Tree festival focuses on planting local

If you want to know the best trees to plant for this area, you might want to check out next Saturday’s 16th Annual Tree Festival, hosted by the Kansas State University Research and Extension Office and its master gardeners.

You can also find out how to care for trees, prune roses, make compost and use the extension office’s new online interactive tool for tree selection and identification during the festival. April 1 is also opening day for the Kansas Grown market that sets up in the extension office’s parking lot from 7 a.m. to noon.

Plant local is trending across the country, just like shop local, say gardening experts. Another trend is sustainability, said Jason Griffin, director of the K-State John C. Pair Horticulture Center near Haysville. He will lead a seminar and provide handouts on selecting trees best suited for the Sedgwick County area.

“The majority of trees that are in the nursery industry come from the Pacific Northwest, the southeast or northeast,” Griffin said. “That’s where the production industry is and where most of the U.S. population is. Unfortunately, our climate is nothing like that.”

So the John C. Pair Horticulture Center staff looks to Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, Nebraska and other nearby states to find trees that are more suitable for our area.

“We try them here and see how they perform,” he said.

They also develop cultivars of trees. In the tree world, you have varieties of trees, which are created by nature, and cultivars, which are created by human intervention by selecting and cultivating certain characteristics of a tree.

Matthew McKernan, a horticulture agent with the K-State Extension office, has high praise for one cultivar the center has created: the John Pair Caddo maple. The Caddo maple is native to parts of Oklahoma and Texas. The John Pair Caddo maple cultivar has been bred to handle Kansas droughts and tolerate low to no irrigation. It has a consistent dark red fall color.

“For trees that are local, you can’t get more local,” McKernan said about the John Pair Caddo maple. “People love maples in our area for their great fall color.” Maples tend to be tall trees, growing to about 40 feet high.

Griffin will also talk about other types of trees, including smaller trees to fit dense, urban landscapes, ones with interesting features and those that are “rock-solid trees” for the area, he said.

The extension office’s arboretum, which surrounds the property’s 24 acres at 21st and Ridge and features 300 different trees, has been a longtime resource for people to go and see how local trees perform. Now some of that research can be done without leaving home.

Over the past several months, McKernan and master gardener volunteers created a new online database using Google maps to help people do research on local trees and see how they perform through a library of pictures of each tree taken at various times of year. McKernan will talk about how to use the database during his Techie Tree Selection seminar. The database can be found at www.tinyurl.com/sgcoarboretum.

Other topics that will be covered at the Tree Festival include care and maintenance of trees, composting and pruning roses. Plant vendors from the region will have plants, trees and other garden goods for sale. A $5 per person pancake and sausage breakfast will be available, along with free children’s activities.

This story was originally published March 24, 2017 at 3:49 PM with the headline "Tree festival focuses on planting local."