source of cuttings

Our municipality has 8 dumpsters set up in the municipal yard so that home gardeners (not commercial ones) may take one load a day of garden prunings. They are then taken to a large site and composted.

Usually I just dump my daily pickup load of blackberry vines and branches but the other day the person ahead of me had thrown out branches of a good rhododendron. Small dark green leaves, red-brown indumentum, and every twig had a flower bud for next year - bright red when I opened one up. It would have been fantastic when it all bloomed next spring. Why would someone get rid of such a treasure? I could only think that perhaps a new owner thought the indumentum was a disease. (I remembered the satisfaction with which an aunt scrubbed off every bit on one of her plants). I grabbed a few branches and now have a couple of hundred cuttings. I certainly hope they don't all root.

Now I have started to look before I toss my branches in. Sometimes there is something good on the far side of the dumpster, like a camellia yesterday. No way to reach it, and I don't want to be really obvious, like using a pole pruner to grab branches. Today I was lucky again, and have half a dozen cuttings of Magnolia grandiflora.

I'm not going to think about what fantastic stuff might be in the other 7 dumpsters. I'm not going to get obsessive about this. Today I did almost call over to the person next to me to ask what variety of fig branches he was dumping, but I refrained.

Diane Whitehead Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Diane Whitehead Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
maritime zone 8
cool mediterranean climate (dry summer, rainy winter - 68 cm annually)
sandy soil

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