Depending on you local chops, you may need no primer whatsoever before reading the following interview. However, if you, like me, haven’t been living in Washington for too long, I’d like you to stop reading this—just for a second! Do me a favor: open up a search browser and find a 1-minute clip from “Last Week Tonight” titled, “You Wish You Loved Anything as Much as Seattle Gardening Expert Ciscoe Morris Loves Everything.”
Did you do it? Good. You’re now officially enamored, just like everyone else in the PNW, with Ciscoe Morris. On top of being a delight, Morris is a living legend in the Pacific Northwest gardening scene and has been giving horticultural advice in-person, on the radio, and on TV for decades. He’ll be giving a gardening talk in the flesh at this year’s Whatcom County Home & Lifestyle Show, which is sure to send at least some of the members of the Gardening with Ciscoe Fan Club on Facebook (which is 7,500 people strong) rushing to the Northwest Washington Fair & Event Center.
The beginning of this Q&A with Ciscoe Morris was published in Bellingham Alive’s March issue. Here is the continuation, where we spoke more about gardening, bugs, his worldwide travels and upcoming garden tour trip to Japan, and some of the horticultural wonders right here at home!
Photograph courtesy of Ciscoe Morris
LIFELONG LEARNING AND BENEVOLENT BUGS
Kristen: This might seem like kind of a negative Nancy question, but I’m curious. Do people ask a lot of the same questions? Do you ever get tired of the same ones?
Ciscoe: I did radio on KIRO for over 30 years, and one question I got a lot was, “When do you prune your rhododendron?” It’s right when they’re done blooming! But you know, I never mind that because I have a great story about pruning rhododendron that I love to tell, so now I’m happy when someone asks that.
Most of the time, the questions go all over the place, and sometimes I do get stumped. They can be pretty tough, you know! It might be about an exotic houseplant or something, boy, that’s hard sometimes. They’ll have a picture on their telephone, “What’s this?” I’m like, “Umm…” …I have to admit, I don’t know sometimes, [but] I like that. Because then I learn, because I’m gonna find out the answer to that question, no matter what it takes, you know?
Kristen: Lifelong learning is really important, and I feel like it’s really well entwined with gardening. I recently learned a lot about the Master Gardeners.
Ciscoe: Oh, I agree with you so much. It’s one of the reasons I just love gardening. You never stop learning. I’m a Master Gardener, I’ve been one for years and years, and boy, you learn a lot when you become a Master Gardener. I went to horticulture school, all that stuff, and yet I’m always learning. … I never knew about spraying weeds in the lawn with vinegar. It’s a great way, on a hot summer day, to kill a dandelion. I never knew a thing about that till an old time gardener told me about it. So you know, there’s always more to learn. It’s the coolest of any hobby anybody could ever have.
Kristen: Speaking of cool tricks for your garden, you’ve always been a proponent of integrated pest management and organic gardening. Do you think that more gardeners should know more about bugs in general?
Ciscoe: Oh, do I ever. You know, early in my career I used to go around to grade schools and teach kids about bugs. … People should know about bugs. The worst thing you could do is spray something that kills every bug in your garden. It throws everything off. What I’ve learned over the years is that the less you spray and the more you watch what’s going on, the less you ever even have bug problems, because the good bugs eat the bad bugs!
And there’s so many beneficial insects out there. I really think if people knew more about bugs, they wouldn’t fear them so much. They’d realize that most of them are beneficial. …Out of a thousand different kinds of bugs that are typically in a normal garden, only 10 out of those thousand kinds are harmful to our crops or us in any way. So if we spray something to kill all the bugs, we’re killing 990 good guys to kill 10 bad guys.
Most of the time, if you do get a little problem, there’s an easy way to deal with it without using chemical pesticides. And it’s even kind of fun! The more you get to know bugs, the more fascinating they are. If you could watch, like, a ladybug eat an aphid, oh la la, that’s so exciting, you know?
Kristen: What’s a good place for people to get started with organic gardening?
Ciscoe: My first book that I ever wrote … by myself was called, “Ask Ciscoe.” That little book ended up the number one selling garden book in the United States, and it’s just cram-packed. It’s a Q&A book. All the answers I give for dealing with pests are something environmentally friendly that you could do that’s not going to throw your balance of nature off in your garden, so that’s one thing!
