Over the years I have been faced with a challenging situation here - many people interested in becoming a MG but not the resources to support more volunteers. This past year, my goal was to find a way to expand our program to be able to support at least 100 Master Gardeners. I am very happy to have made that a reality. We are now a group of 114 Master Gardeners – our largest to date. I am excited to have such a talented group and look forward to a great year together!

2005 MG Intern Class
By the time you read this, our new class of MG Interns will have already started their training. I am very pleased to introduce our class of 2005:

• Kelly Bryant
• Virginia Carlson
• Stephanie Coatney
• Barbara Connell
• Sharon Cook
• Robyn Franklin
• Kathleen Gervase
• Deborah Heinze
• Mike Horsley
• Bill Jegen
• Jody Johansson
• Margi Kaminski
• Ann Klingele
• Nancy Knopf
• Michael Koziol
• Carol Lathrop
• Linda Marrandino
• Kathy McKinley
• Ann McNichols
• Pat Menzenberger
• Ellen Meyer
• Maggie Mikolajczak
• Loraine Miranda
• Len Muller
• Julie Neuberg-Labant
• Dortha Ogborn
• Lisa Olmstead
• Judy Petrushka
• Laurie Policastro
• Christine Riker
• Hema Shende
• Deborah Simpson
• Nancy Thompson
• Marti Travelli
• Yvonne Williams
• Nora Williams-Fielder
• Marta Witte
• William Woulfe
• Linda Zwego

As you can see, we have a large group of very special people. We learned a lot about them during the interview process - many of them bring a wealth of gardening knowledge to the table, with various horticultural interests and experiences. Throughout their interview, each of them expressed a sincere interest in strengthening their knowledge and also a desire to help others learn. They are anxious to start their community service. Please join me in welcoming them to our DuPage program.

MG Training Classes
Each Wednesday, our MG training classes will be held at the Oak Brook site, 9:15 am-3:45 pm. I have allowed space for veteran MG's to attend and several classes are full, with wait lists started. I'm so glad to see your interest, and I know you will enjoy meeting our Interns.

If you cannot attend a class that you signed up for, please call the office so someone from the wait list can fill your spot. Also, please do not just "sneak in." The class space is filled to capacity and we do not have "extra" space. For safety reasons and the experience of the students, I hope you understand.

MG Advanced Training: Sudden Oak Death (SOD)
As you learned at Fall Wrap-up, there is another threatening invasive disease that threatens to show up on Illinois plants: Sudden Oak Death. Our state identified a team of educators (Monica David and Bruce Paulsrud) to be responsible for providing training to Master Gardeners and green industry personnel on this important issue. A statewide telenet training class will be conducted in the morning, on Monday, March 7. We have reserved a room at the County Administration Building for this class. If you plan to volunteer on our help line, garden clinics, or community help desks, please consider attending this class. Monica and Bruce will cover host plants, disease symptoms and U of I recommended procedures that Master Gardeners and office staff should follow when handling potentially diseased plants. According to Monica, this class will cover more information, and be more in-depth than what she presented at Fall Wrap-up. Please call the office to register for this class. There is no charge; it will count as enrichment training for veteran MG's.

Butterfly Garden Team
Mary and I just met with Pam Kowalczyk, Team Leader for the Butterfly Garden, and made plans for 2005. Last year's team did a great job with watering, deadheading and weeding. We hope many of you will be interested in joining the team this year. We need you! We're planning to have a seasonal kick-off meeting this spring. If you didn't sign up on the February - April list but wish to be part of the Team, please call the office, and we will gladly sign you up.

Speakers Bureau Team
Requests for garden programs are coming in and we are excited to have so many good topics to offer for 2005. Special thanks to Mary and her team members Beth Corrigan, Arthur Feid, Lou Horton, Pat Kosmach, Eileen Kostock, Sandy Lentz, Pat Miller, Ron Ory, Pat Pieper, Susan Renwick, Warren Senneke, and Paul Stoffels for this valuable community outreach effort. Mary developed an excellent marketing plan and recently mailed packets to many DuPage groups. If your garden club would like a speaker, or if you know of any other group that might be interested, please be sure to help us spread the word. We have included a copy of our 2005 Topic Offering List with this newsletter.

