From away to garden.com and Robinhood Radio.com, this is Away to Garden with Margaret Roach. You're a weekly invitation to dig in and grow. Patrick McDuffy believes that everyone should have at least one scented geranium on their window sill year round for an on-demand whiff of fragrance or to admire its colorful flowers or to make a home-brewed cup of herbal tea. Patrick is the third generation of his family to cultivate scented geraniums at Well Sweep, herb farm and rural New Jersey, where 80-something pelergonium varieties are among some 2,000 different kinds of herb plants in the nursery's amazing collection. More in a moment about Well Sweepweep and scented geraniums, but first these messages. Underwriting support for a way to garden provided by Colorblends, wholesale flower bulbs, a third-generation bulb company offering top-sized flower bulbs directly to landscape professionals and ambitious residential gardeners on the web, Colorblends.com. by by High Mohing Seeds, Wolcott Vermont, Professional Quality Vegetable, Flower, and Erbil Seeds that are 100% organic and non-GMO project verified. On the web, HighMohingSeeds.com. And by Whiteflower Farm, offering a wide range of carefully selected and expertly grown garden plants. On the web, whiteflowerfarm.com Well Sweep herb farmers of popular destination nursery and Port Marine, New Jersey founded in 1969 by Cyrus and Louise Hyde, which today has more than six acres of themed gardens to explore. My guest Patrick McDuffy, who's nursery manager, is one of three generations of the extended-hide family, who bring well-sweep to life, including his grandmother and his uncle, David Hyde, who runs the business. Each garden season, well-sweep hosts a couple of weekend-long festivals, with the next one its full flower festival and craft market set for August 30th and 31st with lots of expert talks and tours and more,

including what Patrick is calling a scented geranium deep dive that he's offering.

I'm glad to welcome him to the program today and good to talk to you again.

How are you?

Hello, I'm doing well.

How is it out there in herb world?

We are experiencing a drought at the moment and walk as much as we can.

Yes, it's madness. This has been a year of challenges, definitely, definitely. Well, I so enjoyed working together on our recent New York Times Garden column that we did about Well Sweep and about the scented geraniums and so forth. The 80-something scented geraniums are like a collection within the bigger collection of the nursery. You have deep

groups of number of other plants too, yes. There are other specialties. There's 50 different types of mint and 60 different types of lavender. I'm just, you know, guesstimating. There's probably 200 different varieties of time. 40 or so different types of rosemary, 20 to 30 oregano, so yeah, any one of those herbs, there's a massive collection, and then on top of that there's a large amount of medicinal herbs for our herbalists in the region. We do a lot with the American herbalist guild here locally locally and lots of natives and other rare plants and antique plants. Yes, and then I think that if that's not enough, I think maybe you and maybe your uncle too enjoy carnivorous plants, is that correct? Is that another specialty now? It is. That has become a specialty when I came over a decade ago now from James Madison University. I used to work in a tissue culture lab at an intern where I got to cut out Venus fly traps and test tubes under sterile conditions and when I came here my grandfather had one fish tank in the back with a collection of things that he had collected and I knew how to go in there with a scalpel. And we do this, we do a lot of trariums in living spagged moss. And I can almost recreate lab-like conditions in that stuff. Because it's so full of antibiotics and antifungals and rooting hormones that I was able to slice and dice and start selling a few. And then my uncle runs the business so that people were into it. And he expanded the collection even larger. Yeah. And he's a native plant enthusiast. I think David Hyde is nice to me as well. He is. And a lot of those are all native. So that's one of the reasons he really, really got into it is because he could add every single one of these to his native lectures or his funky plant lectures.

Yeah. And so as if that were not enough, then you also inherited from your grandfather, I believe, a lot of roosters with very long tails. Yes, I did. They are the closest thing we have to onagodora here in the US. yes, I inherited his flock and I did a lot of genetics classes that were originally inspired by understanding all the genetics of these particular roosters and so now I breathe them and sell them all over the country now Yeah, just a few little little passions, huh? For diversity So I think your grandfather, Cyrus, had from whom, by the way, I decades ago, I used to mail order a lot of plants from my garden, so I've known well sleep a long time. I think he sort of handed down the scented geranium gene to you, Patrick. I think he gave you a scented geranium when you were a teenager maybe. I think I was probably 16 or 17 when I got my first rose geranium, which he taught me to train into a topiary. And that first one, we've talked about rose geranium, how it's relatively tolerant of many conditions compared to some of the other ones. And so everything I moved almost every year of college to a different dorm room, different apartment and