Rodale put out a lot of good books. They were kind of the leaders in the organic gardening thing. I have a book [of theirs] called, “The All-New Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening,” and … they put out, “Natural Insect and Disease Control.”
In my newest book—I’m not trying to just sell my books—my newest book is called, “Oh, La La!” It’s short stories about gardening and they’re all supposed to be really funny, and I can only tell you that I laughed my head off when I wrote it. One of the big stories in there is how I started the whole organic gardening program at Seattle U. We were the first university to do that almost in the United States! We stopped using any [chemical] pesticide by the end. So there’s quite a fun story and how I started that whole program, but you learn a ton about keeping a balance in nature going in your own garden, and you learn about a lot of the bugs in there too.
Photograph courtesy of Ciscoe Morris
AT HOME GARDENING FOR EVERY GENERATION
Kristen: Those are great resources to get people started down that path, thank you! Something else I’m curious about: I think gardening, especially at-home gardening, has been a little less popular in the past few decades, but have you noticed an increase of interest since the pandemic?
Ciscoe: Well, during the pandemic, vegetable gardening took off. I think part of the problem is that new houses barely have room for a garden half the time. They take up the whole yard! I’d hate to be the guy that vacuums that place inside, you know?
But I think I’m seeing more young kids get into it, and that’s really exciting to me. At my local school I’ve gone down there and done a couple things with the kids. … I think [gardening] skipped a generation, and now I’m seeing the younger people taking it up again! So I’m really, really hoping that young people take it up more.
And I gotta say one nice thing. I meet a lot of … people in their 20s, they look at me and they go, “I grew up with you. My mom made me watch you every week on TV!” I get a lot of young people telling me that, so that gets me excited that young people are starting to get back into gardening more again, because it’s the funnest thing there is to do. Everybody should have a little vegetable garden, it doesn’t have to be huge!
And I always tell people: plant perennials, because it’s the most fun kind of gardening there is.
Kristen: What you said about vegetable gardens makes a lot of sense, because I think there’s this big return to self-sufficiency. I think there was a bit of time there where everyone was like, “We don’t need to know how to do this because we have all these modern conveniences.” And now I think there’s this push to acknowledge, “Well, sometimes those conveniences go away.”
Ciscoe: You’re so right. And the other thing is, you know, now and then you hear about E. Coli in the food, so it’s kind of nice to grow most of your own food at home. … I think for a lot of people, if you grow your own veggies, not only do you get really interested in how to do it better and better, but also you’re eating really healthy food that’s so good for you, so. That’s an extra special thing about growing your own.
Photograph courtesy of Ciscoe Morris
GLOBETROTTING GARDEN DESTINATIONS, FROM JAPAN BACK TO WASHINGTON
Kristen: I did want to ask you, you have a trip to Japan on the books for November this year called, “Gardens of Japan with Ciscoe Morris.” What are you excited for on that trip? Do you act as kind of a deputy tour guide, telling people about gardens?
Ciscoe: I’m a deputy tour guide. I host these things, I work with this guy that owns a travel company and he doesn’t know plants worth a bootle hopper, but he’s a great organizer. We work together to determine what gardens we’re gonna go to and everything. I do some research, my wife Mary usually jumps in there and helps too. But when we’re on the trip, I am definitely the deputy tour guide.
Now, the way I do it is I always try and get the head gardener or somebody really good from the garden to lead us through, and I’m always making little comments as we go. Iin Japan, they’ll show us a plant that maybe a lot of people haven’t ever seen, but I’ll know it probably, because I’ve been around the world so many times looking at plants. So I’ll be telling extra things, and I usually tell the guide that’s leading us through, “Hey, I’m going to probably add some comments about some things so that people know how they could deal with this plant back in the Pacific Northwest,” … so we almost always end up working as a team. So yeah, all these trips are real, real fun.
It’s really funny; On these tours, sometimes the spouses get dragged along, so the wife might be a terrific gardener and her husband might be a great golfer! So I make sure there’s lots of fun things for people that aren’t the world’s greatest gardener to do, too.
