- Welcome to Oklahoma Gardening.

If you're headed to Utah to watch the Cowboys play next weekend, you won't wanna miss this week's show.

OKG is going on the road to Salt Lake City, where we visit the Red Butte Garden to learn more about their water conservation garden and ethno botany.

We then stop by the Conservation Garden Park to see how they're teaching people backyard landscape design practices to help improve water conservation efforts.

Underwriting assistance for our program is provided by the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, food and Forestry, helping to keep Oklahoma Green and growing Oklahoma.

Gardening is also a proud partner with Shape Your Future, a program of the Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust shape your future provides resources for Oklahomans to make the healthy choice the easy choice.

I love sharing with you guys the cool things that plants can do.

We're back here at the Student Farm.

I wanna share with you a tropical plant that you might find in some Oklahoma landscapes.

It's important to know which plants we are dealing with so that we can continue to maintain them successfully for years to come.

If you find yourself headed to Utah next week, you don't wanna miss today's Oklahoma gardening.

Join us as we explore the unique horticulture sites that are right here in the cities by the mountains.

We're going to visit the Red Butte Garden and also Conservation Garden Park.

We'll look at the similarities and the differences as they garden in the same hardiness that we have in Oklahoma.

It's an exciting and beautiful environment.

Join us as we discover what there is to offer.

We are here at Red Butte Garden and Arboretum just inside of Salt Lake City.

And joining me today is Guy Banner, who's a horticulturist here guy.

Thank you so much for giving us a little bit of your time.

- My pleasure.

- It is a beautiful garden right on the hillside here.

Tell us a little bit about how this garden got started.

- It began as a state arboretum where people could come to experience local native plants and trees.

30.

In 1985, the garden opened and started small, and it's grown since then.

It's now 29 acres of manicured landscape and managed landscape.

And then we have about, about the rest of a hundred up in the natural area, which is a forest.

Used to be forest land, but it's managed as a natural area up above us.

So we're nestled right up against the, the foothills into the mountains here and ha live in this urban wildland interface.

- You're really bridging the gap here.

Yeah.

And you get to experience both of 'em while you visit here.

Let's talk a little bit, because it is, you kind of have the visitor center down low at base camp, and then you gotta hike up.

Yeah.

But let's talk about some of the different gardens that you have overall here.

- All right.

Yeah.

Some of our earliest gardens are the, the entrance gardens, the Four Seasons garden.

We have an aie, which is, which is an event center for weddings and things like that.

Then we have our terrace gardens, which we call the heart of the garden these days.

But that includes an herb garden, a medicinal garden, and a fragrance garden.

And we do weddings and things like that in the fragrance garden down lower.

We have a rose garden, we have a water pavilion because we have red View Creek running through the garden.

And we have multiple ponds where we have the native Bonneville cutthroat trout stocked, but we see lots of birds and have some beautiful, calm spaces with lots of water for people to hang out by.

We've got the Wasatch range behind us here, the Ochers across the valley, and you can see the great Salt Lake and Antelope Island over there.

It's one of the best places to view the, the valley and a sea sunsets in, in the valley.

- It's absolutely breathtaking.

And we're here at the top of your area, the water conservation garden.

- That's right.

- Can we work our way down and take a look at it - More?

Absolutely Love to.

It gives this larger sense of garden space, and it's something inspiring for people that maybe they can't do at home, but here it's something that they can experience.

- Yeah.

And - So on a bigger scale, - All of this that we're seeing right now is the water conservation garden.

- Yep, that's right.

So we're in the center of the water conservation garden.

This area is called the water saver terrace, and we have it broken up into hydro zones.

So each of these plantings, all the plants are rated for a similar use of water, which is really important concept in water conservation, gardening.

Absolutely.

So hydro zoning, you, you match your plants by what water they need.

That way you're not overwatering something or under watering something.

And - So the vegetation sort of changes then, right?

Imagine?

- Absolutely.

So we have a, this is one of our once a month areas.

- Okay.

- And then we have a zero water, nothing after establishment.

- Okay.

- Then we have once every other week, once a week, and then twice a week.

Okay.

At the, the luscious and greenest.

And we try to work hard to make sure that this area looks as good as those areas later in the season when it gets really hot and things are dried out a lot.

- I think that's a critical point always in botanical education.

Right?

Yeah.

Is that drought tolerant doesn't mean cactus and rocks, - Right?

That's right.

Yeah.

We try to show a lot of lushness.

It capture a lot of our native vegetation, but we borrow it from all around the world.

The Mediterranean, some of our sister climates, like we, our sister city I believe is in Turkey.

- Okay.

- Just climatically.

We're a zone six.

Six is our safe number, but seven is what we are now rated as.

So depending on where you go in the valley, seven or a six, - Which is so funny because Oklahoma is in that six seven range also, but drastically different because of just temperatures.

