Wow!

Should be 'Eisregen'.

Karl Fuchs of Germany collected seeds in Paktia Province, Afghanistan in 1979. Multiple cultivars have been selected and named from resulting seedlings.

stunning dave..

how you been ... that gorgeous grass of yours look droughted ...

ken

Hi Ken, doing great, how about you? Hot summer with little moisture. Grass will take the month of October to bring back. Probably going to bail out of this place within the year and move to a gated community. It's time. My body is asking what are you doing? This is crazy. A really full time job year around that has become more then I want to deal with. Nothing is forever. If your not there yet, you will be and you will know it.

I'm sad and glad for you Dave. Knowing its time is the tough part and you have achieved that.

Another great plant, BTW. Thanks.

tj

What a beautiful, elegant conifer!

Want, want, want, sigh. :-)

I just planted one last spring. It is my favorite of the many cedars I have on my property.

Now that is a beauty. Wish I had a bigger lot of land ... sigh....

Thanks for the pic. Dave!

Super cool tree! With the bonus that it grows 18"/year.

And, by the way, Eisregen is German for freezing rain. You can see the association...either that or Karl Fuchs was gathering seed on a particularly nasty day.

tj

"Very hardy selection, to at least -24 degrees. USDA zone 4-5."

You've definitely piqued my interest with this information. I really like the habit and color of this one, but the true Cedars are out of my range. This one might be worth a try.

'Shalimar' is also reportedly cold hardier than many. Not as stunning a looker, though.

Wow, what a rocket! It looks like a giant compared to it's neighbors... Great color and form on that one. Nice to know how seriously hardy it is too. Sad to hear you will be leaving your conifer oasis soon... You can be assured it's one of the nicest conifer displays I have ever seen. Many of your original photos inspired me to start collecting. Hopefully those prime specimens find a nice arboretum or home to live at, or a least a new owner that will appreciate them!

Shawn

I should add that I purchased this cultivar from Forest Farm 10-12 years ago. Shipped as a 24 in stick in a 30 inch length box. If my memory serves me right I think Dax bought one too. I am not sure his lived.

I purchased 2 from Forest Farm spring of last year because of you. lol

If I had the money I would buy your house in heart beat to preserve your amazing work. The city should purchase it and have tours of the Dave Stegmaier Arboretum as it is a real unique gem and would make a great tourist attraction.

'Kashmir' may be the oldest familiar introduction of this type, having been raised by Styer nursery in PA during the 1920s, put on the market in 1950. It survived -25 degrees F. 1933-34.

Supposedly hardiest of all 'Shalimar' was raised by the Arnold Arboretum in 1964 from seed collected in the Shalimar garden, Kashmir, and named in 1979. As mentioned this one is considered less visually attractive than 'Kashmir', for instance. However it seems anyone living in an area where getting any Deodar cedar to persist through colder winters could get plenty of enjoyment out of having a particular selection succeed, even if it wasn't the most beautiful one on the market.

to be clear .... z5 is wildly divergent ... and dave taught me that lesson ... his zone 5 is not my z5 ..... he can grow things.. that i can not ... and deodora is one of them ...

it would never survive in my cold z5 ... my micro climate ...

im already there dave .... my garden is slowly reverting to horse pasture.. with some really cool conifers .. lol...

ken

Conifer pasture. Or Horst pasture, depending on which cultivars you have.

Garen, the fact be known...I don't do large volume tours. I have turned them down numerous times. By the time you have several 100 adults and half as many kids you have little left at the end of the day. Especially if it rained the night before. The adults are more rude and inconsiderate then the kids are. Small clubs maximum of 10-15 are welcome and I do these every year. The dollar value of the conifers is worth considerably more then the property and house are. The figure a landscaping contractor gave me to duplicate this garden blew me away. I won't mention the figure because non of you would believe me.

None of us?

"None of us"? Probably not. I still don't believe it. Since I did 100% of the work it's hard to factor labor into the cost. I started in 2000 and never counted hours. Never the less the garden will not be factored into the selling price of the house. It will take a special buyer since most working families would not want this to take care of.

