People Who Influenced Me During My Early Years of Collecting Conifers

The world of conifer collecting is a relatively small one. The members of this world either know or know of each other. When I first entered this conifer collecting world, I was influenced by several of its members. During the 1950's and 1960's there were several people who were widely known for their conifer collections and for the odd conifers that they sold. When I began collecting in 1974, I dealt with some of these same people, who were then in their sixties and seventies. As I came to know them, I soon discovered there were few collectors who showed any interest in pursuing conifer collecting as a business. Some of these friends shared this same concern. Because of their influence and my own obsession with conifers, I decided to pursue a rare conifer business as an avocation, eventually seeing it become well known in many parts of the world. (The need for such a business was apparent. As I hunted for new sources of rare conifers, I had problems finding any at all.) In recent years, new blood has come into the dwarf conifer collecting world, and new sources have appeared for these specialty plants. Demand is increasing, and more collectors are offering propagations of their treasures for sale.

Since I began conifer collecting as one generation was passing and another was assuming their mantle, I thought that some of the newer conifer collecting enthusiasts might enjoy sharing some of my experiences with friends who are no longer with us but who have influenced all who deal with unusual conifers. Many of my readers may have met one or more of the people about whom I will be writing. If so, I hope I can recall some pleasant memories.

Don and Hazel Smith lived near Morristown, New Jersey, in an older house with a back yard that was admired by many different people. Their Watnong Nursery was known throughout the Northeast both for its plants and the graciousness of the Smiths toward visitors. They devoted their lives to education- first in New Jersey's public school system, and then, after retirement in 1961, among gardeners throughout the Northeast. Their public school backgrounds were a great asset in communicating the advantages of using dwarf shrubs and conifers in landscaping.

Early in my conifer collecting career, I met Layne Ziegenfuss, who had been doing custom propagation for the Smiths for a number of years. When I asked Layne for sources of rare and unusual conifers, Watnong Nursery was the first place he mentioned. Even though Layne had told me what to expect when I visited them, I had no inkling of the extent the Smiths would influence my life.

After a phone call, I received a mimeographed, descriptive, plant list and directions to the nursery. I quickly made an appointment to see their gardens, and the first weekend after receiving their list I was off. I timed my visit to avoid rush hour on the highway in front of their street since I had to make an illegal left turn. I was nervous sitting with my left turn signal indicating what I planned to do.

After parking in front of their home, I walked around to the back door and rang an old school bell hanging next to it. A tall, thin, older man answered the door. His features were very angular; his skin darkened by the elements; and his voice so soft that I had to listen very carefully when he spoke. In spite of a reserved manner, which may have been cultivated during his years as a school administrator, he literally glowed when we discussed dwarf conifers. An unassuming man, Don was a veritable fountain of knowledge.

Hazel, Don's wife, was his life time partner in both marriage and horticulture. A somewhat frail, mild-mannered lady, Hazel suffered from osteoporosis during the years that I knew her. In spite of having to spend much of the day lying on her back resting, Hazel was always cheerful and loved to have visitors.

Don and Hazel were totally devoted to each other and did everything as a team. They were Watnong Nursery, and for the twenty-two years they operated their business it was a place plantspeople loved to visit. The Smiths traveled thousands of miles up and down the east coast lecturing about special plants to almost any group that invited them. They presented 125 lectures in the first twelve years that Watnong Nursery was in business.

As our friendship developed, I became a regular visitor to Watnong Nursery, many times enjoying morning tea or a light lunch with them, often followed by a trip into Don's greenhouse, which was entered via a narrow stairway down from their living room. It was there that Don propagated a number of things, including a large number of Rhododendron yakushimanum hybrids, a species that is especially difficult to root. His other propagation facility was a Nearing Frame which produced a high percentage of rooted hemlocks.

I was able to purchase a number of real treasures from Don. I used to carry a list of my plants because my collection was growing so fast that I occasionally bought duplicates by mistake. Sometimes I got so wrapped up in my plant purchases that I pulled more plants than I had money, so I would have to put some back, which made Don chuckle more than once.

As my collection became more extensive, I purchased very few plants, but I was still a regular visitor at the nursery. When I started Coenosium Gardens, Don sold me over half of his Chamaecyparis and Tsuga canadensis inventory for a fraction of its true value. He said the plants were surplus, but I knew he wanted to insure successful start for my rare conifer business. Both he and Hazel did all they could to encourage young people to become involved with these special plants.

