Human touch

When you’re an editor, people ask you for your takeaways. My biggest takeaway from MANTS 2023 was that it felt really, really nice to be among people again. I believe that was a shared experience, too, from the smiles I saw while walking the aisles of the Baltimore Convention Center.

I missed hearing laughter and glasses clinking at happy hours and running into people at receptions. It was great to walk down Pratt Street again and see the green industry take over the Inner Harbor for a few days. Anywhere you went, you were likely to see someone in town for the trade show. On and off the floor, people felt reinvigorated, and after the last few years, it was nice to start the year off with a proper MANTS. Apologies for stealing a line from Bruce’s solo years, but I think we all needed a little of that human touch. And maybe a crab cake or two.

But as excited as I was to see the people in the booths, there were also plenty of plants to see in the booths. One trend I noticed was that growers are doing their best to meet the increased demand for hedges. If you look around your typical suburb, you’ll see that most new construction tends to be bigger homes on smaller lots. We may try to love thy neighbor, but most of us don’t want to see or hear them all the time. Enter the hedge, a time-honored way to separate your yard from your neighbors without installing a fence. Arborvitae is booming, and several companies were touting fast-growing arbs. We covered Private Jet from Bloomin’ Easy in the recap on pg. 20, and we get to know Brent Markus, founder of InstantHedge, in our back-page column this month, but another that caught my eye was Emerald Squeeze. This Thuja occidentalis was discovered at Shreckhise Nurseries and is being introduced through Star Roses and Plants. Matt Shreckhise told me it is similar to Emerald Green but comparatively compact, hitting 8.5 feet high. However, it’s not slower in production – it just stops short.

Speaking of short, redbuds seem to be in short supply. One of the reasons is that vascular streak dieback is still a problem in many states, especially Tennessee. That’s bad news for nurseries who have seen the issue in their operation but good news for growers that have a solid supply of healthy redbuds (I talked to a few at MANTS who did, and boy, were they selling them). This has been an issue for a while now, and plant pathologists have had time for preliminary research into the redbud problem. We’ll dig into it in detail in an upcoming issue of Nursery Management.

We also got to chat with Sam Hoadley, horticultural research manager with Mt. Cuba Center. He was hanging out at the Cavano’s Perennials booth and promoting his excellent new multi-year trial report, which focuses on 70 Carex spp. Watch for that in a future issue.

Thanks to Vanessa and Kelly and the Quercus team for putting on such a great show. I look forward to returning Jan. 10-12, 2024.