NDSU Woody Plant Improvement Program
The NDSU woody plant improvement project has introduced 60 superior ornamental woody plants for production and sale with 41 active registered trademarks with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. NDSU woody plant introductions have a nursery wholesale sale value of over $2.75 million and a $6.75 million value in retail sales for 2020 alone. Introductions are currently being propagated for sale by commercial wholesale firms in four countries: Australia, Canada, England, and the United States (18 states, including 35 nurseries). The return on investment of this program is with increasing the diversity and availability of woody plants with increased disease/insect resistance and winter hardiness for landscapes throughout North Dakota and the region.
The primary focus of my research is to develop, evaluate and release superior ornamental woody plants for the Northern Great Plains landscapes.
Short-term goals are to identify sources of native, introduced and foreign woody plant germplasm with potentially desirable ornamental traits for selection and/or breeding purposes and to establish practical means of propagating selected clones and other plants that are not available or limited in the nursery trade.
Long-term goals include evaluation of woody species, cultivars, and seed sources to determine ease of establishment, winter and drought hardiness, soil adaptation, pest susceptibility, aesthetic characteristics and survival for potential introduction for the commercial nursery trade. Most new ornamental woody plant releases have been evaluated for a minimum of 15 – 20 years before they are released to the commercial trade.
Climate and soil conditions present a challenge in growing landscape plants in the Northern Great Plains. There is a deficiency of adapted, winter hardy, pest resistant woody plants for shelter and landscape uses in the Northern Great Plains. Only a small percentage of woody plant genotypes perform satisfactorily as a result of insufficient winter hardiness, pest susceptibility, lack of resistance to drought, desiccating winds and unfavorable soil conditions; e.g., alkaline (pH) and saline soils. There is a real need to improve, evaluate and introduce adapted woody plants for this region to increase plant diversity and avoid monoculture disasters in the future.
