The Bald Cypress Tunnel of Love: Dave Creech and 40 Years of SFA Gardens (Part 1)
Host: Dr. Ping Yu, UGA Department of Horticulture Guest: Dr. Dave Creech, Professor Emeritus and Director, SFA Gardens, Stephen F. Austin State University Producer: Rich Braman Episode: S02E11, Part 1 of 2, Blooms and Beyond, Season 2 Duration: 53:10 Air Date: September 27, 2026
Welcome
Ping Yu: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Blooms and Beyond podcast, a podcast that uncovers plant history, culture, and management through the lens of science. I’m your host, Ping. How’s everyone doing today? I’m doing great because I have one of the legend and well-known international horticulturalist here today with me, Dr. Dave Creech, to share his plant stories. I believe anyone who’s interested in horticulture or gardening may have heard about him or his story. If not, don’t worry, you’re gonna hear all of those in today’s episode.
So I don’t wanna steal any more thunder from our speaker today. Without further ado, here are the conversations with Dr. Creech, Dr. Dave Creech. I hope you enjoy.
Meet Dave Creech: From Nagpur to SFA Gardens
Ping Yu: Well, hello, Dr. Dave Creech. Welcome to the podcast. I know a lot of people have known you, including me, for a long time. But first off, can you tell our audience about a little bit about what you do and who you are and what you do?
Dave Creech: Thank you, Ping. Good to see you. Dave Creech. I’m at Stephen F. Austin State University. I’ve been here since, believe it or not, 1978, and I was a nine-month assigned horticulture teacher in the Department of Agriculture, and basically have had a wonderful career teaching from 1978 to 2007. I retired in 2007, and I was hired back to direct SFA Gardens, which is our true love here. It’s 138 acres of campus property, and most of it is bottom land, but still, we’ve built a beautiful garden in the last 40 years. And Ping, this is our 40th anniversary.
Ping Yu: That’s great. Congrats. The 40th. It’s like I- Because I know you, I still remember the first time I saw you was when I was doing my PhD back in Texas A&M in 2017. It’s crazy to think about how time flies. But- Yeah, but I do know that you’ve spent your whole, or your entire life in horticulture. Can you tell us about what first sparked you, your interest in plant, in horticulture, and how I know you grow up with plants. Can you tell us a little bit more in that route and share your horticulture story?
Raised in Asia
Dave Creech: Well, I have a little interesting background. When I was two years old and my sister was six months old, my dad was a vo-ag teacher, an agriculture teacher in Central Texas, and he got a phone call from Washington, and they had a job for him in India. And so when I was two years old, Mom and Dad and Sue and I, we off we go to India, and we spent five years there. We spent two years in East Pakistan, which is now Bangladesh, and we spent another three or four years in Burma, which is now Myanmar. And so I didn’t come back to America until I was about 16 years old, believe it or not. And so I’d had, been raised as a child in Asia, so that had a lot to do with it.
My father was an agronomist, and he always took me in the Jeep to the field plots with his students in Nagpur, India. And I really was just a little whippersnapper, but I was very mesmerized with agronomy, growing grains, really.
My interest in horticulture didn’t come until I was at Texas A&M. And so when we came back to America, I finished high school, and I started in agronomy, and I was interested in, what would you say, feeding the world, saving the world- [laughs] saving the world with agronomy.
The Professor Who Made Him a Horticulturist
Dave Creech: And but then I had a professor at Texas A&M, his name was J.B. Storey, and I got to know him in a class, and I really liked him. And he was six foot four.
Ping Yu: Wow.
Dave Creech: And he was a very powerful personality. And when I was registering in my second semester of agronomy, he grabbed me in the main room there, it used to be the basketball coliseum, and we were holding little punch cards, and he took me around all the tables that were there, and he introduced me as the next great horticulturist. I wasn’t a horticulturist, but he made me be one. And back then, we really respected the professors and were scared of them. So I just shifted over to horticulture because of him, to be honest with you.
And he was a pecan person, and I met Hollis Bowen, and I worked in the fruit program at Texas A&M University and managed the orchard. But I wanted to buck out. I wanted to leave. Just too much education at A&M, you understand that.
And when I got a bachelor’s degree, I got a National Science Foundation fellowship that I could go anywhere with. And so I went to Colorado. Colorado State University was my master’s. I thought, gosh, that’d be wonderful. The skiing is really good there. I’m gonna enjoy the lifestyle. And off we go to… I went off to Colorado to get my master’s. But I missed Texas, I missed my parents, I missed my family land, and I came back for my PhD, and I got my PhD in fruit physiology in 1978.
Leaving the Mecca on the Brazos
Dave Creech: After that, I was hired by Texas A&M to be the very first extension specialist in fruit and vegetable for Overton, Texas. And I stayed there a few- I was only there a few months, and this job at SFA came open, Ping, and I suddenly saw the light and I decided that, oh my gosh, it’s a nine-month contract.
Well, I had a peach orchard. I had a 35-acre peach orchard that I had built since I was at Texas A&M, my PhD. I’d bought some land. Back then the land was $300 an acre, it was very cheap, and I started a peach orchard ‘cause I love peaches. I still do. And essentially, I was a 12-month contract with A&M, and here’s a job that’s nine months and I’m off in the summer, perfect for peaches.
