Talking Trees with Davey Tree

Landscaping Trends to Know About in 2024

The Davey Tree Expert Company Season 4 Episode 3

Lou Meyer, business developer for Davey's mid-Atlantic region, talks about landscaping trends he saw at the 2024 Mid-Atlantic Nursery Trade Show (MANTS).

In this episode we cover:  

  • What is the Mid-Atlantic Nursery Trade Show? (0:48)
  • Trends in landscaping (1:48)
    • Fabric grow sacks (2:00)
    • Gardening containers (5:52)
    • Shifting away from native only (6:25)
    • Environmental restoration (9:27)
    • Software in landscaping (11:50)
  • Winter in D.C. (12:26)
  • Davey's project with the National Aquarium during MANTS (13:00)

To find your local Davey office, check out our find a local office page to search by zip code.  

To learn more about environmental restoration at Davey, visit our Environmental Design & Ecosystem Restoration Services page or Wetland Studies and Solutions, Inc.'s, a Davey company, website.

To learn more about the Mid-Atlantic Nursery Trade Show, visit mants.com.

Connect with Davey Tree on social media:
Twitter: @DaveyTree
Facebook: @DaveyTree
Instagram: @daveytree
YouTube: The Davey Tree Expert Company
LinkedIn: The Davey Tree Expert Company 

Connect with Doug Oster at www.dougoster.com

Have topics you'd like us to cover on the podcast? Email us at podcasts@davey.com. We want to hear from you!    

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Doug: Welcome to The Davey Tree Expert Company's podcast, Talking Trees. I'm your host, Doug Oster. Each week, our expert arborists share advice on seasonal tree care, how to make your trees thrive, arborists' favorite trees, and much, much more. Tune in every Thursday to learn more because here at the Talking Trees Podcast, we know trees are the answer.

Regular listeners to the show will know my guest, Lou Meyer, he's part of the Davey Business Development Team in the Mid-Atlantic region, DC and Maryland. Today, we're talking all about the Mid-Atlantic Nursery Trade Show. Last year, we were together at the show. This year, that didn't work out. Lou, take us through what the Mid-Atlantic Nursery Trade Show looks like. Paint us a picture.

Lou: It's the greatest green show on earth, Doug. It's all the growers from around the United States and beyond converge upon the convention center in Baltimore every January to sell their wares to the landscape industry. For those of us that are freezing in the northern climate winter, it's so wonderful to have all these beautiful trees and flowers and shrubs, some that are in bloom because they've been indoors the whole time. It's just a reminder that spring is around the corner and the season is upon us.

Doug: Big trees. You got 20-foot, 30-foot trees in that convention center.

Lou: Yes, they haul them in. That's a really interesting part of the industry. We, Davey, has a branch that does big tree moving, actually. Some really cool projects all over the globe, actually. The bigger, the better.

Doug: Let's talk a little bit about the trends and things that you saw there. Then I'll talk a little bit about what I saw, too. What's the first thing that comes to mind when you were looking through the show?

Lou: The first thing that caught my eye were the number of growers who are selling their plants and also selling this product in fabric grow sacks. Traditionally, we've bought trees in either balled and burlapped condition or container-grown. Balled and burlapped is when those big root balls on the bottom of a tree at a nursery. What happens is the nursery digs out the roots of the tree, either manually with a shovel or more often with what's called a tree spade. A tree spade is a piece of machinery that connects to the front of a Bobcat or some of them are big enough that they go on the back of semi-trucks and will lift those 30-foot trees out of the ground with a 2000-pound root ball.

When we do that in the industry, we sever those roots with a sharp instrument to reduce damage to them. Then we wrap that root ball in burlap, really tight, a burlap sack, and tie it. Sometimes a metal cage around it.

The other way that you frequently see these is in a container where we start a tree from a seed. It gets a little bigger. We move it into a larger container and a larger container until the point where you're buying it from a nursery in a 25 or 30-gallon plastic container. These fabric grow sacks, I wouldn't say that they're new to the market, but they're really gaining in popularity.

If you think of the non-disposable grocery bags that you get from the store, it's like that. It's a square bag. They're bigger, obviously. It's a square bag that has perforations so that it's not completely enclosed like a grocery bag would be. What this does is it allows the roots of the tree to grow out and through these perforations. One of the downsides of container-grown trees is roots hit that container and they start to wrap around and wrap around.

If you don't get into a bigger container, what you end up with is these severely girdling roots that wrap around the trunk of the tree and they end up suffocating the tree. They because damage by cutting off the water and nutrient supply from the roots to the shoots. These grow sacks allow those roots to grow through the walls of the sack. As they grow through, as the root gets larger, the root actually gets girdled, which is okay because that root will then girdle. It'll die past the sack. On the outside of the sack, it'll die. That'll fall off and degrade and that root will regrow and it will continue over and over again. It'll allow the tree's roots to grow and develop without girdling. It makes for a wonderful product.