It's a conifer garden. As low maintenance as gardens come. Won't be too hard if the buyer likes gardens. Maybe have some landscapers come in periodically to help with maintenance, like weeding.

Beautiful. I hit mine with my zero-turn mower more than once while learning to drive it. It's like it was a magnet for that mower of the other hundreds of trees & shrubs I have that never got touched.

I bought another in an Anderson Band Pot (5") that I planted one fall and it didn't go thru the winter. Then last year, Alex sent a one-gallon that I overwintered fall thru spring in my semi-heated greenhouse that died in there. As of now I said to myself "forget it."

Yours sure is a beauty though.

Gated community. Well, you'll have someone else do some work for you and you'll have a few special trees and shrubs. Maybe you will select some other deciduous plants you've always wanted.

Thanks for the memories that are going to come to end.

Dax

Yes, when you hire a landscape contractor time and materials add up. All the more so when you pay them to run around and get a large number of different kinds of plants from multiple different suppliers - some of whom might be located some distance from the planting site. Putting together a one of everything collection would require many hours of shopping at and driving between vendors, with all the plants having to be arranged and planted afterward as well. Here we also often get stuck in crawling traffic when moving about in the metropolitan area, which adds additional time to what it takes to get it all done.

I don't know where the notion that 'Shalimar' is the hardiest is coming from. Even the Arnoldia paper that introduced it and told its history noted that it was damaged at -6F in Boston. That clone was selected in a relatively low-altitude ornamental garden in Srinagar, India; there's no particular reason to think it was anything other than a clone that was locally selected in that part of the Kashmir mountains.

OTOH the Karl Fuchs selections were deliberately introduced from the coldest parts of the range, west of the main areas where the species is found.

Oh, I see, it came from NALT. Although that book is quite thoroughly researched, I think he just got some bad leads on this one. Curious that he doesn't cover 'Paktia', 'Eisregen', etc., but I guess they are more recent collections.

The Patkia cultivars of deodara seem to be getting harder and harder to find for some reason.

I have a 'Shalimar' but I sure can't attest to its cold-hardiness! The only reason that I have it is that a local specialty wholesaler was putting up a new shade house and had to clear out the stock that was in the way and so I got a 54" box for $100! It's nice looking but not particularly special. I have almost unlimited space out by our barns so there's no opportunity cost.

I'm also not sure why ALJ considered 'Shalimar' to be less attractive. Maybe because it's not as blue as some...or because it's neither blue nor emerald green. I'd call mine a grayish-green, up close, but from a distance, next to a dour american holly, it's more bluish seeming.

I'd call mine grayish-green also. I think it's very pretty but I wouldn't use it as a focal point. I love cedars, though, so I'm happy with it!

"The Patkia cultivars of deodara seem to be getting harder and harder to find for some reason."

A lot of obscure, hardier and/or slow growing cultivars of anything are getting hard to find. If you're a wholesaler with a fixed size field and fixed amount of human capital, why grow a hardy variety when 95% of your C. deodara sales are going to be in milder places like the SE, CA, or PNW? I don't know for a fact but I bought an 'Eisregen' (IIRC) liner from Camforest and though it eventually died of neglect (I admit this happens more often than it should!) it was agonizingly slow growing for a couple years. I mean, a 3-4" inches each year slow...so I suspect the cold hardy ones grow slowly compared to the robust zn 8 forms. This makes biological sense to some degree. Thus the nurseryman has to question whether to tie up his fields with a niche product.

There is (used to be?) a conifer nursery near New Windsor or Mt. Airy that would have had those. Somewhere east of Frederick but not in HoCo. I'll try to find the name if you want. He used to show up at the Ladew Garden Day but might be going into semi-retirement. John Shelley in York County had a good variety of hardy cedars too, but have long since closed. You've been to Patuxent Valley Nurseries, right? He probably once had them but seemed to be easing into semi-retirement, and that was several years ago!

Mine slow the first 3 years. Usually the time it takes for enough new root growth to push good foliage on the top side. The transformation of faster growth begins at the top of the fence. From there on about 18 inches a year. This one has seen -15 F. Anything lower the that is an unknown for its survival here in the Midwest. Lowest temp recorded here is -18 F. A 100 year event.