A conversation with Ed Hume

Jill Severn portrait

JILL SEVERN’S GARDENING COLUMN

Ed Hume, 91 and still aiding our northwest gardening passions

Ed Hume is 92 this year. He’s still working three or four days a week at his namesake seed company in Puyallup, where he gives tours of the gardens.

For 50 years he was a celebrity TV garden show host, author, and international garden tour guide. He still wears his fame lightly. And he’s as wonderful a lunch companion as he was last year.

This week we split an excellent Reuben sandwich and talked about how gardening and the nursery industry have changed over the course of his life and career.

In 1950, when he worked for the Malmo Nursery in Seattle, the nursery stock consisted of over a million plants – mostly trees and hardy shrubs growing in rows on 35 acres. Yes, they were growing in the earth, not in pots! If you wanted to buy one, a nursery employee would dig it up for you and wrap its root ball in burlap.

There were no vegetable plants; people grew their own from seed. “You could have a thousand carrots from a package of seeds,” he says. To this day, it makes no sense to him that people would buy carrots already sprouted. “The slightest disturbance of their roots will cause the carrot to split. It just doesn’t work,” he says.

There weren’t even tomatoes or other frost-tender vegetables growing at the nursery. If people wanted to give vegetables a head start, they made cold frames – boxes covered by old windows that could be opened and closed. These scaled-down greenhouses protected plants from frost and gave them a little extra daytime warmth. And people typically shared their tomato and pepper starts with relatives, friends and neighbors.

The advent of plastic pots changed the nursery industry dramatically – and it changed consumer behavior.

Plastic pots

Another development accelerated the change.

When Ed was growing up, home gardening was as much a part of life as home cooking. “In my family, Dad grew the vegetables and fruit trees; Mom grew roses and other flowers. We also had chickens, geese, ducks, and rabbits. There were six of us kids, so of course we had chores, like cleaning the chicken coop.”

It was normal for children to learn about raising food: vegetables, fruits and animals. Canning and other food preservation methods were also practiced and taught. But Ed says the “pass-me-down” legacy of garden knowledge faded.

Over time, urban populations grew, and cities became denser, with smaller lots. Commercial food production and processing took over an ever-larger share of what people bought and ate. Garden clubs for both students and adults dwindled.

“That’s why people started Master Gardener programs,” Ed says. “There was a need to teach adults how to garden.” And by the 1970s, there were signs that a growing number of people wanted to learn.

The first Master Gardener Program was started by the Washington State University Cooperative Extension Service in 1972. The idea was to create a “teach the teachers” program, where graduates would volunteer to “pass-me-down” what they learned to people in their communities. They knew they were onto something when 600 people applied for the first cohort in Tacoma. They accepted 200.

Now there are Master Gardener programs all over the U.S. One hopes that might lead to a growing number of families where gardening is once again a normal part of raising children, but that might be hopeful speculation.

Another big change has been science and technology-based: Plant reproduction is based on tissue culture. In the past, Ed says, plants were reproduced in three ways:

• Planting seeds;
• Planting rooted cuttings – that is, small, young growing tips from shrubs or trees were planted out; they put down roots, and produced new plants; and
• Grafting a young branch from a tree onto the rootstock of another tree – usually a different variety known to have stronger roots, but sometimes grafting branches from several varieties of apples or other fruits onto a single tree.

These methods were ancient. For shrubs and trees – the standbys of the earlier nursery industry – this meant that “a new variety of, say, rhododendrons, might take five or ten years to reach the market because it took that long to produce enough plants to sell.”

“With tissue cultures, a single small stem of rhododendron, for instance, divided down to its cellular level, can produce 350 new plants.” This means that a new hybrid rhododendron (or most any other plant) can be replicated quickly enough to come on the market in less than a year.

This has created an ongoing explosion of new plant varieties for consumers to choose from.

So back in the day – 50 years ago – people had far fewer varieties of rhododendrons to choose from, and far fewer alternatives to rhododendrons if they were looking for a flowering shrub.

So, I asked Ed, were people back in the day as crazy for rhododendrons as they are now?

“Crazier,” he said.

As we left, I reached up for a hug (Ed’s much taller than me), and both of us nearly lost our balance and fell over. I think it was the trekking pole he uses for a cane that saved us.

So yes, we’re both a year older and a little clumsier than when we met for lunch last year – but we’re both still on our game.

Jill Severn writes from her home in Olympia, where she grows vegetables, flowers, and a small flock of chickens. She loves conversation among gardeners. Start one by emailing her at  jill@theJOLTnews.com