All kinds of events take place on Durango’s public sports fields. Baseball, softball, football. Ultimate frisbee often catches a curious eye.
But the pavilion next to the La Plata County Fairgrounds hosted something very different during the weekend: a stampede. In fact, it was Durango’s first plant stampede, a highlight of the Durango Botanical Society’s Horticultural Festival.
“We did some research, and this was the first plant stampede in the western United States,” said society Executive Director Cindy Smart. “It’s a popular spectator sport and horticulture event on the east coast.”
About 30 plant lovers lined up Saturday on the field, a short distance from hundreds of potted plants, shrubs and trees arranged in rows out on grass. When organizers gave the green light, they ran, rushed and beelined toward the plants they wanted to take home. There were four rounds. The last was a free-for-all.
Jeff Wagner, a member of the Durango Botanical Society and owner of Four Corners Natives, said there were rare, hard-to-come-by plants in the stampede.
“It’s kind of a cross between a scramble, a field day and a plant sale,” Wagner said.
“It’s really kind of fun,” Smart said.
While the plants were hard to find outside the area, one was hard to find anywhere in the country and part of American history.
Scott Skoegerboe, owner of Fort Collins Wholesale Nursery and a guest speaker for the festival, specializes in edible plants. During round two of the stampede, Skoegerboe told the crowd that one particular apple tree was still out there – according to him, from the last tree planted by Johnny Appleseed.
An American folk hero, Johnny Appleseed, born John Chapman in Pennsylvania in 1775, roamed early America trading and planting seeds up and down the Ohio River Valley. Now he’s become a legendary figure who wore a burlap sack as a shirt and a cooking pot for a hat, according to the Library of Congress.
As a gift, Skoegerboe’s wife gave him a book 20 years ago that led him to believe one of Chapman’s trees was still alive in Ashland County, Ohio.
His only lead led him to a retired teacher.
“So I called retired teachers until I found one that knew the tale. She said one of her students took the cuttings to a horticulturist that knew how to graft, and ‘here’s his number,’ so I called him, and he said it was alive in front of his bakery.”
Skoegerboe got his own cuttings and grafted them, a process in which a plant tissue is inserted into another and they yield a desirable flower of fruit, giving him Johnny Appleseeds.
“There are a lot of people that claim their trees are Johnny Appleseeds, but there is no documentation, so this is a really interesting story,” he said.
Saturday’s events went off without a hitch, but a violent storm moved into Durango on Sunday, canceling a photography workshop with celebrated local photographer Kit Frost. So Smart turned her focus for the day on the demonstration garden behind Durango Public Library, the society’s first project.
She said the garden represents the many climates make up the Durango area and aids in collecting information on what grows well in the region.
“This garden is here because of the hundreds of people that just care about their community and want things to be beautiful,” she said. “We don’t have to just depend on the city and our taxes to pay for this type of thing. We can take this project in-hand and make this beautiful corner in the world, right here in Durango.”
bmathis@durangoherald.com
