Visit and help evaluate a climate-ready landscape plants trial - Cache Valley Daily
Visit and help evaluate a climate-ready landscape plants trial - Cache Valley Daily
Do roses require a lot of water to be beautiful? That’s one of the research questions the Climate-Ready Landscape Plant Trials project is seeking to answer.
Horticulture and landscaping professionals, master gardeners, and the public are invited to observe and evaluate the performance of selected plants in response to different irrigation treatments on Thursday, August 10, from 7:30 to 11:30 a.m. at the Utah State University Agricultural Experiment Station Greenville Research Farm (1857 N. 800 E., North Logan). Rating the plants will take 90 minutes to two hours.
USU Extension, in collaboration with five other Western research institutions, is conducting a comprehensive assessment of the aesthetic qualities of landscape plants under different irrigation treatments. The study aims to evaluate plant performance across diverse climates and soil types.
Starting from July 2023, plants received different irrigation treatments based on the high, moderate, and low water need categories defined by the Water Use Classification of Landscape Species project. Monthly data on plant growth and quality ratings are collected by researchers and shared with researchers in other states.
According to Lorence Oki, a University of California – Davis (UCD) researcher and collaborator on the project, water use in urban landscapes is always a critical issue.
“It’s one of the places where we think we can save a lot of water, but we don’t have a lot of data,” Oki said. “There’s anecdotal information about how much water plants use, but there’s not a lot of science-based, research-based information.”
Oki explained that water use in agronomic crops is simpler to evaluate because it can be done by measuring the pounds of a crop produced per gallon of water used, both relatively easy things to measure and compare. For landscape plants, however, that sort of metric doesn’t exist because evaluating them requires measuring quality. As part of the research project, the scientists have developed a rating system to assess plant performance based on appearance.
One example he cites is that “people think roses are a high-water-use plant, but we found that a lot of roses can perform really well at 20% of reference evapotranspiration, which is a very low water rate. At UCD, that’s an irrigation about every four or five weeks.”