ASHS 2024 Conference

The North Dakota State University (NDSU) Woody Plant Improvement Program has been servicing the Northern Great Plains for 70 years, beginning germplasm trial evaluations in 1954. NDSU purchased an 80-acre (~32 hectares) farm in the early 1970s to be established as the NDSU Horticulture Research Farm near Absaraka, ND and began trial plantings in fall of 1974. This research farm provides ideal horticultural soil for evaluation and breeding projects for ND. Approximately 45 acres (~18 hectares) of this farm is used for evaluation, selection and breeding of woody ornamental plants including a 35-acre (~14 hectares) research arboretum. This research arboretum is the most extensive collection of woody ornamental plants in North Dakota and in the Northern Great Plains. There have been over 15,000 accessions obtained, evaluated, and developed since planting began in 1974. Accessions have been collected from local, regional, national, and international sources. After 50 years, this program has introduced 62 superior ornamental woody plants for production and sale with 44 active registered trademarks with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. NDSU woody plant introductions have a nursery wholesale sale value of over $2.0 million and a $6.0 million value in retail sales for 2022 alone. Introductions are currently being propagated for sale by commercial wholesale firms in four countries: Australia, Canada, England, and the United States (22 states, including 35 nurseries). The primary focus 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, region, and nation. One issue that this program is addressing is that native woody (trees and shrubs) plant species diversity is extremely low in the central United States, especially in North Dakota. Most of the available trees and shrubs in the specialty crop nursery trade in North Dakota are non-native introductions. Many non-native plants have been shown to be invasive to native environments. Woody plant research has reacted to this issue utilizing sterility breeding. This results in new cultivars that are not considered invasive and are allowed to be utilized by the commercial nursery and landscape industry, even in states where they are banned. Sterility breeding through polyploid induction has become a focus of the NDSU Woody Plant Improvement Program. The research focus of this project is to induce, or develop, polyploids produce sterile cultivars to be used in the nursery and landscape trade.