Budding Gardeners Day
Our Sixth Annual Budding Gardeners Day will be held Saturday, May 21, 9:30 am - 11:30 am at the DuPage County Fairgrounds. This year we hope to have 50 children participate. When our brochure is ready, we will ask you to help us publicize this fun youth gardening program. It is open to the public, and targeted to youth, 8-12 yrs. old.

New MG Mentoring Program
Beginning with our MG Intern Class of 2005, we will be launching a pilot Mentoring Program for our new MG's. The goal is to ensure that our Interns learn, grow and meld into the DuPage MG program with ease. As we all know, our program can be a bit mystifying to new Interns. Mary and I hope this simple program of matching Veteran MG's with Interns will help improve understanding and communication between all MG's and staff.

It seems like a minute is all I have to spare these days. Of course unless one of our MG's stops by for a chat...there's always time for that!! I have been meeting more & more MG's and I must say what interesting people you are. Your talents are wide and varied, what a blessing to get to know you. As you can see by the contents of this newsletter 2005 is looking to be a wonderfully productive year. Never hesitate to give us a call if you have new programming ideas or thoughts to share. Happy New Year!

I acquired a spring flowering anemone from my mother's garden in the early 1980s when my garden beds were in an early state of development and a free, attractive perennial was a useful addition. This perennial had season-long attractive foliage and attractive white blooms effective for a number of weeks. It thrived in a semi-shaded spot and eventually was divided and grown in several other spots.

I was at a point in my perennial gardening experience where I needed to know the name of every plant in my garden, and it really bothered me to not know some of them. Besides the compulsion to name things, it is sometimes useful to know the botanical name because that can provide clues to siting the plant properly from the specific epithet or provenance. I obsessed over an unknown white rose, an unknown campanula grown from a seed mixture, and my unknown anemone. The rose is still unknown, but I no longer care. The campanula is Campanula alliariifolia, and the anemone becomes known later.

This period was early in my perennial gardening experience, and I was enthusiastic about learning more about them and knowing the names of things. I was propagating seeds of plants that were not readily available at that time and sending away for "exotics" that grow in zone 5. My "campanula" period was wrapping up where I was trying to grow every bellflower known to mankind, and I learned that zone 5 hardy Fuchsia magellanica is not. (You might also like to know that in my experience, you need to divide and reset most campanulas every three years or so, in order to keep them alive.)

But my anonymous anemone continued to bug me. Was it Anemone quincifolia, Anemone virginiana, canadensis, sylestris, nemorosa or some other member of that tribe? I tried to key it out but was unsure of my identification. I knew Floyd Swink, Taxonomist of The Morton Arboretum, through various classes taught by him and from botanizing hikes with him; I gave him a sample of my anemone to identify. He ID'd it as Anemone canadensis, an attractive native with a reputation as an aggressive spreader not generally suitable for perennial borders. Birdseye in Growing Woodland Plants says that this plant is "just too easy to naturalize...keep it out." My plants seemed to not meet this definition and I questioned Floyd; he was relatively sure of the plant's identity in his modest way, but I was not convinced. I dead-headed the seed heads from then on as a precaution and grew comfortable with my Anemone canadensis plants over the next 20 years.

Three years ago, I designed and installed a new white island bed in front of my home. Like many garden enthusiasts, a new garden gets a lot of attention and I tinkered with various small shrubs, grasses, sedges, bulbs, perennials and structures to convey the white theme. Among these plants I divided an Anemone canadensis and set four divisions in this new garden. Things were fine for a while until I noticed that small, anemone-like leaves were popping up at some distance from the original plantings. At first I wondered about this incongruity from my prior experience with this plant and grubbed out errant adventitious shoots several times a year. I now regularly trench around the parent plants.

However, I placed one of my divisions close to a choice white delphinium with similar looking leaves. After I grubbed out anemones close to, within, and beyond my delphinium, I acknowledged Floyd's identification, dug out the anemone (I hope), and learned another gardening lesson. While good gardening can be experimental and you can never say "I know all I need to know," Allan Lacy has said that "It's terribly simple to know things that happen not to be true." After "knowing" Anemone canadensis for over twenty years, I was amused by this seemingly new behavior of the perennial and thought I've learned another new lesson.

