Texas Nursery and Landscape Assn Expo, Dallas Arboretum, Blackberry varieties

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Photo: This is the moth parent of that huge caterpillar
- at least it looks big enough to be the parent.

PLANT NEWS
Texas Nursery and Landscape expo was held this week in Dallas and we were treated to plenty of eye candy for plant lovers. We took a lot of photos of new plant introductions.

After the show, we walked a few hours at the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden where we saw how many perennials and annuals can withstand Dallas heat if they are watered daily. A click on a map of the Arboretum will give you a sense of the size of their collections.

Later this week, I'll post photos from both.

BLACKBERRIES - In answer to a question about blackberries: Select varieties specific to your climate. For western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma, look for the ones with names such as Arapaho, Navajo, Choctaw, Comanche - you get the drift. These thornless varieties were bred at Arkansas State University to hold up to our climate and adapt to our soils.
Photo: We picked two of these full of berries twice a week during the season.
The original planting six years ago was 3 little sticks of plants.




GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE PROTESTS -
My garden column this Thursday is about Ryan DeSantis who is studying the effect of carbon dioxide on the health of trees in Oklahoma so I was especially alert to two stories about climate change in today's paper.

Protesters at Heathrow Airport in London set up a camp to protest the proposed addition of a third runway at the airport because of the greenhouse gases that would be released into the environment.

and

In an effort to bring attention to global climate change, Greenpeace had 600 people lie on a melting Swiss glacier in Bettmeralp. They report that the glacier is shrinking by 110-yards every year. The air temperature was about 50-degrees when the photo was taken. The entire article is at http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=070818214642.2288blmn&show_article=1.

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