it meant conditions compared to some of the other ones. And so every I moved almost every year of college to a different dorm room, different apartment, and it managed to live on some northeastern facing windowsill some east some west and I managed to come up to me to the farm for quite a few years until I over zealously root pruned and top pruned it at the same time one year and a little bit too much tough love and I killed it. But I've gotten better at the art of topiary since then. So the two that I have recreated in its stead are much nicer than the original. But the old fashioned roast uranium was your first pelergonium of your first-centred uranium. And I think you use it for, I mean, it has many uses as do many of the centurraniums and as do many of the herbs in your collection of things too. Like, what else you can make tea? I think you can even use it sort of when you go out, is a bug repellent. I mean, don't use it for other things as

well. Oh yeah, absolutely. If I feel like going on a hike tonight, I will grab a couple of leaves

and rub my shins down and leave them in my sock and it stops the ticks from coming up my legs. And if you look at an organic tick repellent, you can look at the ingredient list and it will always have pelagonium graviolins in there as well. I'm about to shape prune my topiaries probably tonight or tomorrow night and I will be taking some cuttings of them but then taking off all the broad leaves and handing them to my grandmother to do a multitude of rose uranium cakes that I will be featuring in a lot of my tea courses through the both at the festival and in the fall As a little tea accompaniment And I will also probably use it in my tea courses as well Yeah, so it's a even just that one even just the rose which is a familiar scent Of the Santa geraniums and we should say I might say that so their pelergoniums I think they're from various areas in southern Africa, originally. And the range of sense is pretty staggering. I mean, most people know about the rows and the citrus, for instance, but wow. I mean, that's not even a drop in the bucket. Yeah, not at all. Yeah, people are most familiar with either that or the,

what goes by mosquito plant or citronella plant, which we call citrosa pelergonium here. We have another one we call citronella, which is what I would argue is the true citronella, with a much better fragrance to it, with a much more circular leaf. Um, and then yes, it goes everywhere from black pepper to southern wood to some of the oak leaf types that smell indistinctly like wood or some that smell like Parmesan cheese even or lime or lemon or oranges or strawberries. So I often have a kid come up to me and I say, what's your favorite flavor? It doesn't always work. Sometimes they'll say something really obscure, but most of the time I can be like, okay, and then I'll reach down and grab a sense of draining of that flavor and have them smell it. The way to get kids to engage with plants for sure is to amaze them like that, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, there are, I mean, just among the sort of

minty ones, you know, there's like chocolate mint and peppermint and, you know, all kinds of, um, yeah, peppermint is a very popular one with a very fuzzy, uh, lower growth habit and a large fuzzy leaf. Chocolate mint is similar to it, a little more upright with a good red center to the leaf. There's peppermint spice is another one of my favorite ones with a nice almost skeleton rose look to it with a nice upright growth habit. I've once made a topy area out of that one. And yeah, the mint flavors continue to go on. There's mint rose and variegated mint rose, which my grandmother likes. There. And when you want to do tea, do you just kind of pinch off some leaves and put them in the cup and pour some hot water over it? Is it as simple as that or is there something you don't dry them or what's that? I don't dry them. Yeah. You could dry them, but I really love a fresh cut tea. So I will use fresh herbs as much as I possibly can or accent a dried herb with a fresh herb. And usually I do a little bit of shape pruning, so I like to make art out of my herbs and a pruning opportunity presents itself every time I want to make a cup of tea. It's a harvest, it's a harvest too, right? Yep, so if I have one branch that's going kind of in the wrong direction or a little bit too tall, that's kind of asking me to make a cup of tea and I'll take just maybe the top three leaves as a sprig per cup. Yeah, I mean I think there's even like a coconut once I read in the catalog and the coconut would be coconut would be like the weed of the Pelagonium family and it will sometimes recede itself in our garden very low growing but very distinctly coconut I mean and it's definitely one of the land- varieties from Africa. So the rose uranium. And yes, there is French vanilla, which has taken, which is a fragrance as the species hybrid. Old spice, uranium used to be our top seller in the fragrance world until just, I think it was two years ago, one of our volunteers, his name is Greg and he is a geranium fanatic and he helps us maintain the collection just for his own fun now that he's retired. He helped introduce the French vanilla and the black pepper about two years ago and they have both become two of our favorites. Oh, cool. And, you know, I know there are other pallargoniums that we in gardening call the fancy leaf geraniums as opposed to the scented geraniums. But some of these scented ones have some pretty beautiful leaves. You were just talking, for instance, about some of the peppermint ones having kind of very fuzzy solvary leaves. They're ornamental, and some of them have very dissected kind of leaves and some are grayish and some are very gated. So they're not unsholy, even though they're not technically the fancy leaf geraniums. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you could subdivide these into those that are bred for their flower, or those that are bred for their fragrance, or those that are bred for their foliage. And there's a lot of beautiful variegated forms that have the most gorgeous foliage on them, if that's what you're into, or there are some that have some of the most gorgeous scarlet or red flowers or just are very