Don and Hazel supplemented the heat in their home with a wood stove, and up to the day he died Don hauled wood for that stove. Neighbors would cut the wood, and Don would use an old garden tractor and trailer to haul it down a hill to his garage. One day when I visited the Smiths, Don seemed to be moving a bit stiffly. I f igured that a man in his eighties would be less spry from time to time. Hazel told me that while he was hauling a load of firewood, the tractor rolled over onto him and pinned him to the ground until she could get help to lift it off of him. Luckily he was pinned against a pile of leaves that he had gathered for mulching. The next day Don was back hauling wood with the same tractor.

The Smiths always had time for a small garden but fought a constant battle with groundhogs and rabbits. Like many gardeners they put a fence around their vegetable patch, but the critters always found a way in. Their solution was to electrify the middle wire of a three strand fence. Don told me that the animals always stood up to inspect the fence. When they touched the hot wire with their nose, they quickly lost interest.

Watnong Nursery was a fine source for Kalmia latifotia in landscape sizes. A friend of Don's was growing a crop of pink seedlings to raise money toward college tuition for his son. Don agreed to purchase the entire crop over a period of more than six years. Don sold the plants at a very small markup (his typical pricing strategy) and actually sold them below cost for several years when the demand was low, never once fretting about losing money by honoring the contract.

When Don was almost 80, the Smiths realized that Watnong Nursery had to be scaled down, so they donated their pine stock plant collection to the United States National Arboretum, gave an assortment of older stock plants to Frelinghuysen Arboretum in Morristown, New Jersey, and worked at a rather ambitious project of propagating three sets of a collection of over 100 hemlock cultivars for distribution to three arboreta. They felt that having all of these plants on their own roots and all at the same age would be an excellent reference collection. Once again they were thinking of education. Unfortunately Don died before he could complete the project.

One autumn day in 1983, Don brought in a load of firewood for the stove. After putting it down, he sat in his favorite chair near that same stove. He fell into a sleep from which he never awoke. Hazel found him there a few hours later.

Hazel kept Watnong Nursery going for about a year after Don died. She greatly reduced the inventory and only sold small plants of high quality. I enjoyed visiting her on my regular collecting trips, which always passed near her home. Hazel quietly followed Don about a year after his death.

Both donated their earthly remains to science. The Smiths believed that if their bodies could help to educate future physicians and maybe help to alleviate someone else's suffering, then they could truly rest in peace. Many dwarf plants in gardens throughout the Northeast and more recently, the Northwest, are living memorials to Don and Hazel Smith.

At about the same time Layne directed me to the Smiths, he also gave me directions to several collectors on Long Island. He told me not to be surprised at the numbers of plants these people would have in their yards. When I visited Eddie Rezek, Joe Reis, Joel Spingarn, and Hank Weissenberger, I discovered that it was possible to fit a rather extensive assortment of dwarf conifers into a very small area.

My friend, Joe Reis died in 1983, at the age of 79. Joe was very down to earth, and a more knowedgeable naturalist would have been very hard to find. He knew a little bit about everything, and a lot about many things. Joe could identify just about any amphibian, reptile, or bird on sight. He even spent some time as a commercial shark fisherman, spearing them from a dory. He was also an artist and enjoyed using natural objects to create works of art. He made birds and other animals from seashells, stones, bits of carved wood, seeds, and flowers. Joe even made his own furniture.

Joe's love of nature carried over into plants. He became enamored with dwarf conifers in the 1930's and built up an amazing collection on a fraction of an acre of ground. Joe especially loved Chamaecyparis obtusa and enjoyed collecting seed from named cultivars to look for variations worth propagating and naming. A plant would have to prove its worth over a ten to fifteen year period before Joe would even consider naming it. Through the years he found some excellent forms. Chamaecyparis obtusa ‘Reis Dwarf’, ‘Bess’, and ‘Meroke’ are just three of many.

Joe's wife, Elizabeth, was perhaps his greatest treasure. Bess, as she is known to many of her friends, has always been a very active lady and continues to maintain the conifer collection at the home they shared for many years. Whenever I visited the Reis' home, Bess was a real bundle of energy. Joe always told me how she would wear out women half her age on shopping trips into town. Bess always liked if I visited over the lunch hour so she would have two men to feed. Joe's lunch was rather simple. The main course was always a big Bermuda-type onion sandwich. He considered onions a health food. Maybe his idea had merit since he was very active well into his late seventies.

Joe and Bess had a small dachshund as a house pet and watchdog. She would bark at strangers coining into the house but was not a biter. Once, when Joe and Bess were returning home late in the evening, they discovered that burglars had been in the house. They did not discover bodies that had been torn to shreds by their watchdog. Rather they discovered a ransacked house and one very fat dog asleep on a chair. The burglars had given the dog a cylinder of baloney from the refrigerator and she had eaten herself senseless, especially since the baloney weighed almost as much as she had before eating it.

