Bob Stewart, co-founder of Arrowhead Alpines, passed away on December 16, 2011 after a long and brave battle against cancer. Bob was a brilliant plantsman, with encyclopedic knowledge of diminutive rock garden perennials to towering evergreen conifers, and virtually everything in between. His genius extended well beyond the plant world, including physics, chemistry, politics, the environment, predator birds, butterflies, and the list goes on. For those fortunate to have spent time with him, Bob could easily weave a conversation through all these subjects and more. And when it came to plants, seeing Bob converse with other elite plantsmen was amazing—listening to his full knowledge firing on all cylinders was an unforgettable experience.

Many simply knew Bob through the Arrowhead Alpines catalog. His opening page letter became legendary—ranging from current events to science to the simple (“Winter Sucks”) and back, of course, to plants. Bob tackled this annual, monumental task and produced an epic catalog. Readers got to know him through the thousands of plant entries written with sharp wit in his personal stream-of-consciousness style.

To say this catalog got around would be quite the understatement. While admiring plants in gardens around the world, it wouldn’t be unusual to bend down and read a label that said “Arrowhead Alpines – Fowlerville, Michigan.”

Brigitta Stewart, Bob’s wife and Arrowhead Alpines co-founder, will continue to run the retail and mail-order nursery. The printed catalog will no longer be published; current plant listings will be maintained on the Arrowhead Alpines website.

USDA:

Compared to the 1990 version, zone boundaries in this edition of the map have shifted in many areas. The new map is generally one 5-degree Fahrenheit half-zone warmer than the previous map throughout much of the United States. This is mostly a result of using temperature data from a longer and more recent time period; the new map uses data measured at weather stations during the 30-year period 1976-2005. In contrast, the 1990 map was based on temperature data from only a 13-year period of 1974-1986.

Find your new zone on the USDA website

NPR:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture released a document yesterday that got no attention on the nightly news, or almost anywhere, really. Its title, I’m sure you’ll agree, is a snooze: National Nutrient Management Standard.

Yet this document represents the agency’s best attempt to solve one of the country’s — and the world’s — really huge environmental problems: The nitrogen and phosphorus that pollute waterways.

There’s a simple reason why this problem is so big, and so hard to solve. Farmers have to feed their fields, before those fields can feed us. Without fertilizer, harvests would dwindle. But lakes, estuaries, and coastal waters lie downstream from highly fertilized farmland, and now they are choking to death on too much nutrition.

Read the rest of the story…