Many people see a tree, a shrub or flower for what it resembles. For a few, it is the unusual that stands out: the flower that's bigger, the shrub that's hardier, the blossom that is a unique color — some detail that is different from what he is used to seeing in the plant.
Logan Calhoun, who died of liver failure at 41 in 1999, had such a sense.
"I have found over the years that there are people who see things totally different from the rest of the world," says Vicki Thaxton, who was weekend manager for the now-closed Cedar Hill nursery Kings Creek. It was founded by Calhoun and his business partner, Dallas landscape architect Rosa Finsley. "They see details that the regular eye doesn't see. That's what Logan saw."
One day, Calhoun and Finsley spotted a stand of winecup, a silky, fuchsia wildflower that blooms in the fall in North Texas, around Houston School Road and Camp Wisdom Road, Finsley recalls. Some of the winecups, however, were white, catching Calhoun’s eye. The white-flowered specimen began a journey from nurseries in Oklahoma to an agricultural station and nurseries in the Great Lakes region.
White winecups were sold across the country after they trialed well, but the Kings Creek staff was still amazed when a truck pulled up to deliver them to the nursery. And they certainly didn't expect the name on the plugs to be Callirhoe involucrata var. lineariloba 'Logan Calhoun.'
“It was just wonderful,” Finsley says. “When we planted some at a neighbor’s, it jumped the sidewalk and [grew] out into the lawn.”
‘Logan Calhoun’ winecup is still sold at North Carolina’s Plant Delights Nursery (plantdelights.com) and other U.S. nurseries.
Calhoun was one of the last plant explorers to drive throughout the state and into Mexico, camping out and searching for new selections adapted to their geographic areas. His counterparts today take airplanes and stay in hotels, says Dr. Dave Creech, who directs the Mast Arboretum at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, where many of Calhoun’s plants were taken after his death, as specified in his will.
Calhoun and Finsley also traveled to China in 1985 to collect plant material. They selected the areas to visit using a world map one of Calhoun’s Oklahoma State University profs displayed on almost a full wall, a map made by the Germans during World War II. Finsley said the Germans “had divided the whole world into different climates and soils, so that once they had captured them, they would know what to grow there. It’s a scary thought — the whole world.”
The business partners studied the map of China’s zones, looking at areas with characteristics like Dallas. “We made it a point on our trip to go into some of those areas to see what was growing there,” Finsley said. Among other treasures, they found a pittosporum that was more cold-hardy than those sold in Dallas.
Another of Calhoun’s finds belonged to one of his friends who had died. Finsley and Calhoun drove up to the friend’s Oklahoma house, where they spotted a rain tree with pink pods, which are normally found on rain trees in subtropical areas like Corpus Christi and Houston. Normally, rain trees in the Dallas area produce buff-colored pods and are not as showy, Finsley says.
Calhoun knew all this. “He really got excited when he saw those pink pods,” Finsley says. “He was always curious about plants when he would find them, to see if they were a little different, a little better.”
His friends and colleagues (and they were mostly both) found that Calhoun was “a savant on rare and unusual plants,” as Creech puts it.
When she knew Calhoun, Thaxton says, there was no widespread Internet. “Everything that we knew then, and that he knew then, was by virtue of reading, looking it up, talking to another person — asking a person: Have you grown this? Can you tell me something about this plant material?” Logan fit right in. “He always wanted to share his knowledge with people.”
The late Lorine Gibson’s Dallas garden was a frequent destination for Calhoun. At Gibson’s house, there were a number of Calhoun plants. In fact, a lot of her antique roses came from him, Finsley says, and were planted in the parkways and yards of neighboring rental properties owned by the Gibsons. “Lorine used to say that she’d like for him just to touch a plant or bless a plant because it would do better,” says Finsley.
Once, while driving with Thaxton, Calhoun took a detour through Oak Cliff to show her a special oleander with showier flowers than usual that was hanging over a fence.
“We could go to the front door and ask the guy if we could have some cuttings,” Calhoun told Thaxton. But “I think the best thing for us to do is just try to take them and go.” The two, clippers in hand, reached up, snipped the cuttings, stored them in plastic bags with wet paper towels inside and drove off.
