Open garden
A treasure trove of information Howard Ecker, nurseryman by Mary Ruth Smith
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ABOVE: A sampling of Ecker’s ferns INSET: Howard Ecker
10 | mAY-JUNE 2011
fter 56 years of growing trees for the nursery trade, what Howard Ecker doesn’t know about trees is probably not worth knowing. I first met Howard at the Fairport Farmer’s Market. I had been looking for a Robinia pseudoacacia ‘Frisia’ (a yellowleaved black locust) for quite some time and had just about given up when I was amazed to find one at my hometown farmer’s market. I stop to visit him on Saturday mornings and keep him posted on the progress of my Frisia, and I’ve discovered that he is a treasure trove of information about trees, ferns, and many other plants, and a wealth of knowledge about the nursery and garden business in Rochester. Howard grew up in Irondequoit, loving to grow things. “I always had a shovel in my hand,” he said. After four
years in the Air force during the Korean War, he came back to Rochester and started growing conifers from seed on his uncle’s farm. By selling the seedlings to nurseries, he helped put himself through the Syracuse College of Forestry, graduating in 1961. The year before that, he and his wife, Margaret, bought the house on Oakdale Drive in Webster, where he still lives and grows his trees. The back yard of the quarter-acre lot has a rectangle of grass completely surrounded by growing beds and holding areas. He told me that the soil is pure sand for 300 feet down to bedrock. He enriches it heavily with humus, mainly leaf mold that he gets from local towns. He proudly showed me a handful of his soil, which looked to me like chocolate cake. As I have rocky clay in my garden, I was very jealous. A bed along the side of his garage contains at least a thousand seedlings of his favorite tree, the paper bark maple, (Acer griseum). He collects the seed from his own mature trees; they take two years to germinate! He sells the seed by the pound to growers and the bare-root seedlings to wholesale nurseries all over the country to be grown on by them and sold to their customers. He used to ship them to Holland, Canada, and England as well. He supplies some local nurseries with plants, but the only place to buy plants directly from him is at his home or at the Fairport Farmer’s Market in the spring and early summer. He has never had a retail outlet, “Never wanted one,” he told me. There are four mature specimens of paper bark maple in his yard, and I noticed that they didn’t look just alike. He told me that every tree is an individual, looking a little different from the others, which makes it difficult to grow them in a matching clump. As they mature, the bark becomes cinnamon red and exfoliates in different patterns. The trees start to peel around August, when they have finished growing for the year. At that point, the diameter has expanded so fast that they “almost explode”, according to Howard. They reach about forty feet at