But retired DNR wildlife biologist John Cely who has explored the Park extensively, you might enjoy his blogs (at Friends of the Congaree Swamp) had found large cypress inaccessible except by boat and took Professor Dave Stahle, the world’s expert on bald cypress, to that area. Professor Stahle took tree cores from the largest of those trees to get information on their age and the climate they had grown in for probably over a thousand years. The oldest cypress trees Dr. Stahle has found are in the Black River preserve in North Carolina and are over 2,000 years old. The size of bald cypress doesn’t necessarily indicate their age; ones that grow in nutrient poor wet soils grow slowly.