West Michigan's Morning News
Supporting Role...A Gardening Simplified Preview
This is West Michigan's Morning News. Steve Kelly and Brett Paquita Schmidi back with us on Monday from Gardening Simplified. Rick Vyst is back with us. Good morning, Rick. Hey, good morning, Steve. Happy Friday morning. Oh, man. It feels good to hear your voice, not just because it's Friday. We liked you here anyway. Just even if this was a Monday segment, I just want you to hear that. We would still like to talk to you. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that. You guys provide great support for what we do on the Gardening Simplified show. And speaking of support, the winner for best supporting role is, how does that apply to a landscape? I had a lot of guesses yesterday. Well, Stacey and I, tomorrow, are going to talk about plants that play a supporting role in the landscape. And if you think about it, you know, in the movies, a supporting role is somebody who plays a role that's below that of the leading actor, but above a bit part, you know, I think, you know, what would Batman be without Robin or Ed Harris as Gene Krantz in Apollo 13, even though Tom Hanks took the starring role or Jonah Hill in Moneyball, you know, playing second fiddle to Brad Pitt, but just did a fabulous job in a supporting role. Or you think about Meryl Streep or Jack Nicholson, who are great examples of people who could play either a lead role or a supporting role. And we took that whole concept and applied it to the landscape and came up with a long list of plants that do a great job of playing a supporting role in the landscape. Maybe they're not the stars of the show. Maybe they don't bloom like crazy, but they certainly provide a great foundation to your landscape. And we'll talk about that tomorrow. Rick, one of the things that I'm always interested in, and we're kind of going through this right now, we removed a bush from an area and we're going to plant some flowers there, but we're like, okay, what fills the gap? What's going to grow in? What do you recommend besides listening to your program to get great advice as far as do you take pictures of your landscape and then bring it to, you know, someone who is an expert that can help you with that? Because you want to get that right combination. Yeah, that's a great point, Brett. And I think number one, be open to diversity. If you have a diverse group of plants in your landscape, if a problem comes along, it doesn't spread like wildfire. Secondly, each of these actors takes center stage at different times of the year. And the third thing I've mentioned is in summer, we do some traveling. Visit some gardens during the summer. And like you said, Brett, snap a few pictures of stuff that you like that's in bloom. You know, I have that all the time. I have people messaging me with pictures and they say, hey, Rick, I saw this out there in the landscape and I love this by my home. What is this? And I identify it for them. So, you know, that's a great approach. And this is the perfect time of year to be looking for that sort of thing. Speaking of perfect time of the year, and this may be unrelated, you think the corpse flower has a complex? I mean, everybody stands in front of it and goes, oh, man, I mean, it doesn't know. It's just a plan. It's doing the best that it can. Should people maybe temper their comments for when they get to the car? You know, I think it's a great point, Steve, but it also brings up a great point that the aroma of flowers is there to attract pollinators. And in some cases, that aroma doesn't smell much better than when you unzip your gym bag after a week and sitting in the back of the car in the hot sun, right? So, you know, it will attract, you know, flies and other insects like that are great pollinators. So, you know, it understands its role. And there it is. Rick, vice, Stacy tomorrow to with gardening simplified nine o'clock on wood radio gardening simplified on air.com. Thanks for your time as always. Thank you very much for your support.