Joe had a section off to the side of his garden that he utilized as his nursery. He would grow plants in the ground and dig them for customers. He never had to dig a deep ball because he had hard pan just under the topsoil, and plant roots stayed above it. Joe filled the holes with weeds pulled from his garden. In that way he kept the soil high in organics.

A hemlock hedge runs along Elizabeth's driveway. In that hedge is a witches-broom that Joe had discovered quite some time ago. As an avid conifer collector, having his own witches’-broom was a great event. Joe propagated it and sent young plants to his friends. Over the years, however, the broom was constantly being hit by their car going in and out of the driveway. Bess had to hug the hedge whenever the dining room's leaded glass windows were open, since they opened out onto the driveway. One day Joe decided to correct that problem. He got some friends to rig up stretchers and they removed the heavy, fragile windows, took them into the dining room, and rehung them so they opened inward, thus stopping the wear and tear on the hemlock broom.

Joe had a friend who lived about ten minutes away. He told me that I just had to meet this guy. Joe called him a real character and said that I would just love meeting him. The fellow's name was Joe Burke, and I spent many hours enjoying the pleasure of Burke’s company. Whenever I would visit Joe Reis, I would also swing by to see Joe Burke. When I would get back to Reis', Joe would invariably ask if Burke did his Little dance for me. He would give me a big smile if I told him yes.

Anyone who never met Joe Burke missed out on one of life's little treats. Whenever I visited Joe, I would wonder "What is he up to now?" Joe was wet I known to any of the knowledgeable Bonsai people in the New York area. He pioneered root crown grafting for Bonsai in this country. Knowledgeable people used to tell him that root and stem cambiums were incompatible and could not be grafted together. He proved them wrong time after time. He was an artist with a grafting knife, even though he was never a commercial grafter. Joe showed me some Pinus thunbergiana ‘Nishiki Tsukasa’ plants that were triple grafted into the stem of an understock over a three year period, creating a symmetrically branched plant. He was a perfectionist and once sharpened knives as a source of income. Joe taught me how to sharpen a grafting knife. He also taught me his grafting techniques.

Joe brought some excellent pines into America. He especially enjoyed Pinus parviflora and brought several excellent cork barked forms in from Japan. Through Joe's efforts, ‘Ara Kawa’ and ‘Ibo Can’ were propagated into respectable quantities. Pinus thunbergiana ‘Nishiki Tsukasa’, which Joe contended is the best corked bark, Japanese black pine, was developed in large numbers by Joe from two scions that he purchased in the 1960's for $250.00 each.

In WWII Joe was a marine fighter pilot and fought against the Japanese. He had a few bad experiences in combat and once thought he was dead when he crash landed and had his plane flip over. That experience changed his life, and from then on he lived life for the pleasure it gave him. To be successful in life was to simply live it and enjoy it by doing the things he wanted to do. Financial rewards were a minor consideration. Joe taught school in New York City until he was able to take a modest retirement. Joe enjoyed doing Bonsai so he did it well and for many years. He enjoyed knife sharpening so he did that for a while, too.

Whenever I visited Joe, he always wanted to know what I had been doing since the last time I had seen him. He always offered to make me something to eat while we talked. When I invariably turned down the meal, he would always say "Good! I didn't realty want to make anything anyway." He would then talk about his bell collection or an old truck camper (which he was planning to renovate). Then we would talk about Oregon, a place I had visited once or twice. Joe was very interested in Oregon because he thought he might move there. He always figured that in the event of a war that would be the safest place to live since there would not be any fallout from cities to the west.

Joe's interest in Bonsai was starting to fade when I met him. At first I could only purchase a few things from him as he was not ready to release some things. After we got to know each other, I was able to talk him out of a few treasures. Joe loved to bargain and would get all excited when we played ‘Let's make a deal.’ At times he had trouble containing himself and would put his hands in the air and dance in a little circle. He acted as if he were driving a hard bargain but would always sell me plants at a fraction of their true value. I obtained a number of Joe's older stock plants of Pinus Parviflora ‘Ara Kawa’, ‘Ibo Can’, and ‘Ogon Janome’ and Pinus thunbergiana ‘Nishiki Tsukasa’. I was able to purchase these plants because Joe knew I would make propagations of them available to a large number of people through Coenosium Gardens.

