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Pinus
mugo
Uniform
dwarfs are great shrubs for low borders
Pinus mugo is one
of those frustrating plants. It's a quality plant, mind you, but
it does have a few poor traits that hold it down.
The two biggest problems, and the ones that keep
mugo pine from being more commonly used, are that it is difficult
to propagate vegetively and it's highly variable from seed.
"You can see some spectacular examples in person,"
said Greg Pilcher, general manager of Iseli Nursery, Inc. in Boring,
Oregon. "Look at a 10 to 15 year-old planting of mugos at a
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shopping
mall or Kentucky Fried Chicken. Every plant is going to look different.
There's a lot of seedling variability, even among the so-called
'dwarfy' types."
Mugo
pine is native to the mountains of Central and Southern Europe
and its biggest contribution to the landscape industry has been
as a dwarf. Some mugos reach 80 feet tall in the wild, but it's
the smaller selections that grow less than four feet tall that
are most valuable.
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Pinus
mugo 'Mops'
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| Biting
the bullet.
Pilcher knows the only way to ensure a mugo will
have the same size, texture, color and needle length as the parent
is through cutting propagation.
"We grow them from cuttings to give landscapers
and consumers some assurance of consistency," Pilcher said. "They're
not easy to root, but we've been having some success.
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They're never
going to be widely produced this way by other nurseries because
it's so much easier from seed, but it's what set's us apart. We
do a zillion cuttings to get a million plants."Another downfall
of the mugo pine is that it's sometimes painfully slow. Some varieties
will grow only an inch or two a year, if that much. The trick, Pilcher
said, is finding varieties that have the most commercial adaptability
- the ones with the highest rooting percentages that are relatively
fast growers and take to container of field culture. |
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Pinus
mugo 'Slowmound'
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2
good cultivars
Here are two varieties Iseli Nursery feels are
most commercially viable. They are part of the company's TRU-dwarf
line of mugos:
'Slowmound.'
This was a seedling selection from Iseli Nursery in 1981. The
cultivar name describes the plant's growth, which is only 1 ½
-2 inches per year. Needles are ¾ to 1 inch long and dark green
with a slight twist. It produces single buds.
'Mops.'
Selected in the Netherlands in 1951, this cultivar reaches 3 feet
high and wide at maturity. It has ¾ to 1 inch, dark green needles
that can change to light green or almost yellow in winter. It
normally produces multiple buds.
This
article was originally published in the November 2000 issue of
NMPRO Nursery Management Production magazine. Used with permission.
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