And so [laughs] I jumped ship from the center of the universe, it’s Texas A&M, you know that, you were at A&M, and basically it’s the center of the universe, and I left the Mecca on the Brazos, I left it to go to a very small university near the Louisiana border, and I’ve been here for 47 years. And it’s been an amazing ride and I’ve had a wonderful career.
And there’s a lot of advantages that people don’t realize by going to a small university compared to one that’s large, and a lot of it has to do with scrutiny. I’ve had a lot of freedom to go and do and be without filling out another form, and [laughs] I know you understand.
And I started doing international work in the early 1980s, and I went four, five times to Guatemala. I did some work in Mexico. I did Pakistan four or five times, to Pakistan, Northwest Frontier Province mainly. And then I started in on China in 1994, and I went 27 times to China. Done Chile, done New Zealand. So I’ve had this wonderful experience that I probably couldn’t have pulled off at a larger university just ’cause of the paperwork, and this allowed me to go, and I turned in a travel request maybe a week ahead of time and I was gone.
But I have never regretted for a moment having come to a smaller university because, I mean, I love East Texas, I love the piney woods, and College Station is not a horticultural paradise. Did you know that?
Ping Yu: No, not really. No, it’s hard to grow things, hot, and it’s super dry during summer. And so when you’re, like, talking about, like, the nine months at SFA, and I was like, yeah, that’s another three months in summer in College Station. It’s just miserable. So that’s a good point.
Dave Creech: [laughs] Yeah. And also the water quality is terrible for growing a lot of plants in College Station, and the soil has a high pH.
Ping Yu: Yeah.
Dave Creech: And College Station is where a lot of plants go to die. [laughs] It’s really a tough environment, tough environment. We used to try to grow blueberries, believe it or not, which are acid-loving. It’s not gonna happen. But I still love Texas A&M, and I have a lot of good friends at A&M and across the South.
The Case for Ornamentals
Dave Creech: And I’ve branched out into ornamentals. So that story was always interesting, ’cause I was fruit and I was hired for fruit and vegetables, but I woke up in the mid-1980s and we had a savings and loan bust, and we had a cattle bust, and the economics were bad, and we had no students interested in fruit and vegetable. Everybody was-
Ping Yu: No, now it’s the- opposite right now because it works, so in ornamental, one, people don’t get money to do anything, and two, people don’t think it’s essential compared to fruit and veggie. At least it’s a current condition or situation where whenever people talk about crops, they talk about the food, the vegetables, small fruit, and all that. Nothing. Like, for ornamentals, they were like, “Oh, just flowers.” They can… I don’t… Actually, if the economy is not great, they were like, “I can sacrifice, I can live a life without ornamentals, but I cannot live a life without food.” So that’s the situation where the environment, that current generation where people were thinking.
And that’s actually one of the reasons why I wanted to have this podcast, again, to raise awareness, and hopefully people will appreciate the ornamental a little bit more. In horticulture, it’s not just fruit and veggie, but also ornamental. They have to, we have to have both to have a good, to have a good life in general.
Dave Creech: And actually, the job market, in our situation, I’m sure it’s true at A&M, at UGA, is, it’s pretty darn good in the ornamentals, like retail nurseries, wholesale nurseries, landscape. I got a lot of former students in the landscape business. And that’s a great joy, whereas those folks that headed off into fruit and vegetable, there’s not that many- And so it’s-
Ping Yu: I don’t know what is the data or status in Texas, but in Georgia, our ornamental is the top four or five, depending on how you calculate with the gate value, and then the employment, the amount of job opportunities that they created, so we are the top five or top four commodity groups. However, we are not well valued as much as we should in terms of them.
Dave Creech: That’s exactly- You make a very good point, and I say this all the time, ‘cause I’m in a department of agriculture, and poultry rules. Poultry, chickens rule, and basically cattle rule. Now, we’re bigger than poultry, and we’re bigger than timber. We have a great college of forestry, but if you look at the gate value of ornamental horticulture, the retail nurseries, wholesale nurseries, and the landscape associated, it’s four or five billion dollars.
Ping Yu: Yeah.
Dave Creech: It’s pretty, pretty impressive. A lot of people don’t ever think, a lot of kids, I think a lot of students, young high school kids, are not aware that there’s this wonderful career they can have in horticulture, the ornamental field.
Ping Yu: Yeah. Yeah.
Bald Cypress: A Tree That Can Last 3,000 Years
Ping Yu: So with your background starting from the fruit and vege and all the way, now you are doing a wide range of crop species, let’s put it that way. Among all those plants, what is your favorite?
Dave Creech: It has to be bald cypress and the cultivars of bald cypress and some of the hybrids. And we probably have the best collection of Taxodium, and there’s several reasons for it, is that when you plant a bald cypress, you can get a tree that can last 3,000 years.
And it’s- And people say, “Well, how big will it get?” And I usually say, “Well, in 1,000 years it’ll own your whole lot, your whole home lot.” Yeah. Basically, it’s gonna be a big tree.
