RALEIGH -- I was staring at Whale's Tongue, the big blue agave I'd fallen for last winter in the Plant Delights Nursery catalog as 2 feet of snow piled up outside. Here, at the nursery, was the real thing, a good 5 feet wide and dusky gray-blue.
I wanted to stash it in my car. But could I grow Whale's Tongue as far north as my garden in Maryland?
"Maybe, if you keep its roots dry in winter," said Tony Avent, who founded Plant Delights in 1988 with his wife, Michelle. "Last year, we had 8 degrees and this was just untouched."
Agave ovatifolia, the Whale's Tongue hardy century plant, hails from the mountains of Nuevo Leon in Mexico, where winters are cold. And Avent, who loves to challenge assumptions about a plant's supposed range, has this blue beauty and many other succulents sailing through winter.
A yucca near the nursery entrance, about 10 feet tall and just as wide, bristled with narrow spiky leaves, sporting white flowers as tightly wound as my late Aunt Ethel's pin curls. As he writes in his catalog, "If you need to stop trespassing deer, this is your plant." I had come down about two weeks ago for a preview of what visitors will see at the nursery's open house. They can wander through seven greenhouses of elephant ears and variegated agaves, rare ferns and hostas. They can explore the Juniper Level Botanic Gardens - six acres set aside for research and display - where the most promising plants, including jack-in-the-pulpits, gingers and epimediums, are studied in a home gardenlike setting.
Usually these gardens are open by appointment only, and until May, the plants are for sale only online or through the catalog. But during the open house, visitors may buy as many as they can stuff into an 18-wheeler.
"I have one guy who flies in on his private plane every year," Avent said.
The unexpected
The trilliums were blooming in full force in a woodland garden full of trees and shrubs, along with a fringe tree (Chionanthus virginicus) laden with fragrant white blossoms; a red buckeye (Aesculus pavia) loaded with buds that promised clusters of red flowers; magnolias of all kinds; and lilacs that are not supposed to like the South.
"We've got 20 different lilacs here," said Avent, who calls himself the "mythbuster of horticulture."
"Give me a good rumor, and let me find out if it's right or wrong. Most of them are dead wrong," he said.
Avent, who has a degree in horticulture from N.C. State University, travels the world - from the fields and forests of this country, down through Mexico and South America, as well as Europe, Africa and Asia - searching for plants that will suit the warmer, more humid conditions of the mid-Atlantic coast and the Southeast.
His nursery has 17,000 kinds of plants, including many of the woody shrubs and trees that Avent grows as a habitat and striking backdrop for his perennials. He does not sell them, but will tell you where to get them.
"There's nothing worse, as a plant person, than walking through a garden and seeing a plant and not having any idea where you can get it," he said.
As we crouched to get a closer look at the patterned leaves of some of the 500 trilliums, it occurred to me that I was the beneficiary of a childhood disappointment Avent never forgot.
As a 5-year-old, young Tony was making terrariums and selling them; by 6, he was ordering plants by mail.
"When I was 8, I told my father I wanted to go see the best garden in the world," he had said earlier. "I figured, from all the catalogs, that had to be Wayside Gardens."
So one day, the family drove to Greenwood, S.C., Wayside's headquarters.
"We got out and there was a bed of begonias or impatiens or something, and I'm asking, 'Where are the gardens? This can't be it!' "
While all those wonderful plants in the catalog were available, his father explained, they were either grown off-site or bought from other growers and distributed.
"I was just devastated," Avent said. "And I said to myself, 'When I grow up, I'm going to have a mail-order nursery with gardens, so nobody will ever be disappointed when they visit.' "
Delights stays rooted
Plant Delights seems to be weathering the economic storm, though sales have dropped by 15 percent over the last two years. The plants Avent does put on the market are tested here for years. Of those 500 trilliums, for instance, which are mostly grown from the seeds of single plants collected across the Southeast, 14 kinds are being offered for sale this year. Since it takes five to seven years for a trillium to mature and bloom, and as long as 14 years to have enough to sell, the $22 Avent charges seems a reasonable price to me.
When he searches for trilliums he might look out over a population of 100,000 plants. "We're looking for that one unique plant that's taller, bigger, has a darker flower or a bigger flower," he said, as we walked through the woodland garden.
"Here's a silver-leafed one I found in Louisiana," he said, bending down to get a closer look at the blotched silver and green leaves and the deep red flowers.
He showed off T. underwoodii, which has a silver streak down the middle of each brightly mottled leaf and hails from the dry forests of Alabama.
"When you find something like that, you feel like jumping up and down," he said.
Some of these trilliums have been crossbreeding in the garden, something that is impossible, according to the experts - "which is why we never let our plants read books," Avent said.
I could smell the fragrant flowers of the fringe tree as we stopped to look more closely at the weirdly beautiful flowers of Asarum maximum "Ling Ling" or Panda Face ginger. Before its patterned silvery green and gold leaves begin to cover the ground, the flowers - little black cups with creamy throats - open up on the forest floor.
"These patterns guide the insects down to the pollen inside," Avent said, prying one of the tubular flowers out of the ground and pulling it apart.
"The pollen is in here, see," he said, touching the tiny anthers. "So when the insect crawls around, it puts the pollen on the stigma here." He touched the pistils, where the flower's ovules would be fertilized and turn into seeds.
"If you get a seed set, then you can plant the seeds," he said.
Thanks to the mythbuster, these arums are now thriving in hot, humid North Carolina.
European wild ginger (Asarum europaeum) "is notorious for not taking any heat," Avent said. But the plant's range extends from Northern Europe into the south of France, "where it's baking hot," he said. "It's just that nothing in the trade was collected from there."
So Avent headed south, to collect new genetic material. And, taa-daa: His arums tolerate heat.
Wonder of plant science
He is always looking to fill a niche, and one was variegated agaves. In 2005, he bought a few rare variegated agaves on eBay. "A plant the size of your thumbnail for $200 to $800 with no roots," he said.
When a lab in California told him it was impossible to tissue-culture variegated agaves, he contacted a lab in Minnesota that had successfully tissue-cultured some of his hostas.
"A year later, I had them back," he said. Now, he sells variegated agaves for about $25.
Many of his elephant ears resulted from a vacation in Hawaii, which for him means plant hunting. There, in 2003, Avent stumbled on thousands of seedlings - "black leaves, purple leaves, green ones," he said - growing at a university experiment station, where a plant pathologist was trying to find varieties of taro that did not get leaf spot.
"He just happened to get these colored seedlings and was about to plow them under," Avent said. "So I'm explaining how these have value and potential, and he's looking at me like I have snakes coming out of my head."
But Avent persisted. He signed an intellectual property rights agreement with the University of Hawaii and has been working ever since with John Cho, the plant pathologist, to develop some hybrid elephant ears. Seven are now on the market.