Floraferris and will bloom and bloom and bloom

So it's really about you know what you want out of your drainium

It's why I say there's a drainium from everybody because I have many different uses for them

And that's why you have 80 something up

Yeah, yeah

Um and so speaking of variegated, I believe your grandfather bred some sort of lemony-centred ones that have some... Yes, so... My color kind of stuff going on or what? Lemon crispome geranium is the Victorian one known as the fingerble geranium, and it's a great lemon fragrance with a really tight, small small leaf and they'll float those leaves on a bowl of water during Victorian times to rinse their fingers as they ate. Anyways, he found maybe 30 years ago a sport on one branch with a golden edge and he named that well-sweep golden and that hyper-mutated again, another decade or so later for a very beautiful golden edge which he named size sunburst and that one has really gotten popular to the point now where other he never patented anything so anyone could propagate it. Definitely made its way all over the US and beyond. I know that he's had friends in Russia and China that have reached out to him via letter and say hey, Hey, Si,, we've got your plant over here. And this is not a slow, what you're describing when there's like a sport, when something just occurs on one part of a plant, and then you say, hmm, maybe that can make a new variety. This is not a quick process. It's not no get rich, quick scheme, whether you it or not is it? I mean it takes it takes a while to I think you're doing this to yourself. Yes. I am and every It spends on the sport Some sports like in peaches Peach trees will go from fuzzy not fuzzy all the time and you can clone that branch that you want and make make a Fuzz E or a fuzzless peach and the same thing happens in the draining world You can have a sport variegate and the more variegated something it is the less Chlorophyll it has and the more difficult of a cutting it is to take so yes, I think I Think my grandfather got probably got he's got good good. So he probably got them to root right away, but I have one that is an all gold sport of his size sunburst, and it has, it's very sensitive to light and improper watering. So it's taken me a couple of trial and errors to keep it going. Mm-hmm. a multi-year process for sure to begin to get some cuttings to then build up some stock plants to then dot, dot, dot. I mean, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You never want to keep all your eggs in the same basket. Chicken analogies. Yeah. Well, you know something about chickens. Yeah. but that they're, you know, they're, it's really, it, it, it's really remarkable because again, we could choose them for other than the introduction. We could choose them for their flowers. We could choose them because we want to just have something on the windowsill that we can like put our hand on and get a whiff of this and toxic getting fragrance and be just invigorated, you know, and just feel good even when it's sort of the shut in season of the winter. Right. Have one of these incredible fragrances or to make tea and so forth. So so there, I said they're from like Southern Africans over so they're not hardy in most of the United States.

Clearly these are our tender plans. I guess they're perennials in their homelands in their native haunts but yeah. So like what's the kind of what's the way that one makes a long time partnership with a centred uranium, you know. So I like to do them in containers because I know they're not gonna win over. Though we do plant them out in our garden or some people like to plant them out in window boxes. But if you want to let them die as an annual, that is your own prerogative. But if you wanna make a long term friend of it, they like their own container, planted alone, and turn them into an art project. They all have different growth habits, so some of them can be very trainable if you're into a topiary like I am, or can be left to their own sprawling habit, in which case they can dangle over a pot, almost like a hanging basket really beautifully, or turn into some of them have smaller leaves, they can turn into almost like little miniature bonds eyes. And they all bloom even the ones that have delicious fragrance. So if you don't prune it, you will often get flowers on the terminal branches. OK. So the pinching and so forth that we might be doing is going to deter bloom. It's going to be a lot of blue. I rarely see flowers on my rose drainium topiaries, except for in February when I haven't pruned it in a long time. And it's in the greenhouse away from the wind, so it can get kind of leaky without falling over. And I will sometimes get flowers just as I'm about to take some cuttings. And I'll be like, oh man, but it's so beautiful. I guess I'll just let it bloom for a little while before I trim it. So if I have them in pots and I've had them in my garden and it gets to be, you know, sip and well, we're in the northeast, both of us, you know, it gets to be sometime in September. They can't get the frost. So they have to be moved in before the frost. Okay, and I'm looking for a Sunday window still. Yes. General I teach my waters is that the smaller the leaf on a drainium, the more sunny and dry it needs it. Okay. So if you were into some of the crispum drainiums we were just talking about or some of the fragrance varieties like the french vanilla they definitely want a south facing southeast west facing windowsill and a lot of the larger varieties can be more tolerant of an east or west facing windowsill because they have more leaf real estate so to speak to do photosynthesis and this guess they just they can handle they can handle more water and

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