And the fact that it is 65, 90 million, Taxodium dubium goes back 90 million years, and it has a genome four times as big as a human. It carries the gene. It’s a survivor, and it was once all over the world, and now it’s restricted to North America and Mexico primarily. Well, that’s it, North America and Mexico.
And so we’re at the confluence here in East Texas of the bald cypress, pond cypress, and then you have to go west and you get the Montezuma cypress genetics of Mexico.
And I’ve always enjoyed collecting bald cypress cultivars, and we have 136 cultivars and selections in a collection here, and they’re all planted in a perfect location. I mean, they’re right on a creek, Lanana Creek, and it was a degraded creek. It was basically brush-axed on the side. There was no trees there, and they’d mow the edges of the banks, and that was about it. And so we had a perfect location, if we could keep them alive for two to three years to get their roots to get down into the creek, which they’ve done. And it’s a swift stream. It floods every now and then, but that’s what bald cypress can prosper in. And we have managed to increase our collections greatly.
From Nanjing to ‘LaNana’
Dave Creech: My work in Nanjing, my work here in the ’80s and ‘90s led to an email from Professor Yin Yunlong at Nanjing Botanical Garden, and I had never met him, heard of him, or anything, and he had found me on the web. And basically he asked if would I like to go to China. Well, I don’t just- I gotta get some verification, so I went over to a Chinese colleague of mine, Dr. Shiyou Li, and I said, “Is this guy real? Is he a real person?” I thought it was a bot or something. And he said, “No, no, no,” he checked him out and he said, “Yes, you should go.”
And so I went to China in 1994, and then I’ve been going pretty much ever since, until COVID. I haven’t been back to China since COVID. And to be candid, there’s a change in the political climate, which has impacted my trips to China, and their visits to the USA.
But I made so many fast friends, brought Chinese graduate students here, had visitors from China, took people to China from different universities, and kind of fell in love with the culture, to be honest with you, Ping. I fell in love with the food, [laughs] fell in love with the research, and just, I really fell in love with a lot of the amazing amount of work that’s being done in blueberries, all kinds of crops. That, as a breeder, it’s really hard to look at a field of 100,000 seedlings and know that you’re working towards maybe selecting a dozen, and it’s kind of crazy actually in a lot of ways.
The scale of their work in bald cypress was stunning to me. Just, I couldn’t believe it. And we’ve ended up garnering through USDA Beltsville quarantine 15 different clones of bald cypress. These are rooted cuttings, and there’s one out of the whole mix that ended up being disease resistant. It doesn’t get fall blight. It’s- Cercosporidium is a problem on our natives, and it’s pretty immune, and so it wants to be kind of evergreen. It’s half bald and half Montezuma, and the Chinese deserve all the credit they can for recognizing the combination of those genetics.
And so we have taken that clone. My friends there let me name it. It’s called ‘LaNana’, and it’s in the trade now, and I just found out from Twinwood Nursery that we have 2,000 of them going into Memorial Park in Houston. And they’re gonna be like huge soldiers in a row to recognize the death of the… war dead of World War II.
And it’s a perfect plant because it’s a clone. For your audience, you know, if you plant bald cypress seedlings, they’re all different. They’re all like you and I, and they all grow at different rates, and they’re all gonna look different when they get to be teenagers, and they’re all gonna be different when they get old. But if you use a clone, they are cut out of a cookie cutter [laughs] and they are perfect, and they fit that kind of design if you’re doing highways or railroad tracks. Coastal Windbreak Forest Project, they use a lot of these clones, and nothing outgrows each other, and there really ends up being these beautiful stands of long-lived carbon sequestration.
Trees Down the Median
Dave Creech: There’s all kinds of environmental reasons for more trees, and that’s one of the mantras we have here, is how do we get a psyche in the country where we plant more trees?
I think the audience might appreciate when I first brought Chinese friends here in the 1990s, that the drive from the Houston Airport to Nacogdoches is Highway 59, and there’s a big median there, and this median is mowed. And my Chinese friends couldn’t understand it. They didn’t understand why there weren’t trees in the median, and they didn’t understand why the whole side of the road wasn’t trees, ‘cause that’s this approach that they take in China.
On the big G highways, there are trees going down the sides, so there’s a buffer on the side, and there’s a wonderful swath of trees down the middle. And you can go as fast as you can go, in some cases, on the big G3s. And I tried to explain to them that we don’t do that in America, ‘cause when we have an accident, we want to glide gently to a stop in a prairie. [laughs] We don’t wanna have trees that you crash into.
And anyway, it opened my eyes in terms of how reforestation can work, and how large an industry it is in China, and how many millions of trees are going in the ground, and how people are being moved into beautiful homes in the valleys. And the mountains are being allowed to go back to vegetation, and go back to different uses, ecological forestry zones. And there isn’t any doubt about it. I’ve been so lucky to watch China go from many villages and hamlets to skyscrapers, high-rise apartments everywhere.
