Good morning Jim, yes, absolutely! I honestly got the impression few, if any, ever told him, “You can’t DO that”. Children can do anything…until they’re told they can’t.
It went far past just breeding. I remember visiting and he walked me past some fig trees, chuckling. He told me it was very difficult to bud figs, and grapes, because they flow so much sap, it pushes the scion out of the “T” cut. He looked me in the eye and asked if I knew how it could be done. The only thing that made any sense was to make the vertical cut of the “T” longer and place the bud higher in the cut, allowing the sap to flow out the lower end, preventing pushing out the bud. That was it!
He usually had vegetable cuttings in abundance. He’d found a tomato he particularly liked, so to maintain it, he’d root cuttings of it under mist and keep them in the greenhouses over winter so he’d have the same tomato next year. He did the same thing with particular delphiniums he liked the colors of. He was always striking cuttings of the odd thing, much to Carolyn’s frustration, as they never sold any of them, but she’d have to maintain them, make room for them and eventually throw most of them away because of the glut.
He had odd things stashed away all over the place. Years ago, Wayside introduced a yellow Gardenia which was a sport of Mystery (I think) that had occurred in Hawaii. Instead of opening white and yellowing with age, it opened yellow. He had a couple of flats of them rooted on the tables and Carolyn was delighted to find homes for them before having to discard them. I brought several home and gave them to my gardening clients for their gardens. Unfortunately, none survived long, even in pots.
Jim Delahanty and I were up on a visit and had just returned from lunch, when a woman walked into the nursery with a decorated, 2" clay pot. It was too early and cold for the roses to be in bloom, but she wanted something colorful and flowering for a dozen of them that weekend for a bridal shower she was throwing.
Carolyn had gone on errands so it was the three of us there when the woman arrived. Ralph told her no one was there to help her but she could wait for Carolyn, who would surely be back shortly. I asked her what type of thing she had in mind and my eye fell on a partial flat of double spirea in 1" pots he’d rooted. They were thin and wispy, but flowering to beat the band. I picked one up and put it in her pot, telling her the small, double, virginal white buds resembled little roses and were particularly good because the common name was “Bridal Wreath”. We dug out the fullest, best dozen of them and she was delighted. Carolyn had come back and stood there with Ralph and Jim, watching in amusement. I excused myself and asked Carolyn if she would please write up the woman’s purchase, telling her what it was. She had HUGE eyes and a grin on her face, but took over like the professional she is. Afterward, she came over laughing and exclaimed, “How do you DO that!?” That’s when she told me he had propagated things for years with no eventual homes for them and she had to eventually dump them as there were so many. I had stated to the woman her timing was perfect. After selecting the best dozen, there were only a very few left and they weren’t as nice as hers. Ralph came over to look and stated, “Hm, guess I’d better get busy and make some more!” Carolyn groaned!
There were always new flats of 1" potted conifers, crepe myrtles, various shrubs, annuals, vegetables, anything which had a branch out of place and caught his eye. His mist tables and houses were his constant source of amusement. Something was always being stuck in there to make some more.
Lilacs are particularly difficult to propagate commercially, which is why they had been budded on privet for so many years. That proved to be too costly, so tissue culture was chosen. Unless you had suckering plants to divide, they could be slow to increase. Ralph experimented and discovered soft, new growth rooted fairly easily under mist, so he pumped those out, too. He would often cut hands full of things as we’d wander the nursery and leave them sitting on a bench where the mist in the main mist house would keep them wet until he got back to them. Very often, they would begin to callus sitting there. He would often delight asking me on my next visit if I remembered this or that he’d cut and left in the house, then telling me it had rooted laying there!
The climate was perfect. Hot, dry, with enough winter chill to grow lilacs and stone fruit to perfection, but not enough to damage his orange and kumquat trees. Berries, one of his passions, grew like Jack’s Bean Stalk! He had received bud wood from Burbank’s Apex Plumcot from “an old farmer” years before and had it grafted to one of his fruit trees. I grew the tree he grafted for me for years, but only have a self seedling of it left. It was one of the most beautiful flowering trees I’ve ever seen. The fruit wasn’t very good, but the tree was gorgeous. His cherry trees were sumptuous, and had many varieties grafted to them as material from something new came along. Just about any kind of fruit or berry from citrus to apples, figs and quince bore beautifully. Add regular mist and virtually anything could be coaxed into rooting. One table was completely open and exposed, except for the tree canopy overhead, which provided filtered light with periods of direct sun. He would stand there with a three pound coffee can, holes poked in the sides about an inch from the solid bottom, and graft mini cuttings on the tops of foot long whips of unrooted Pink Clouds. He’d do a dozen, rubber band them together and poke them in the can where about an inch of water stood in the bottom and the mist kept the tops moist. He’d do as many varieties as he wanted and leave them standing there in the sun, under mist, to root and knit until he could remove new mini trees ready for planting and hardening off.
As his abilities diminished, he began paying increasing attention to Carolyn’s and Burling’s efforts, much like a newly retired husband pays too much attention to his wife’s daily chores. Of course, that made them nuts, being micro managed all the time. They had always put multiple cuttings in each pot to create fuller pots, faster, but Ralph decided that was a waste, so he pushed to create single eye cuttings to get more from less and wait the greater time it took for the plants to develop. He had Burling experiment with “flooding the stigmas with pollen”, going back over more difficult crosses on several successive days to reapply the pollen in hopes of getting better seed set. The rugosa crosses were his particular subjects for that because so many of the rugosa crosses appeared to be self set seed, whether used as pollen or seed parent. The theory sounded interesting, but far more time consuming with little success to justify it.