Doug: How many holes are in a big fabric pot like that?

Lou: Hundreds. They're not the size of a golf ball. They're, gosh, I don't know, quarter inch maybe.

Doug: For feeder roots, is that the size roots that are going out?

Lou: Yes. These aren't the large structural roots, feeder roots.

Doug: That is interesting.

Lou: Yes,. What's great for us is they're super lightweight. It's easy to move these trees around. The number of containers that I've gone to pick up that are 400 pounds like, "Oh my gosh. How am I going to get this off the truck?" You can really move these grow sacks around. They're easy to stack in a truck too because they're square. They're very user-friendly. I saw a lot of those, which I haven't seen before at the show.

Doug: That's interesting because, I'm looking at that show a lot of times for consumers and I'm seeing the same thing for like the garden, only on a smaller scale. Lightweight with handles, often made from recycled water bottles or something like that. There's one called root pouch where you could get a 15-gallon one, fill it up with something light, and grow your tomato in it or something like that. Let's say it was potatoes, at the end of the season, you dump them all out. You could store that thing flat. That's another advantage too.

Lou: Yes, it's great.

Doug: What else did you see?

Lou: One of the things that I noticed that I thought was interesting is a shift away from native only. Now, I'm a big proponent of planting natives. I think they're incredibly important. I think the focus should always be on that. The past few years, it just seemed like almost a sin to plant a non-native in your garden. I don't agree with that. I think that there's a place for ornamentals, never invasive ornamentals, but a place for ornamentals for appreciation, for balance, and sometimes you just love a tree.

What I noticed this year is more non-native options. Now, again, there's a huge focus on native. I want to be very clear, that's very important. That was definitely a theme at the show, but I was seeing more non-natives, which I appreciated.

Doug: I was seeing, again, this trend towards smaller plants. This is a question for you. Star Roses was offering two redbuds to be grown in containers. Redbuds are native, but when it's bred like that, do you still consider it a native?

Lou: That's a big discussion in the industry, is are cultivars native, right? If you have a redbud, that's great. If it is a Forest Pansy, which is the purple leaf redbud, is that a native anymore? Purists would say no, because the native fauna, the pollinators, the insects, they might not be able to identify those flowers because they're specifically looking for the native flower of the Eastern redbud, the ones that you would find in the forest. It's really up to discussion and it has not been decided yet.

Doug: That's the tricky thing with natives. Obviously, for the most part, we want natives, we know that's a good thing, but there's also the other side of the coin. You're growing for the pollinators, you're growing for the wildlife, but you're also growing for the gardener or for the homeowner.

Lou: Yes, no, a balance has to be found. Another thing to consider is some of the natives that we have are suffering. If you look at flowering dogwoods, for instance, they are getting hammered with anthracnose. I wouldn't recommend planting a straight native flowering dogwood in the Mid-Atlantic right now because of our humidity. Anthracnose just destroys them, but you get a kousa dogwood, which is slightly different, non-native, and they do great. There are other cultivars of dogwoods that have been bred to be resistant to anthracnose. You got to go find that balance, Doug.

Doug: Yes, definitely. What else at the show?

Lou: I saw some environmental restoration companies. I know you've discussed on this show before and any Davey listener should know, we do quite a bit of environmental restoration with the Davey Resource Group. Out here in Maryland, in the Mid-Atlantic, we've got Wetlands Studies and Solutions, Incorporated. Environmental restoration means a number of things. Our focus is on-- I don't want to say our focus, but what first comes to mind is wetlands restoration.

If you live in a neighborhood, for instance, I'll be hyper-local to Maryland here, Columbia is a planned community halfway between Baltimore and DC. Beautiful area. I live in a neighborhood just north of it called Ellicott City. Columbia has meandering streams behind all the houses, in between the developments. When they developed the neighborhoods back in the '50s and '60s, they ran straight lines of a lot of these creeks. Where they used to meander, they'd straighten them out so that they could build more houses.

What we've realized is that causes a lot of destruction to the streams themselves. Then downriver, when you have rain events, that water just races through the creeks and into your stormwater systems. Instead of that natural meandering that slows the water, allows it to percolate into the ground, provides breeding for fish and aquatic wildlife, and the rest. We go into neighborhoods like that, developments like that, and we recreate those wetlands for a more successful setting. I saw more environmental restoration companies at MANTS this year than I have ever in the past. Some really good setups.

Doug: Then I saw just, again, a continuing focus on sustainability, organics, and then also deer resistance, offering plants. In fact, I don't know if you saw it, but there was a guy dressed as a deer walking through, waving at people to promote a deer-resistant line of plants.

Lou: I did see him. I had to resist the urge to request a selfie with him. Yes, I did see the deer frolicking amongst the plants.