A Village That Moved
Ping Yu: I know, but- It’s extremely- Sometimes, like, I grew up in a small village, but now the village is gone, and I… Sometimes I feel like I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing in terms of the economic growth, and then the people are living a better life, people are living a better life in terms of the, like, economic perspective. However, like, the environment that people are living, and people are, like, everywhere, it’s kind of like similar to, I guess, anywhere else in the whole world. If they wanted to develop a residential property, they just do, clean cut all those plants or all those trees and then develop the, or build in the high buildings and all that, but then they kind of lost the environmental, or the ecosystem in that region. And so I don’t-
Dave Creech: It’s true. I have a little story to tell you, ‘cause Professor Yin is my Chinese brother in a lot of ways, and he’s just retired, and his group broke the Taxodium genome, and he would call me in the middle of the night, you know, celebrating.
And basically, his father, his mother had passed, and we were in northern Jiangsu, and he said, “I’d like you to meet my father,” and I said, “Yes.” So he took me to the village that he was raised in as a child, which was turned into agroforestry, fish farms. It was basically a new industrial dis- And they had ground up the buildings. You could- And made roads out of them, and you could see little pieces of plate. I saw a fork. Every- It was amazing before they cover it all up.
And then we went to the- They had moved the entire village. Everybody wanted to move, and they moved them into seven or eight high-rise apartments with a wonderful plaza in between all of them. So the entire village moved, and his father was on the fourth or fifth floor. If you’re old, you get a lower floor than you do. [laughs] The youngsters were on the high floors. And his father had this wonderful little apartment, had a big screen TV that Yin had bought him, had a nice kitchen, had a nice bathroom, and two small bedrooms.
And I asked him, I said, “How long were you in the village?” And he was like, “20 generations.” Ping, “20 generations.” We have no history compared to that.
And I couldn’t- So he didn’t speak English. Yin does. I said, “Yin, ask your dad, was he angry about making this move?” [laughs] And his dad was shocked that I said that. He said, “Look at where I’m living. This is beautiful. I have heat and cool, and all of my friends are here.”
And he goes down to the big plaza between all the high-rise apartments, and he knows all his friends, and he’s playing mahjong, he’s playing his dominoes. [laughs] And the young people are off hip-hopping and dancing, and there’s flag dancing and everything.
And I thought, “Well, you know, this is amazing,” because in America, we are really, we wanna protect our land. I mean, it’s- It was just kind of a shock to me in a way, and I was very, very impressed with his attitude. It’s more of a collective mentality than the independent free spirit that we oftentimes associated with Texans.
Ping Yu: Mm. Yeah.
Cascade Falls and the Tunnel of Love
Ping Yu: [laughs] Back to the bald cypress, ’cause I remember I visited the SFA Garden when I was a PhD student at Texas A&M with one of the classes that I was taking with Dr. Arnold.
Dave Creech: Yes.
Ping Yu: Arnold. So we were able to see the weeping bald cypress that you guys have, that created the big arch in there. I was amazed. And can you tell us a little bit about the weeping bald cypress, and does those coming from the clones that you brought, were- Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Dave Creech: No. Not exactly. Yeah.
This tree was discovered, believe it or not, in New Zealand. And then a friend of mine in the northwest brought it in, and he was gonna- I thought it was the best thing that ever happened. It’s a very- It’s called Cascade Falls. It’s a very strong weeper. So anyway, I thought it would be extremely popular. I thought it’d take over every Home Depot, Walmart, Lowe’s, because I thought this was the ultimate tree.
So anyway, I booked in 200 liners, grafted liners, and he was charging $5 royalty for the patent. It was patented. It’s off of patent now. And so I had 200 of them, and I put some at Tyler Botanical Garden, and then I had a lot of them here, and we just manipulate them.
And then I talked a friend of mine, Doug Arnold at Trees USA, former student, and he grew 500 of them. And he grew them all the way up into 30s on a nine-foot bamboo pole, and they were beautiful, and he couldn’t sell them. He sold half of them, 500, and he ended up with 250. He cut them off. He put them in a 45 or a 60-gallon trying to get them a little bigger.
Still did not have the receptivity of it, and he called me and he said, “Dave, I can’t move this bald cypress. I like it, but it’s just not that popular.” And he says, “Do you want these?” And I said, “Of course I want these.” And he sent several tractor trailers. They were big 60-gallons.
My staff was against it. My staff are always- You know, we’re busy, and so- But we got these beautiful weeping bald cypresses, 12 foot tall. So I had plenty of them to work with, and we put some different locations on the campus, and then I sold some, got our money back for the tractor trailer. He made me pay for the tractor trailer cost, but I got the trees for free.
And then we have the connection between Ruby Mize and the Mast Arboretum. I said, “Well, this will be a perfect archway,” so we planted them. This is a tree that the new growth wants to go straight down. It doesn’t wanna go anywhere, or sideways. It’ll grow on the ground like a snake. It is gravitationally challenged.
And so I built bows out of steel, pipe really, and then we just tied it to it. We left those bows there for two or three years, and in two or three years it turns to wood, and it’s firm. And so we’ve been, we’re gonna have this bald cypress tunnel, and it’s really a very unique feature, picture. If you Google Taxodium distichum ‘Cascade Falls’, we’re one of the top searches. Put SFA in there and you can find it.
