Pilchuck Chapter ARS

This being my last edition of the ‘Pollinator,  I thought I’d take this chance to reminisce about how I ended up joining the Pilchuck Chapter in the first place and that really is the story of sinogrande #8.

My Dad has always been an avid gardener and I was somewhat resistant at first, but when I ended up buying a house with more than an acre of land, the blood ran true and I started buying rhodys from where my Dad usually did, Hammond’s Acres.

After a year or two, while walking around in Dave’s lower garden along the stream, I noticed a real cool rhododendron.  It looked a lot more interesting than most of the others.  Dave told me it was a species, R. fictolacteum.

Seeing how species were much more interesting than those cross-breeds that most folks liked, I caught the species bug and was soon bugging Dave for whatever he had.  Eventually he told me about a large specimen that he had purchased from a couple that lived near us.  He hadn’t picked it up yet, but if we were interested, we could go look at it.  It was an R. sinogrande which had the largest leaves in the genus rhododendron—right down my alley.

Thus Gloria and I made our first trip to visit Loyd and Eddie Newcomb.  They took us on a tour of their lovely gardens.  There were many beautiful specimens of rhododendron and other interesting species that showed it was possible to collect many interesting types of plants.

Finally we got around to the reason we came in the first place.  To see the rhody that Dave had told us about.  In a hoop house, they had a group of sinograndes from a single planting of seed.  The seed had been gathered during the first British botanical expedition that the Chinese had allowed since the government had become communist.  The plant they had sold to Dave, #8 of the group was the largest and healthiest of the grex.

 

Our first sinogrande bud!