And you guys get a lot more colder and, and consistently colder in the wintertime with snowfall.

- Right.

Yeah.

We do tend to have consistent snow pack for chunks of time during the winter.

It's not always throughout the entire winter, but Okay.

Yeah.

So we probably share quite a few different plants.

Our annual rainfall is about 17 inches, and I think you guys get - Yeah, - Quite a bit more than - More.

A little more, a little more than that.

- Yeah.

But you know, you still have very like hot short grass prairies there.

Right.

Understand your humid humidity's a lot higher than us.

- Yeah.

But it's a dry heat today.

- Yeah, it's a dry heat.

Yeah.

- But I'll say I do recognize some of the plants, obviously the yaro and the yuccas, you know, and I, I've seen buffalo grass here, but some unique plants that I'm not familiar with.

Right.

I like this, this, what is this plume, - Apache plume or Canyon?

Canyon plume.

Okay.

Falluja Paradoxa.

This is a super drought hearty plant that stays evergreen on its leaves and it gets these beautiful little white rose family flowers.

Kind of like a little simple apple blossom followed by these, these are the, the fruiting, the seedheads that are fruiting.

Okay.

So it's just these plumes.

So it's a great plan for just a continued season of interest.

You get those blooms early on and it sets these beautiful plumes up and then they just stay.

- And we got a nice massive yellow behind that.

- Right.

This is a sulfur buckwheat and we, or ganum.

So there's the wild, the wild buckwheat's in the United States, and the western United States has a huge number of species.

So this is a cultivar of one of our native species, but they're a great low water plant that has big blooms and it's a great pollinator plant.

- Okay.

- That's something we try to do with this garden a lot as well, creating habitat for pollinators and various other beneficial creatures.

- Absolutely.

Well, I have to ask a little bit about the soil too.

We're here on the rock, the mountain side.

Yes.

And I know you have Salt Lake down below.

- Right.

- What is your soil like here?

- It's quite variable.

So we have a pretty variable geology here.

And so the parent material of these different rock formations breaks down and creates different types of soils.

On average, our soil tends to be neutral to alkaline pH.

Okay.

As you get closer to the, the lake and down in the basin, it gets saltier.

And so the pH goes up and the salt goes up - Right - Here on the foothills where it used to be, it's been grassland and oak scrub for a long time.

We have a little bit better soil, but there is a lot of clay.

There's a lot of rock.

This garden, we utilized the soil that was onsite during construction and mixed in organic material and some drainage.

And then we brought in a little extra soil as well.

It's more of a silt texture, but it tends to be, there's a lot of clay in our soil.

- Well, it's definitely - Red clay.

We know that red - Clay, it's definitely coming into its own and it's a beautiful garden.

Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

- My absolute pleasure.

- We're now joined by Heidi Simper, who is the assistant curator here for Red Buttes Garden and Arboretum and Heidi, we are in your fragrance garden.

And is it ever fragrant?

Tell me a little bit about this garden.

- Yes, it is.

I know viewers can't tell, but it is very fragrant in here.

So this is part of our, this can be considered part of our ethno botanical collections as everything is in here is fragrant and people like to smell plants.

And so, you know, plants are used for perfume.

You know, fragrant plants are used in ceremony, you know, all sorts of things.

So that's why we're here as well as it's just provides a beautiful backdrop.

And so I'll tell you a little bit about ethno botany.

Yeah.

It's the study of the connections between people in plants, so how we use plants both past and present, as well as different cultures, how different cultures use plants, examples being medicinal for clothing.

You know, even a garden is considered ethno botanical because, because we get something outta it.

Right.

Because people are growing plants.

- Yeah.

- So plants have so many uses and so it's, it's really exciting to see 'em.

- Now.

Now you guys have three particular gardens that sort of play up that ethno botany.

Tell me about those - Other gardens.

Yes, we do.

So we have the medicinal garden and then we have the herb garden, which are just over that way.

And then, you know, ethno botanical plants are also throughout the whole garden.

Okay.

They actually make up, probably the majority, about 75% of our plants are actually ethno botanical because most plants are useful.

- Yeah, absolutely.

So, and I love the interpretation, I mean, the botanical gardens are always about educating the visitors.

- Yes.

- So you have a lot of signs here telling us about how those plants were used, especially in the children's garden.

Let's talk a little bit about - That.

Yeah.

So what makes us a botanical garden instead of just, you know, a display garden is that we know all the Latin names of our plants and we, and everyone has to have signs.

And so that's part of my job is creating all these signs.

- And it's a tall task.

- Yes.

And we have a lot and it's never ending.

Yes.

So I have job security, but, so in the children's garden we have a lot of ethno botanical plants that are also native to Utah kind of in one spot.