And it’s become a place where people propose to be married. This is where people go, kids at SFA go and have weddings, and it’s a love tunnel, Ping. It really is. It’s really a beautiful thing, and it’s ended up being, well, particularly in the summer, it’s shade, and it’s nice, and I just think it’s one of the best features I’ve ever seen in any g- I really love it a lot. It’s probably about 100 and something feet long, and it’s very, very easy to maintain, and I have it under a high voltage line. I got permission to do anything I want under a high voltage line, as long as it doesn’t get above 15 feet, and that’s what this is. So we’ve got us a bald cypress tunnel of love at SFA Gardens. It’s quite popular.
There’s another one that Don Shadow introduced, it’s called Falling Waters, but it’s not as weeping, and I don’t like- It kinda wants to shoot up every now and then.
Trees for Highways and Byways
Dave Creech: And so, as far as a utility tree, I’ve always had this dream that we would plant our highways and our byways with trees, but that’s just a project that I’ve never been able to get off the ground. And even in Nacogdoches, in College Station, and at Athens, it’s really hard to get trees going up and down, allées of trees, even though when you have the space. And I’ve been working on Nacogdoches a long time, and we haven’t been able to sell the idea that everybody needs to put a big tree in front of their business, and we need to get our utilities underground. And everybody wants to plant a crape myrtle, which is okay, but, you know, there’s a lot of crape myrtles out there, and-
Ping Yu: Agreed.
Summer Heat, Dinosaurs, and Knees
Ping Yu: Back to the bald cypress, how long does it take from the original bald cypress become the love tunnel in SFA? How long does it take to form the effect?
Dave Creech: It’s in full sun, and so it was quick, within a few years, but it’s the scale, the side branches, everything, so it makes it dense. But I’d say in three or four years we had-
Ping Yu: Three, three to four years?
Dave Creech: Bald cypress, the bald cypress. Yeah, it’s all- It grows very fast. All bald cypress is faster, but it doesn’t really like to grow in the spring. It’s really waiting for the summer heat.
Ping Yu: Mm.
Dave Creech: And when we get the summer heat, this thing will really kick into high gear. If you have water in the summer, you can get four to six feet in a year. And that’s a historical thing. And no matter what you do, it’s hard to get it to grow in March, April, or May. It’ll grow, but it just really gains speed when it gets up into the heat. Remember, this is a plant that was here with the dinosaurs.
Ping Yu: Wow. With the dinosaurs?
Dave Creech: In- Yeah. Yes. And the Taxodium dubium, and it was once all over the world. It was in China.
Ping Yu: I know, yeah.
Dave Creech: It was all over the world, and it’s restricted now, and it’s got this long genetic history around the world, and it carries the g- all kinds of genes.
You know, they- When all of the ice melted, this thing was- It’s found in the Gulf of Mexico, 90 feet of water. You know, there was one off of Alabama. They found standing trees that go back the intense time when things were Ice Age, really. Pulled the water away, when the water was- You know, on beachfront property here, if all the ice melts in the Antarctica and in the Arctic, if we lose the polar ice caps, I’m in Nacogdoches, Texas, I live on Swift Hill, I am beachfront property if we have that kind of climate change. And so taxodium has endured a huge amount of stressors over tens of thousands of years, so it carries the genes of hardiness.
Montezuma Cypress Is Hardier Than Expected
Dave Creech: I think that’s most interesting to me, is that when we first brought in Montezuma cypress, which is in Mexico and South Texas, and some co-mingling in the Central Texas, I believe, Frio River, et cetera, that I didn’t think they’d live. I- There- ‘Cause when you go to Mexico, they’re not experiencing the kind of cold we get up here in Texas. But in 1983, I had a big Mon- not a big Montezuma, had a good young Montezuma, and it was unimpacted, and it was coming out of an area that rarely freezes. And so that was kind of an eye-opener for a lot of us. We really didn’t know much. We just always thought Montezuma cypress was probably tropical, but it’s not, and I’ve got them in Oklahoma and Ar- It’s not as hardy as some of the bald cypress, but it is quite, quite a bit more hardy than we ever anticipated.
What Are the Knees For?
Dave Creech: And the Chinese were the very first to come up with the concept of crossing the bald cypress with the Montezuma cypress to get rid of the knees. So the hy- I like knees, but mostly, Neil Sperry’s a friend of mine, and I know he hates knees, and a lot of people hate knees in their landscape, and landscapers hate them ‘cause it tears up the lawn mowers. So basically, the knees are pneumatophores, and a lot of people don’t know what the heck they’re for, and there’s a lot of debate about them. And you can cut them off and it doesn’t impact growth, so what’s the point of them? And so there’s been a lot of debate about reasons why a knee is there.
I have a theory. Have I told you my theory on the knees? I have no proof. So taxodium at one time, if you go back 60, 70, 80 million years ago, there were dinosaurs, and the dinosaurs would come up trying to eat, eat the bald cypress, eat everything in sight. They were huge. And at that time, the knees were actually very pointed. They were like a spear. And so when the dinosaur stepped in there, it step on his big foot, and he- It protected the- [laughs] I made this up. This is just a theory. [laughs] This is not science.
Ping Yu: So, to protect them from being eaten by dinosaurs?