Doug: Anything else there at the show that was trending that piqued your interest?

Lou: Yes. The last thing that really piqued my interest was, and I talked about this last year when we recorded live at the show, the amount of software companies that are out there, that are helping growers. Parallel to that, in your realm, a lot of garden communications groups. Publications and blogs and those kinds of things that actually have booths to promote their publications. I was really excited to see that there's more in the communication world showing up.

Doug: In your region, what's going on right now? What has your weather been like, and are you still planting?

Lou: Yes. It really hasn't frozen until this week. We had a cold snap back in December, but it was only three or four days. The ground didn't freeze. The ground is not frozen yet. We are planting. Not a whole lot because business slows down now, it's still out there. It's cold. We get snow this morning, our first accumulation in a long time. The kids were very excited when they looked out the window.

Otherwise, what's happening? We've had some fun projects. Actually, one that ties into MANTS. Wednesday, the first day of MANTS, we were over at the aquarium. We take care of the National Aquarium, which is in Baltimore, about five blocks from the convention center where MANTS took place. We were planting three trees actually up on the roof. We used the crane to lift these trees up onto the roof. It was a huge logistical deal trying to set it all up because there are weight limits on the wharves there, and we had to get security to shut down all these lanes. It was a lot of fun to set up.

I went over in the morning to check on the crews to make sure that everyone was good. My good friend, Aaron Garver, district manager of the Baltimore office is the one who coordinated it all. It was his job. Around 10:30, he texted me and said, "Hey, we are about 30 feet short on arbor tie." Arbor tie is this thing like parachute cord. It's webbing that we use to tie trees up when we stake them. These trees are going on the roof. We had to really stabilize them.

I said, "Hold on, let me check with one of the vendors here." I'm at the largest green trade show on earth. I ran over to Forestry Suppliers table. Forestry Suppliers is a supply company that sells anything in the forestry industry. That's a strange sentence. We do a lot of business with them. I've bought a lot of products from Forestry Suppliers. Danny was working the booth there. I said, "Hey, Danny, I'm in trouble. We need some arbor tie and you've got a roll there. Can I buy that from you?"

He said, "It's just a display." I said, "Oh, we're 30 feet short on this job right down the street." Without thinking, he took a blade out, took a knife out his pocket, pulled 40 feet off for me, cut it, and said, "Here, it's yours." I ran down the street, gave it to the crew, and we didn't shut down a huge operation. That's a really great gesture on Forestry Suppliers' part and part of the magic of the industry. We're all in it together trying to help each other out. We want everyone to succeed.

Doug: What kind of tree can you plant on a roof? It can't get that big, right?

Lou: No, dwarf varieties. You're going to plant small ones. This is actually a protected area. Let's see, there's multiple levels to the aquarium. It all culminates with the rainforest up on top, which we actually take care of. Davey takes care of that rainforest. We have crews that go in at five in the morning and we go up into the canopy and we're climbing with sloths and birds of paradise up in the trees with us.

We're pruning out limbs that are dead or broken or touching the walls. It's one of the more unique sites that we work. There's multiple level roofs. Where we're planting these three trees, actually is a courtyard. There's three walls around it on the west, north, and south side. It faces east where the winds are less prevailing. We planted two eastern red cedars, dwarf versions, and one southern magnolia, a dwarf version.

Doug: That's pretty cool.

Lou: Yes. It's going to be an interesting project. We're going to have to treat them with anti-desiccant sprays. I think they're doing that today or tomorrow. Anti-desiccant sprays are oils that close the stomata of the leaves. Leaves, especially broadleaf evergreens in the winter, as the cold winds blow across those leaves, the stomata release the water vapor from inside the tree.

It's like you exhaling. When the cold winds blow across broadleaf evergreens like southern magnolias here or think of hollies, American hollies. Actually, my buddy Brian Seber talked about this on a recent episode. That wind draws the moisture out. We spray them with an oil that plugs up the stomata to minimize that moisture leak.

Doug: Next year, we got to hook up at MANTS again for one of our live podcasts. I know that we'll be talking to you soon with all the ideas you're pitching for the podcast.

Lou: Yes. I still owe you a crab cake, my friend.

Doug: I'm going to take you up on that.

Lou: Excellent. Hey, thanks so much. It's always great to talk to you.

Doug: Thanks, Lou. Tune in every Thursday to the Talking Trees Podcast from the Davey Tree Expert Company. I am your host, Doug Oster. Do me a big favor, subscribe to the podcast so you'll never miss a show. If you've got an idea for an episode or maybe a comment, send us an email at podcasts@davey.com. That's P-O-D-C-A-S-T-S@D-A-V-E-Y.com. As always, we'd like to remind you on the Talking Trees Podcast, trees are the answer.

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