Looking good in the winter garden is the dwarf cast iron plant, Aspidistra zongbayi ‘Old Glory’. This cast iron plant never grows taller than 1′, but makes a lovely 3-4′ wide evergreen groundcover. This is our 2002 introduction of a 1996 Darrell Probst collection from Sichuan, China. This has been fine for us for over
You would think with 220 new Aspidistra (cast iron plant) species discovered since 1980 that botanists would have found them all, but that seems to be far from the case. This oddity just flowered in our collection this month, and is obviously yet another new species. This is one of the final collections (2018) made
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I first met Aspidistra bogneri, when I crawled through a dense jungle of limbs in North Vietnam’s Ha Giang Province in 2005. There I was, face to face with a 5′ tall cast iron plant. Until that moment, I didn’t know such a plant even existed. Fast forward, 19 years later, it’s currently flowering in
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We’re preparing for the release of a new cast of characters for 2024, through our current funding arm, Plant Delights Nursery. One of the “cast” that we’ve been trialing for six years is a new cast iron plant hybrid from Japan, Aspidistra ‘Hanado Raku’ PPAF. This is one of those plants that elicits all kind
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At the lowest levels of the horticultural world are those plants that naturally carpet the forest floor. One of our favorites belongs to the genus Aspidistra, commonly known as cast iron plants. During the spring and summer, they are barely noticed in the garden, but as everything else around them goes dormant in fall, their
Flowering in early December, this is our first time to see blooms on a cast iron plant collected for us in 2018, by the late Alan Galloway in northern Vietnam. It didn’t take but a glance to realize that it represents another new, undescribed cast iron plant species. Our taxonomist, Zac Hill, has already been
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Up until a couple of years ago, we could find no literature detailing any hybrids in the cast iron plant genus, Aspidistra. With our extensive in-ground collection, we had begun noticing seedlings that were obvious hybrids, so we began first by confirming that both the flowers and foliage showed signs of being intermediate between both
We’ve played around with growing cast iron plants from seed, curious if the white-tipped pattern of Aspidistra elatior ‘Asahi’ was heritable. Turns out that it is. Aspidistra ‘Blizzard’ is our seedling with well over half of the leaf being white. That makes it both beautiful, but insanely slow growing. The plant below has been in
Looking great in the summer garden is the stunning cast iron plant, Aspidistra elatior ‘Asahi’. This amazing woodland evergreen is a plant we can’t imagine gardening without. The leaf patterning is brightest as the new leaves emerge in June/July. Grown as a house plant, it needs to get some size before you will see the
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We can’t imagine there are many people who grow cast iron plants from seed, but we have found the results quite fascinating. Below are a couple of our seedling which we found good enough to name. Neither has been divided yet, and are still under evaluation, but we think they have good potential. Aspidistra ‘Bright
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