Dave Creech: Yes. That’s my theory, and I’ve said this in meetings, and everybody walks away shaking their head. [laughs] I even tell people-
You never know. They are thought to- There’s one interesting thing, and it was work done at the University of Florida, and a lot of people don’t know this, is that the needles are feathered. And Jeff Gillum [VERIFY: name; UF wind-machine work is Ed Gilman’s] was, I loved his work at the University of Florida, and he had two 427 Chevrolet engines hooked together in sequence, and he had a fan, and he could put a 180-mile-an-hour hurricane on a tree. And a bald cypress, and he had this huge concrete box, and the thing with it, and then he’d put the trees in there. Like an oak tree, it’ll snap off. Like an elm, it’ll snap off. That bald cypress will just lean over, and it’ll just feather in 180 miles, but it won’t break. So it’s a plant that evolved along the coast, and it ends up having all of this ability to deal with the hurricanes that come.
Some people think that the pneumatophores, the knees, are also- They’re the moths [VERIFY: “moths”, all passes] in Florida. And so you’ll have a colony, and the knees collect debris and washing, et cetera, and that builds land. And a lot of those things become knolls, they become berms. They- And the bald cypress is kind of building its own soil, it’s catching all this trash, and- Get it? This is a theory. I don’t know.
I do know this, that if you cut them off, they’ve done the work, the tree’s unaffected. It doesn’t slow, doesn’t kill the tree, doesn’t slow the tree down. It’s just- So we’re not exactly sure. All I know is that landscapers hate them, hate the knees, ‘cause they come up in the yard. If there’s any moisture around, they do come up. So the Chinese have- And you don’t really need that along a highway either. And so the Chinese bred the Nanjing back in the ‘60s, was some of the first breeding efforts. And anyway, it’s fascinating.
Cuttings, Clones, and Weeping Plants
Ping Yu: Is grafting the main production method for bald cypress?
Dave Creech: In the United States of America, 99% are seedlings.
Ping Yu: Oh, gosh.
Dave Creech: And we have not embraced cultivars, except in certain horticultural circles. It’s not a… It’s a tiny percent, whereas in China and other places it’s been basically going with cultivars that are reproduced by grafting or reproduced by cuttings.
What’s interesting about the cuttings is that it needs to be a young clone. If it’s a thousand-year-old bald cypress, you can’t root it. It’s just, it’s basically- It lost its ability as juvenile. So that’s a problem.
So the Chinese breed them, and then they make selections in a field. They grow the seedlings out, and they let them sprawl the first year, and then they… I was in a field with close to a million trees. I was shocked. Babies. They’re all babies, and they cut them off after the first year. They grow them in the field, they just sprawl around, because they’re cutting grown. And when they’re cutting grown, a lot of times they’ll sprawl, and you don’t know what’s gonna happen.
They’re plagiotropic growth. They think they’re a branch. Topophysis. Your students probably know what topophysis is. It’s basically if you take a cutting off a side branch, takes it a while to realize it needs to be a tree. It thinks it’s a branch. Plagiotropic growth. Big problem with bald cypress. And people don’t understand it, and so you end up not training it.
But you can come in after one year in a one-gallon can and cut it off about this high above the ground, and it’ll pop you a good leader. That tree is trainable that way. And that’s what China taught me. It took me a while to understand that concept, exactly like, “Why do you have this field of sprawled trees?” But you come back the next year, and boy, they will really grow. They’ll grow six feet the second year.
Why Weeping Plants Are Rare Here
Ping Yu: And I do remember where I do kind of observe some of the differences in terms of the plant and use in landscape, and then even just in general. ’Cause I have seen a lot of taxodium when I grow up as a kid, ’cause I live in southwest- southeastern China. We can see those taxodium species everywhere, and they give… A lot of them, I… We love, at least I love them, ‘cause they have those little tiny… Those leaves can give you a softness in the landscape, or a feature, but here we don’t see a whole lot. Even for the…
Another one would be the weeping plants. I don’t know why Chinese people love weeping plants, at least from my observation, they love that, but here in the States I don’t see a whole lot, at least not in the landscape. For instance, we can see the weeping willow on the… Everywhere you go, especially parks, along the lakes and along the rivers, you can see them everywhere. But here I really don’t see that.
Dave Creech: That’s a good question. I don’t know. It’s like, one of my favorite plants is sweet olive. Like, why is sweet olive not popular in America? And it’s one of the top 10 traditional flowers. There’s festivals basically to, you know, celebrate the season. And there’s… I was at a sweet olive conference, and there was 169 varieties, and I couldn’t believe it. That was just out of control. I mean, it was really amazing to me, the diversity of sweet olives.
And here I’d say it’s a minor minor crop, a minor ornamental, and yet it has rather impressive fragrance, and it’s so durable and can live 2,000 years. And, you know, it’s just, it’s really kind of a beautiful thing. So it’s just a matter of where you grew up.
And most of the landscapes, if you look at the Gulf South, a lot of them are Asian. I mean, let’s face it, crape myrtle kind of rules. $100-plus million business, and now we have an insect that followed it, and it’s now here from China, crape myrtle bark scale. Thank you for that.