I already lead [a tour] in Japan. Japan is incredibly fun, the gardens are beautiful, the people are so nice. It’s the coolest mix of cultures, so it’s super modern and yet really old fashioned. I love it.
Kristen: Something else really interesting—I was able to go on a trip recently around south of Seattle, and I was able to visit the Highline SeaTac Botanical Garden.
Ciscoe: Oh, that’s a wonderful garden! I’ve given a lot of talks there.
Kristen: Yeah, and they have this big Japanese garden area! I was also able to visit Mukai Farm & Garden on Vashon Island and learn a little of the history there. So there’s a lot of Japanese influence in our area’s gardens.
Ciscoe: That is so true. You know, Seattle University, where I directed grounds care for 24 years, that garden was put in [by] two guys, a person everybody “Father Greengrass,” Father Nichols, and Fujitaro Kubota of the Kubota Garden [in Seattle]. He put in the great majority of the Seattle U. landscape, so it had a really cool Asian feel to it. And that feeling is still there, even though I added about a hundred-million perennials and rare plants and everything. But we always worked with rocks and tried to stay true to that Kubota feeling there.
Kristen: So I bet you’re super excited to take folks around Japan and show them where it all comes from, too.
Ciscoe: Oh, I cannot wait. I used to lead tours through the [Arboretum Foundation’s Seattle] Japanese Garden, so I know [a lot] about Japanese gardens and I’ll be able to tell a lot of really good stories, some wild ones.
Kristen: Awesome. What are some of your favorite places you’ve visited on your world travels?
Ciscoe: Well, you can’t go wrong going to England. Southern England has Sissinghurst and Great Dixter and all these unbelievable old, old gardens, just so great. But Cornwall, England is tropical. … We actually took a helicopter to Scilly Island and went to Tresco Abbey, one of the coolest gardens I’ve ever seen. And it’s all tropical, you can’t believe it. It’s just so cool, plus the helicopter ride was so fun.
So, I love it there, but South Africa, oh my gosh, they’ve got some gardens to die for there. And Italy—first of all, Italy is so doggone fun to go to, you just have to learn to talk with your hands, that’s all it takes…. They have incredible gardens, off on islands [and] all over the place.
One of my favorite places on Earth is France. I’ve been there [17] times, and there’s fantastic gardens … [in] South France they have some gardens to die for, these cactus gardens [where the] cactus are 20-feet high—you can’t believe your eyes!
Kristen: I saw an article in the Seattle Met where you gave shoutouts to Christianson’s Nursery in Mount Vernon and My Garden Nursery in Bellingham.
Ciscoe: Oh, I love both of those! … I know I’m going to be giving a talk at My Garden Nursery this summer, and every year I give a talk at the Rose Festival at Christianson’s … the owner John Christianson and I give a talk together, it is so fun!
Kristen: What do you think of the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival?
Ciscoe: Oh, I love the Tulip Festival! When I did live radio, many, many a year, I’d broadcast my show from the Tulip Festival, and I used to lead tours to the Tulip Festival on the Clipper [a passenger ferry that runs between Victoria and Washington]. I’d take people over on the Clipper, we’d do whale watching, then we’d go to the Tulip Festival and just have a blast.
I think the Tulip Festival is top of the line, and I’m so happy, too, because maybe partially thanks to all the tulips they grow there and all the great veggies they grow in the Skagit Valley out there, that whole area has stayed so nice and rural, which I think is so beautiful.
Photograph courtesy of Ciscoe Morris
Listen to Ciscoe on KSQM 91.5 FM every Saturday at 9 a.m., on the radio or streamed online. Every Thursday, he and Nita-Jo showcase plants on the Bellevue Botanical Garden Society’s Facebook “Plant of the Week” live stream. Every other Wednesday, Ciscoe does a garden segment on KING 5 New Day. Purchase Ciscoe’s two books, “Ask Ciscoe” and “Oh, La La!” from Village Books and Paper Dreams, or online. Watch past episodes of “Gardening with Ciscoe” for free on KING 5’s YouTube channel. Find more information at ciscoe.com