And so we've created different colored signs that are red.

So most of our signs are green, so these ones are like a, yeah.

A red and denoting that they're ethnobotanical and useful to our Native American tribes.

- Okay.

Let's talk about some of your favorites.

And you, you focused, your research is kind of focused on Native American ethnobotany, is that correct?

- Yes, yes.

My own personal research actually was conducted in Tanzania, but here as a local here, I have been focusing on Native Americans and learning about the uses of the plants.

And so, you know, some of my favorites, you know, we're surrounded by yaro right now.

This is actually a cultivar of yarrow, but it can be used the same native tribes used it as a general cure-all including our, the Ute tribe.

The the leaves and flowers are usually the ones that are used for medicine, and it can be made into a tea in times of war.

We've used the leaves as a poultice and you know, if you're ever in the wild, you can just pick a leaf of the, of the yarrow, get it wet with your saliva, and then you just slap it on your wound and it, it acts as like a blood coagulator.

Interesting.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

And I know you have a, a fun little potato also growing Yes.

Up in the Children's garden.

Tell us a little - Bit about that.

So that's called the Four Corners Potato Lanum, James ZI.

And it has a really cool story.

So our conservation department with the help of the Natural History Museum, they're doing research in southern Utah, Escalante, Utah, and they found starch granules in a tool that is dated over 10,000 years ago.

And this starch granule is from this potato.

- Wow.

- And so, so we know that it was used 10,000 years ago, meaning it could very well be the first cultivated plant in the Western US.

Oh my goodness.

And so - I would imagine they don't look like our traditional - Potatoes we know of now, right?

No, they don't.

They're very tiny.

You have to collect a lot of them and, and they're very bitter too.

Okay.

- Okay.

- And there's special preparations they did to make the, they do now still to make them taste better.

And, you know, we're highlighting them in hopes to get Native Americans to grow them again.

And they are like they, we have people are firing them now and you know, there's genetic research happening so that we can cultivate our potatoes that we can in the grocery stores and hybridize them with the four corners potato and introduce more drought resistance to our own potatoes.

Oh, excellent.

So there, yeah, there's possibilities for a more sustainable future.

- Okay.

- Excellent.

- And I also know one of the plants that is involved in ethno botany is the milkweed.

Is that - Yes.

Which we know very - Well in Oklahoma.

- Yeah, absolutely.

So asclepias speciosa, which is showy milkweed, and there's actually one sticking up right there.

- Yeah.

Right there.

- And so it is, it's used for fiber.

You can like pull fiber out off of its stem as well as it produces a milky latex.

If you've ever touched one, you've probably - Right.

- Gotten sticky with it.

And Native Americans make that into like a chewing gum.

- Oh, really?

Okay.

- Yeah.

As well as you can, you can put it on warts to get rid of warts as well.

- Okay.

Yeah.

Interesting.

- So, and - And also what about a rice grass?

Tell us a little bit about this rice grass.

Oh, rice grass - You made.

Yes.

So Indian rice grass, it achnatherum hymendoide, it's a staple grain for many of the tribes here in Utah.

And you know, they used it to make porridge, they put it the seeds in their mush.

It was just, it was a staple.

They put it in everything, made cakes of it, preserved it so they could eat it in the winter.

Yeah.

It was, it, it is one of their most prized plants, I believe.

- That's cool.

So it's really neat what y'all are doing here and kind of bringing those stories back to life again and, and remembering the heritage and the culture that these plants offer.

- Yes.

And thank you for bringing that up because, you know, ethnobotanists, that's kind of their goal.

They want to preserve the knowledge of indigenous, indigenous people who have been accruing this knowledge for thousands of years.

And you know, sadly it's on the decline.

And so, you know, remembering these ways they use them and they still use them today, it's really important in preserving their culture and which also leads to diversity of our earth and which is very important.

- Absolutely.

Thank you so - Much.

Yeah.

Appreciate you joining us.

No problem.

Thank you.

- We are here in West Jordan, just south of Salt Lake City at the Conservation Garden Park.

And joining me is Courtney Brown and Courtney, I think this, it's really a demonstration garden, right?

Can you tell us a little bit about the history here?

- Yeah, the Conservation Garden Park is what it's called.

It was started in about the year 2000 is when the first phase was built.

And it's been built in phases ever since then, mostly through donated funds, although it's owned by the Jordan Valley Water Conservancy District for the purpose of water conservation to help people learn about waterwise landscapes and, and how to make changes in their own yards.

- And you've done that in a lot of different ways.

Tell us a little bit about some of the things that visitors might see throughout the gardens.

- Well, there's dozens of exhibits designed to help people understand landscaping principles and ways to make changes.

Irrigation design principles, maintenance principles, just plants.

A lot of people need ideas for what kind of plants will grow in their yards.