And, you know, I’m in the fruit business, and so when I think of fruit, a lot of it’s Asian. A lot of people don’t appreciate that. If you look at… If we get rid of… If we only go with American fruits, blueberries, and there are some plums here and there, but we’re out of luck, and no cabbage, no- A lot of vegetables are Chinese or Asian. And we’re not talking about banning broccoli. And we need to appreciate that the plant will have been placed that is not invasive. I don’t like invasive natives, I don’t like invasive exotics.
Plants That Remind You of Home
Ping Yu: I think one of the reasons- So that’s just- In terms of the plant species or the popularity of those, I think a lot of those are related to the culture that, like you said, the way- where you grow up with.
And then if you grow up with the plant, and that simple plant can, wherever you go, can remind you home. And then sometimes the plant can also symbolize a certain culture, that I guess that’s one of the, my take on from some of the Chinese love for willow, for willow trees, and even for osmanthus, because it’s a smell, it’s a feature, it’s a plant that will remind you of home. That will remind you with your childhood. And all those things has something to do with the plant in and of itself, and people, if they are not close to that culture associated with the plant, they don’t have the attachment or they don’t have the bond with the plant, so people are like, “Okay, yeah, it’s just a tree. I don’t really care about it.”
Family Trees Worth a Fortune
Dave Creech: No, there’s even family trees. I worked with a family, Yongfeng Nursery, in [VERIFY: place name, heard “Huangshihe”] that they bought a sweet olive for their family tree at their place, and Ping, it was huge. It was a big tree. It was tens of thousands of dollars, and the rich people in China will spend a fortune, some of these, $100,000, and they don’t even blink. It was kind of shocking to me to see some of the nurseries that specialized in trees coming out of the forest that are 1,000 years old, and they’ll dig them out and they’ll make them live.
Ping Yu: Mm-hmm.
Dave Creech: They’ll make them live. I’ve even seen them with transfusions on them. You’ve seen them- know where they put bottles up and they bleed.
Ping Yu: It is crazy. Yeah.
Dave Creech: They were pre-
Building SFA Gardens
Ping Yu: So, Tom [VERIFY: “Tom,” FireCut only], can you mention a little bit about the FSA Garden? Can you tell us a little bit more about it and how… ‘Cause I’ve been there, it’s gorgeous. It’s gorgeous, and you guys have a lot of good, cool, exotic plants, collections over the years, and you may brought them from other countries. I would say a majority of them are from China. I don’t know if that’s right, but can you tell us a little bit about that, Japanese maple? Yeah.
Dave Creech: Well, we started in 1985, really a little bit earlier than that, but we say 1985. And we had a little quarter-acre patch, just a quarter of, half quarter of a football field, and we started growing. And then in the two years, we had taken around the agriculture building and the greenhouse facilities, and I was in… I like to grow things, and so there was some land next to me in the bottom, and I wanted it, and athletics wanted it. [laughs] And I got it. And it was an administration, which is unbelievable.
Ping Yu: [laughs] It’s- So we had- Like, you cannot compete with athletics, never.
Dave Creech: Anyway, it’s floodplain. It was floodplain, and it was all privet. It was terrible, and my students and I got out there, and I kept telling them that this is gonna be one of the great gardens in the South. We’re gonna have all this genetic diversity, and we’re just gonna grow and grow and grow. And they just kind of winked at each other and thought I was crazy. They’ve all told me this now. They’re all- A lot of them have retired, some of those original students are retiring. But they all remember that I was convinced that this was gonna be a great garden.
As you already know, at universities, gardens can come and go, and they can be here, and then the next thing you know, it’s a parking lot. But I was convinced that we had the key to success, and we headed out the door, and I was very lucky to have a lot of friends in the nursery business. We were so pathetic. I was not an ornamental horticulturist, Ping. I was a fruit and vegetable guy, but my students were all ornamental horticulturists.
I really wanted, because of fruit and vegetables, I wanted to put the trees in rows so I could get a tractor up and… And they made fun of me, my students did. And so I said, “Well, let’s design a garden,” and they designed one. I just wanted to grow the darn things.
Two Years of Care
Dave Creech: And basically, we have good horticulture for two years, and we take care of the water for two or three years. That’s our goal, is after that, you better learn how to live in East Texas. And that’s, I think that’s a mantra that we’ve had for the fir- Keep the weeds away, have some mulch around the plant, have a fairly decent planting hole, and take care of the water for the first two years. And in most cases, a tree that can get a little care and attention in the first two years, it’ll go on forever. But if you, it’s a baby, and you understand a baby. You cannot just ignore a baby for two years. You gotta give it two or three years of care and culture, and some fertilizer and some feed, and this and that, and then it can live to be 100 years old. And so that’s the same attitude that we take here for trees.
And I think we were very lucky in that we connected well with a lot of other gardens, and they felt so sorry for us. The nurseries just thought we were pathetic, and they just handed us a lot of plant material, and we’d plant it and we’d make it live. And then connecting with some of the botanical gardens, the National Arboretum, Atlanta Bot, and Auburn had a garden. There was just a lot of friends in the academic world, and we’d kinda share.