Tony Avent, owner of Plant Delights Nursery in North Carolina, describes Calhoun as one of the characters he has known in his field. “These are the people who are off the horticultural bell curve, I like to say,” he says.
Avent had heard about Calhoun and made it a point to call him when he traveled to speak in the area. When Avent called, Calhoun explained that he had just spent months in a coma, and he had been told he had not long to live. “I popped out of the coma and the first thing I did was go off to Turkey on a plant exploration, because this would be my last one,” Calhoun told Avent.
Calhoun wanted Avent to take cuttings of everything in his garden of discoveries. “He literally was so thrilled that I was willing to take these things and get them out there [on the market], because he knew that would be his contribution,” Avent says. “That was just a very powerful day.”
Calhoun’s own landscape was amazing, according to several people who saw it. “You could walk a step and go, ‘What’s that?’ Then you’d walk another step and go, ‘What’s that?’ And then another step. Every inch had something in it that was special,” says Thaxton.
“Logan made the time to try things in his garden, to see how they did,” Thaxton says. “And if they did well, he wanted to share them.”
When Calhoun returned from his travels, he would drive up to the nursery and unpack “boxes and boxes of plant material that he had bought or gone someplace and found. We bumped it from little nothing pots into 4-inch pots and into 1-gallon pots, and we sold it,” Thaxton says.
One of Finsley‘s and Calhoun’s first landscaping jobs was what is now the Bank of America campus downtown. They were looking for stone to clad the concrete planters to make them appear more natural, says Joe Abbet, Calhoun’s friend and owner of Design on a Shovel in Dallas.
“Logan remembered that when he was 9 years old, his family was driving across the United States and came across a pasture with a bunch of big cut boulders in the middle of it,” Abbet says. These boulders had been cut during the Depression and left to lie in the field. Calhoun remembered where they were.
He and Finsley flew up, found them and bought them out of the field, Abbet says.
“He could recite botanic names, common names, where the plants grew, what their benefits were, what problems they might have, what plants they were related to, and where or how they might be obtained,” says Abbet.
One day at Kings Creek, Calhoun came into the nursery carrying a big book. He said, “Vicki, I bought this for you.” When Thaxton asked why, he said, “Because I want you to have something to go to after I’m gone.”
"It's Botanica," Thaxton says. "At that time, that was the book to have if you were looking something up. That book means so much to me."
Time after time, his friends’ stories include Calhoun driving to the site of something he had found out or read about that he wanted. He taught himself French so that he could read the diaries of a plant-collecting Louisiana plantation owner and locate specimens on the property. Invariably, the stories end with “Logan always walking away with his treasured plants and a new friend,” Abbet says.
Calhoun’s monuments are the plants he found and shared. “While he was on this earth, he used all of his breathing moments to be the plantsman that he was and to find things and plant them and enjoy them and share them,” says Thaxton.
Betsy Simnacher is a Cedar Hill freelance writer.
Calhoun's contributions
Longtime friend Joe Abbet of Dallas says several of Calhoun’s plants made it into the horticulture trade, but without identifying him as the collector, and others have been lost. Calhoun took now-ubiquitous sweet potato vine, for instance, to Kings Creek several years before it made it into the marketplace. “Tangerine crossvine also was collected by Logan many years ago. I believe that Green Lake Nursery was the first one to take cuttings off of it,” he says.
Abbet provides this list of plants Calhoun discovered or collected from others’ nurseries or gardens to try in North Texas.
Dicleptera suberecta. Perennial for hummingbirds blooms summer to fall with orange tubular flowers. Sun.
Dianthus japonicus. Reseeding annual with small lavender flowers in late summer. Sun to part shade.
Trailing sansevieria. Foliage stands 12 to 18 inches with fragrant, cream-colored flowers borne on a 2-foot spike. Blooms are rare for most sansevierias but this one has bloomed frequently. Spreads readily by underground runners.