- Donald Obuch

"Parsley, sage, rosemary..." These herbs may be familiar, may even make us hum the melody of that old song. However, since in most of these columns I have written about some less well-known herbs, I thought I'd start the new year with some more familiar ones - perhaps we can learn something new about them. Gardeners are always learning something new!

Parsley, Petroselinum crispum, is perhaps the most familiar to us of all the herbs. Tight green curls garnishing our dinner plates, strongly flavored leaves pushed on us as an antidote to "garlic breath," sophisticated cooks claiming that only Italian flat leaf parsley (P. neapolitanum) will do.

Once humans have decided that a particular plant is both not harmful to eat and, in fact, useful, the plant seems to continue in our gardens through the ages. And so it is with the herbs so many of us grow. Discovered, tried, written about by ancient Greeks or Egyptians, these plants turn up in essentially the same forms in our own herb patches. Parsley is one of these. Last issue I wrote about bay leaves used as crowns for athletes; parsley was used this way, too!

For the novice herb grower, here are parsley's vital statistics: P. crispum has finely cut, bright green leaves, curled, with toothed edges. Its stems are solid, ridged, semicircular, hollow, more strongly flavored than the leaves. The plant, a sun lover like most herbs, grows 12 - 15 inches tall and will tolerate some shade. It is a biennial, so if you winter it over, the second year it will flower, attracting bees and butterflies. If you find a caterpillar striped in yellow, white and black munching on your parsley - leave it be! You will be rewarded with a black swallowtail butterfly!

One way to have a continuous supply of parsley is to have two rows, one of which is composed of "second year" plants, blooming and setting seed for you to gather. Remove these at the end of the growing season, keeping the other row of "first year" plants to winter over. In the spring, use your saved seed to start your replacement row.

Parsley is reputed to be hard to germinate. I have found that, after setting the seed in its furrow in the spring, pouring a teakettle full of boiling water on the seed before covering it encourages germination. Alternatively, some soak their seeds in water overnight before planting. Plants should be thinned to grow approximately eight inches apart.

Parsley is eaten in salads and egg dishes, on fish and boiled potatoes. It enhances other flavors when cooked; it should be added toward the end of the cooking time. Parsley is very rich in vitamins and minerals, with a flavor described as "the summation of all things green."

I'd bet that most of us have a favorite tool – a special something that you feel you just couldn't garden without (maybe more than one). We welcome you to share your favorites with us! Please send your article to: ppieper2@sbcglobal.net.

- Sandy Lentz

Do you have a plant to share with your fellow Master Gardeners? How about a piece of equipment you would like to sell or trade (or donate)? Is there a plant you are looking for that one of us might already have? We'd like to put you in touch with each other. Contact Pat Kosmach at Pkosmach@aol.com or 630-279-1655. She will take the information and put all of it together for the next newsletter.

"The Garden Thymes" is the official newsletter for DuPage area MG's. If you misplace your copy, it can be found at our DuPage County Extension website. From time to time, you may have something you would like to share with fellow MG's or perhaps include an article of your own. We would love to hear from you!! As always, your comments and suggestions are most welcome.

• Issue #2 – February 25
• Issue #3 – April 29
• Issue #4 - June 24
• Issue #5 - August 26
• Issue #6 - October 28

Wednesdays, January 12 – March 23
MG Training Classes
9:15am – 3:45 pm
1010 Jorie Blvd., Oakbrook

Tuesday, February 15
Flowering Trees and Shrubs for the Home
Landscape telenet class
1 pm – 2:30 pm
Extension Office Conference Room
Fee: $5.00

Monday, February 21
Small Flower Beds with Seasonal Interest
9:30 am – 11:30 am
Sponsored by HCE
Extension Office Conference Room
Fee: $5.00

Friday, February 25
Newsletter articles deadline

Monday, March 7
Sudden Oak Death Training Class
Morning, time to be announced
421 DuPage County Adm. Bldg.
No Charge

Tuesday, March 15
Low Input Landscaping Using Groundcovers
Telenet class
1 pm – 2:30 pm
Extension Office Conference Room
Fee: $5.00