Joe liked to graft onto Pinus parviflora seedlings. Since they were hard to find, he always grew his own and made some interesting selections. He left me have one selection that I feel was the best of all that he found. I have named it 'Burke Bonsai' because of its many Bonsai attributes. Interestingly enough it is also an excellent landscape plant. The needles stay short and thin, the growth is asymmetrical, and the cones are quite small.

As Joe was losing interest in Bonsai, he was becoming interested in sewing machines. There was no connection at all between these two things, but Joe always had a love for precision machinery. He would purchase old sewing machines and rebuild them. Whenever I visited Joe, I heard a discourse on sewing machines and was often given a demonstration of what some of his machines could do. Joe felt that they had the same precision as a fine watch.

Joe died unexpectedly in December, 1988 after living a happy life doing the things he enjoyed. Not many of us can say that. I miss the pleasure of dickering over plants with him or seeing him operate one of the sewing machines he salvaged and rebuilt. But I think of him whenever I pass one of the plants I purchased from his collection.

A retired meat cutter from British Columbia with a nonstop sense of humor and a generous disposition became a good friend. Gordon Bentham was known to plant collectors from Victoria, British Columbia to southern California. He was always looking for new conifers to add to his collection or to distribute to specialist nurseries for propagation and marketing to the public.

One day in the winter of 1981 I came home from school to find that UPS had left a large box at our house. When I opened it, I was pleasantly surprised with fifteen plants of assorted sizes. ALL of these plants were new to my collection and unsolicited. I had written to a man in British Columbia named Gordon Bentham who was recommended to me as an avid conifer collector. Since Jean Iseli recommended him, I thought he would be a good person to meet. In my letter to Gordon I included a List of the conifers then in my collection and asked him for a copy of his plant list. Instead of a list, Gordon sent an assortment of conifers that I did not have. A few days later a letter and an extensive plant list arrived, and a correspondence friendship began.

During the summer of 1982, Dianne and I made our first trip across the United States to Oregon. We traveled in a pickup truck both for ease of packing and also for space to bring plants back to Pennsylvania. On our itinerary was a visit to Victoria, British Columbia. We spent a few days with Gordon and his wife, Molly. Most of Gordon's collection was kept in containers at what was then called Flora-Vista Gardens, a wholesale nursery with which he was affiliated. His house had much too small a yard to grow everything he had. As we looked at the plants in the containers, he put so many of them into the truck that I almost had to arrange shipment of our luggage by another means.

Gordon knew the agricultural department people, and we were able to go directly to the building for a phytosanitary certificate. Gordon seemed to know just about anyone on Vancouver Island who had anything to do with plants.

A year later Gordon and Molly spent a summer week with us. We took them on a circuit to visit all of my plant collector friends. But the high point of the visit was a trip to Pennsylvania Amish country, not so much to see the Amish in their horse-drawn carriages but more to show Gordon the names of the towns and villages. We stopped in the town of Intercourse so that Gordon could have his picture taken next to a sign with the town's name on it. Then we went into a tourists' shopping area so that he could purchase memorabilia with names like Intercourse, PA, Blue Ball, PA, and Bird-In-Hand, PA. Gordon had a rich sense of humor and ribald comments were his forte. He would often mention Amish country to us for the rest of the time that we knew him.

Gordon was not a plant propagator. He was not in the business of selling plants for a living. He collected conifers for the love of them and a desire to see the better ones become available to everyone. The only group of conifers he claimed to have no use for was Picea abies. He always said to me that they all looked alike or reverted so much as to be almost worthless to the dwarf conifer lover. ‘Pachyphylla’ was his one exception. We had several spirited conversations over some of his comments. I often believe that he said things like that to get a rise out of me and to enliven our conversations.

After we moved to Oregon, Gordon visited occasionally and enjoyed seeing my collection. His interests had narrowed to the true dwarfs with an emphasis on the pines. He was redoing his home to have the choicest plants of his collection landscaped in a special setting. He had given almost everything else away and just wanted a collection that fitted the size of his property.

Gordon died suddenly on Christmas Day in 1988.

The last person I would Like to mention was a close friend to me and an enigma to many others. Jean Iseli took a bankrupt nursery and built it into a nursery unlike any other in the country. He was a copious writer and an avid telephone conversationalist. In person he was very quiet and withdrawn, especially when part of a group. His business practices were ethical and above board with many restrictions applied to customer relations that were considered arrogant by some but were a necessity to develop a healthy, financially sound operation. Even people who did not Like to deal with the nursery enjoyed meeting and spending time with the owner, who was considered to be a bit of an eccentric always wearing rubber thongs instead of shoes and possessing a persona that appealed to everyone who got to know him.