- True.

- Something that will inspire people and, and give people ideas and, and knowledge about and confidence how to make changes in their yards.

- And I, and I think you've done a fantastic job.

There's a lot of fun interpretation and signage for people to explore.

This particular area we're standing in though kind of spoke to me and I think Oklahoma residents can really relate to some of this stuff.

It's you're local scape exhibit.

Can you tell me a little bit about this space?

Yeah, - So local scapes is a design principle for how to do a sustainable landscape.

It's a simplified design principle that a homeowner can easily understand and, and not feel overwhelmed by what it takes to remove lawn and replace it with something that's gonna use less water and make irrigation changes.

So where we're standing is a local scapes exhibit, and it's a quarter acre lot fenced in, which is a typical lot size for this area.

And it incorporates five design principles.

What this concept does is it takes what people are used to and just flips it right around.

- Okay.

- So, so you've got, most of northern Utah historically is lawn dominant landscapes.

You know, it's not uncommon to find lawn going from someone's foundation all the way to the fence line.

And then they'll come in and, and if they alter that, they'll put in a, a planter, a kidney bean shaped planter in their yard or something around the house.

Local scapes takes that order or that process and changes it completely around.

And we start designing with the lawn and a central open shape.

It doesn't have to be lawn, but that's the first principle is a central open shape, something that's ground level, and it can be functional as a lawn or a, or a just a, a gravel space where people can gather or something like that.

The second principle is gathering areas, so places where people can gather and talk like, like this area next to a area, the relaxing - Area.

Yeah.

- And those are designed, you know, strategically as needed.

- Right.

- Then there's activity zones, activity zones, as the name implies.

Anything where some activity happens, a vegetable garden, a playground like the one behind me or a trampoline or, you know, anything like that.

- Right.

- Isn't that even something like a, a shed, necessary parts of the landscape, - But maybe something that you don't wanna have a lot of maintenance around.

Right?

- Yeah.

- You don't wanna kill your grass - Right.

- If you've got a trampoline on it.

So how do you design with - That?

The, the advantage to us is in, in water conservation is that those areas don't require any water.

There's no, there's, it's part of the landscape.

It's providing function and value to the landscape, but no water use.

- Okay.

It's hardscape.

Absolutely.

- And then we take all those areas and we connect 'em together with paths and, you know, those can be secondary paths made out of gravel or something like that.

So that connects 'em, provides more function to the landscape.

And then the last thing becomes the planter areas and all the, the other space is filled in with plants.

Okay.

And of course there's a lot of design elements associated with that and how to do that.

A lot of options as well.

- And when you say planter space, you might, whether it's a in-ground bed near a house or by the front entrance or containers as well?

- Yeah, yeah.

Could it all of that.

- Okay.

- And the advantage to doing that last is the, the shapes of those planter beds are gonna be irregular and it, and so it's easy to fill that in with plants and water it efficiently with drip irrigation rather than spray irrigation, which, you know, doesn't bend around curves very easy.

So.

- Well, I love what you guys have here and it's a true visual for people to walk in and kind of experience it like you're in somebody's backyard here.

Again, this is the Conservation Garden park.

And tell us a little bit, it's free to the public if anybody's in town, they wanna come visit.

- Yeah, it's, it's, it's free to the public.

It's open weekdays during the day primarily, and just a lot of interesting things to look at, a lot of different plants for ideas, exhibits of, of how to do things and maybe things that you hadn't considered previously, you can, can get some idea of, of what it would take to redesign a landscape and, and install it.

- Absolutely.

Well, while some of our plants are same and some are different than what you have here in Utah, I know a lot of those same design principles will be applicable to Oklahomans.

So thank you so much for sharing this with us.

- Thank you.

- If you're planning on visiting Utah next week, I hope you take time to also visit these beautiful horticulture sites.

Go pokes.

There are a lot of great horticulture activities this time of year.

Be sure and consider some of these events in the weeks ahead as we begin to wrap up the gardening season.

Join us next week for another great episode of Oklahoma Gardening.

We known that we have in Oklahoma.

- Okay, here we go.

- I'm not driving right now.

To find out more information about show topics as well as recipes, videos, articles, fact sheets, and other resources, including a directory of local extension offices, be sure to visit our website at Oklahoma gardening dot OK state.edu.

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Oklahoma Gardening is produced by the Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service as part of the division of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources at Oklahoma State University.

The Botanic Garden at OSU is home to our studio gardens and we encourage you to come visit this beautiful Stillwater Gem.

We would like to thank our generous underwriters, the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, food and Forestry, and Shape Your Future, a program of the Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust.

Additional support is also provided by Greenleaf Nursery and the Garden Debut Plants, the Oklahoma Horticulture Society, the Tulsa Garden Club, and the Tulsa Garden Center.