Kerria japonica 'Shannon.' This weeping deciduous shrub is said to be a more rare form of kerria and stands 3 to 4 feet tall with dark green foliage. It covers itself in single yellow flowers in the spring. Full sun to bright shade.
Ruellia makoyana. Dark green leaves with silver veins and a purple reverse. Flowers are carmine pink and trumpet-shaped. Tender.
Plectranthus. This variegated Swedish ivy is ideal for a pot; it's 2 feet and cascading with green and white foliage. Does well in bright shade. Tender.
Justicia fulvicoma. Orange shrimp plant is a hardy perennial 2 to 3 feet tall and wide with orange flowers through summer and fall. Full sun to part shade.
Salvia elegans 'Sonoran Red'. A hardy pineapple sage collected by Logan in the mountains of Sonora, Mexico. 1 to 11/2 feet tall and 2 feet wide with red flowers. Sun.
Zephyranthes sp. 'Labuffarosa'. A white rain lily tinted with rose. Blooms July through August.
Habranthus robustus. A large rain lily with lavender-pink blooms that face out like an amaryllis. Blooms in early summer.
Bulbine frutescens. Yellow flowers held above succulent, pencil-shaped leaves. Tender perennial.
Ruellia elegans. This frost-tender ruellia is about 18 inches tall with bright red flowers. Sun to bright shade.
Erythrina herbacea. Small-leaf coral bean stands 5 feet by 5 feet with interesting leaves and hook thorns. Large flower spike covered in red tubular blooms. Full sun.
Ampelopsis brevipedunculata. Porcelain vine. Deciduous vine for full sun to bright shade. It has lacy green-and-white foliage and cream-colored flowers followed by metallic, speckled berries that change from rose to blue to purple.
'Grand Duke' jasmine. Super-fragrant white blooms that look like tiny cabbage roses. Logan said that the blooms of this variety are used in making perfumes. Tender.
Lobelia laxiflora. Mexican cardinal flower is a 2- to 3-foot-tall perennial with narrow leaves and 1.5-inch red-and-yellow tubular flowers. Full sun.
Centaurea americana. New Mexico basketflower, a 3-foot-tall annual, has large lavender flowers that fade to white in the center. Logan collected this seed on his last trip to California.
Anisacanthus 'Purple Desert'. This tender perennial stands 2 feet with small leaves and purple blooms. Reseeds.
Grey plectranthus. This one's a great foliage plant with large, silver-gray leaves. It has pale lavender flowers in summer.
Plectranthus. Yellow-and-green variegated plectranthus is useful for containers. It grows 2 feet by 2 feet in shade to part sun.
Gazania rigens. A low-growing hardy gazania that has green leaves with a silver reverse. The flowers are butter-yellow and abundant. Drought- and heat-tolerant. Collected in California.
Gazania 'Sundrop.' Great border plant for hot, dry areas. It is 6 inches tall and creeping, with bright lemon-yellow flowers. Collected in California. Heat- and drought-tolerant.
Bulbine frutescens. Flowers are tangerine and yellow.
Salvia greggii 'Dark Purple.' Two feet tall and semi-evergreen with spikes of dark purple flowers from spring until frost. Sun.
Salvia greggii 'Flamingo.' Semi-evergreen with flamingo-pink flowers. Grows 3 to 4 feet tall and 3 feet wide. Color selection named by Calhoun.
Salvia leucophyllum 'Hot Pink.' Two and one-half to 3 feet tall with matte apple-green foliage and spikes of hot pink flowers. Perennial. Sun.
Salvia grahamii. An attractive salvia that gets 2 feet by 2 feet with coral flowers. Not winter hardy in Dallas. Sun.
Strobilanthes dyerianus 'Persian Shield'. Excellent foliage plant. It has purple leaves with dark veining. It likes morning sun and bright shade and it grows quickly. Zone 10.
Anthericum saundersiae 'Star Fountain'. Grass-like foliage to 1 foot with white, star-shaped flowers on arching spikes. Full shade to morning sun.
Lobelia cardinalis 'Sitting Bull Falls'. Luminous red flowers on 2- to 3-foot spikes. Part sun to bright shade. Winter rosette.