Jean loved conifers and was enthusiastic about them. His enthusiasm was contagious and affected everyone around him. To the person who did not know Jean personally, he seemed very standoffish. Actually he was very shy and did not warm up to a person until he got to know him either personally or by reputation. Jean had a PhD in pure mathematics, did research for the government and taught at a university white living in Washington, DC, and was deeply involved with the art world. He even saved several art galleries from bankruptcy by reforming their business practices. Jean once told me that he used to lecture to his classes white sitting in a lotus position on a desk in front of the room and that he taught a very tough course and was a hard grader. Frustration with college politics drove him out of education and helped him decide on taking over the management of a nursery in Oregon.

I first heard about Jean from Joe Reis during the summer of 1980. Joe showed me a Picea pungens ‘Iseli' Fastigiate’ that Jean had sent him as a get well gift while Joe was in the hospital for an operation. It was in a crate and arrived the day before Joe came home. When he was being helped out of the car, he saw the crate and tried to make a beeline for the garage to grab a hammer and pound open the crate. He was restrained and Ed Rezek opened it while Joe watched from the kitchen window. After Joe told me this story, he gave me Jean's address.

A letter to Jean fostered a relationship that began with dozens of letters, continued with almost weekly telephone calls, and ended with Jean's death when we were in the process of moving to Oregon so that I could work with him on a daily basis.

Jean Iseli took to plants, especially conifers, with a real passion. Whenever he wrote or telephoned, I learned about new plants or obtained addresses of people who were into conifers but were unknown to me. I always looked forward to Sunday mornings because Jean and I would usually spend about an hour on the telephone discussing one thing or another and sharing some dreams.

I had formed a mental picture of Jean, and in 1982 1 was able to meet him. Jean was a short, balding man who wore granny style glasses and did not tolerate shoes. He had a twinkle in his eye, an obtuse sense of humor, and a way of expressing himself that could charm the socks off of the most skeptical people. He was a very sharp man and possibly the most brilliant person I have ever met. He was shy to a fault but open to his friends. Once he accepted a person as a friend or as someone he could admire that person really could do no wrong. Unfortunately he was taken advantage of more than once, and this may have attributed to his shyness.

I recall when we had the formative meeting for the American Conifer Society at the home of Joel Spingarn on Long Island. Jean and I had worked many things out together in advance, and he shared his ideas with me about how to get things moving. Before the meeting he asked me to give the presentation of our ideas. Jean was introduced to the group first and when he asked me to give the presentation, I told him that he was doing such a fine job that he should continue. After a brief pause, he gave me his "Fincham, you are a real turkey look" and proceeded to summarize what needed to be done at this meeting.

I visited the West Coast several times before Dianne and I moved here on a permanent basis. I remember going on a nursery visitation with Jean and a few others. on the way back we stopped for dinner at a Portland area greasy spoon. On each dinner plate was a hot pepper. Don Howse was with us and he enjoys hot food. The hot pepper was too much for him even though he barely touched it with his tongue. Jean, however, was very knowledgeable about many topics and he included hot peppers part of his repertoire. He explained how hot peppers are not very hot if you peel off the outer skin. He proceeded to prove it to us by peeling his and putting it into his mouth and biting into it. When he started crying, we starting laughing and gave him some extra glasses of water.

Jean used to write articles for the ACS Bulletin under two pseudonyms, Ed Remsrola and Revol Refinoc (conifer lover backwards). He did not want to appear to be interjecting his ideas into the Society because he felt that people would think he was doing it for his own glorification, since he was running a large, commercial nursery. When we received the articles, he always asked me to do some rewriting to eliminate some of his effusive vocabulary. It was a partnership that worked out quite well and did get additional articles for the Bulletin from a very knowledgeable person. For an idea of Jean's phrasing, here is a quote from a letter he wrote me in 1981 complaining about nurseries setting products at below cost prices because they glutted their own markets, "a form of socially reprehensible behavior leading to monopolistic future pricing".

When Jean suddenly died in June, 1986, I lost a good friend and the plant world lost a very enthusiastic person who was only starting to accomplish many great things.

The people I have mentioned here are not the only good plantspeople to have died in the 1980's, but they were the ones who were very special to me. I treasured each friendship and miss each one in a different way. For readers who knew any of these individuals, I hope I have rekindled some fine memories. For those who have only been acquainted with the individual's name, I have shared some of my experiences with and have given a few insights into these people. Years from now I will enjoy rereading this musing and fondly remember Don and Hazel, Joe Reis, Joe Burke, Gordon, and Jean.

Counter Started February 21, 2002