How Patents Changed Plant Sharing
Dave Creech: Of course, this was all pre-patent. There were no patented trees by academia in the early days. That really is something that happened in the 1990s. And that’s a change in, oh, you can’t have this, you can’t have that. I may patent this. I may patent that. So patenting has been a restrictive thing in a lot of sharing, ‘cause people get nervous about giving away plants that are destined for the royalty trade or for patents. And so, you know, we are at SFA, and we’ve never- We’ve patented a few plants that are- But we’re not Texas A&M, we’re not the University of Georgia. It’s a different world here at SFA.
So I think that in a lot of cases, patenting can slow a plant’s progress down.
Ping Yu: Very much so.
Dave Creech: We do have a lot of patented plants given to us, and we put ‘em in the garden, but we’re real careful not to get ’em into our plant sales or let ’em get distributed, et cetera, ‘cause that’s become a funding stream for a lot of the companies that are out there.
Ping Yu: Mm-hmm.
Dave Creech: The big nurseries are interested in- And universities, too. Y’all patent plants all the time.
The 2021 Freeze and the 80/20 Rule
Ping Yu: About how many plants, ’cause you said you got, like, early in the phase of developing the garden, you receive or exchange plant materials to, like, other gardens throughout the US. Well, many south region, I guess. But how many plants have you collected throughout your 40 years in the garden? And about what ratio would you say, among all those plants you have in the garden, how many of them are from abroad? ’Cause I know you brought some material from abroad.
Dave Creech: How many? Of- You know, we have an accession list every year that’s between 500 and 1,000. Not all of them live. We kill- [laughs] It’s not a perfect machine here.
We kill a lot of plants, and we have a new problem. We have wild hogs on campus that are killing me, and that’s- I’m- But I’m not allowed to shoot ’em. And so we have issues with floods, knocked a few trees south of us. And, but I would say that over 50% are probably not of southern origin. And that adds in the herbaceous as well, the perennial world.
Minus Four Degrees in February 2021
Dave Creech: I would say that we are emphasizing more and more native plants as a backbone, and I’ll tell you why, and it’s 2021, February 16, we went to minus four degrees.
Ping Yu: I remember that.
Dave Creech: You were here. I was actually here too, in East Texas. I was at home, and it- I couldn’t get to the road. I was trapped four days at my house. No electricity. I have a wood heater. My dog caught a rabbit, I needed it to eat. It was a fight to get the rabbit away from the dog. And basically, it was a pretty tough time. We had blown all the pipes in the dorms here. I’m sure you might have experienced the same thing.
But when the dust, the dust settled on it, Dr. Mengmeng Gu and I saw, what an opportunity to evaluate plant material. And we did go out the gate, and we’ve got a wonderful database, but it got confused because- Well, she left to go to Colorado. [laughs] But basically it got confused because we had a wonderful- A lot of them grew back. So we had wonderful magnolia collection from Asia, and many of the evergreen magnolias were six and eight inches in diameter, and I thought they were gonna be the next great tree. But minus four, it killed them to the ground, or it killed them to the trunk, and, but the growth came out real, real fast.
Well, we had a good winter that following winter, 2022, and then the next December we had no freezes. We had bananas on the banana plants, and on December 23rd we went to nine degrees. And what happened was, that killed the magnolias dead as a hammer. And so they had grown back, they were too vigorous. It was a confluence of a perfect storm, a perfect group of temperatures. The minus four took them to the trunk. Two years later, the nine-degree Fahrenheit event with no p- Everything, no freezing temperatures, no frost.
And that was a shock to me, ‘cause I have been out on the trail. I give a lot of talks here and there, and I’d say, “Oh, this Magnolia maclurei, foveolata,” there’s a whole bunch of wonderful, beautiful, fragrant magnolias, and I thought they were perfect, but they weren’t. And so I think it’s real important to recognize that when the dust settled, guess what happened? Our natives made it, at least at SFA.
We have troubles with live oak, but live oak is not really native in Dallas-Fort Worth. It’s native along the Gulf South. So when it went to minus eight, minus nine, minus 11 in Northeast Texas, there were live oaks, they’re all seedlings in general, that died. And we lost, you know, lacebark elm, almost- That’s exotic, but there was a lot of trees that really took it on the chin.
Plant 80 Percent Natives
Dave Creech: So now my new mantra with this new wisdom is that, plant 80% of your landscape, and the backbone of it, in natives. And native trees, and shrubs, and you get excited about natives. There’s some beautiful natives that are never utilized. And then the other 10 or 20%, you can go off there and wander off into some strange Chinese plant, or Indian plant, or Nepal, and that way your whole landscape is not trashed.
I can’t tell you how many people, they got into gingers. Houston Botanical Garden had a very heavy emphasis on semi-tropical and tropicals. Mercer had invested a lot of money in lots of different tender, but they normally will go through the winter, but all of a sudden we get one of those barn burners, and I think we’re gonna have more of them. I think we have a highly energetic climate, and we have to be ready to face that future.
Ping Yu: Yeah.
Closing
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Thank you for listening. Till the next time, stay healthy and go plants.
Transcript produced for Blooms and Beyond / UGA Center for Urban Agriculture