While most plants are going dormant in winter, others have a seemingly backward schedule. One of those is our native cardamines. Below is our garden clump of Cardamine bulbosa, which emerged in late November, and is growing happily as we hit the new year. This cabbage family (Brassicaceae) member, native from North Dakota south to
It’s Grow time for Cardamines Read More »
Back in June 1998, I was botanizing in Southern Georgia, with Woodlander’s Bob McMartney, when I spied a spectacular patch of ornamental grass, growing alongside the road in remote Warren County. We turned around and dug a small division, before heading on. While I was excited at the prospect of a heat tolerant, blue-foliaged grass
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
Cast-ing a Wider Net Read More »
One of our favorite evergreen trees is the little-known, Trochodendron aralioides. I first met the wheel tree at the JC Raulston Arboretum back in the 1980s, quickly falling in love with the fascinating foliage, which is arranged at the branch tips, like spokes on a wheel. As the curator of the Arboretum’s Lath House, I
Driving the Wheel Tree Renaissance Read More »
Last weekend included a quick trip to Marietta, Georgia, to celebrate the 80th birthday of our long-time plant friend, Ozzie Johnson. Ozzie is a life long garden designer and consultant in the Atlanta area, as well as a career volunteer at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. Ozzie has traveled extensively through China, Vietnam, and Japan, searching
A Visit to OZ to see the Wizard Read More »
This year, we introduced an amazing new Chinese collection of the shade-loving Mioga ginger, that we named Zingiber mioga ‘Lushan Gold’, from an Atlanta Botanical Garden expedition. It’s amazing, first, in that it clumps, instead or runs like many forms of the species. We grew quite a few from seed, looking for any that might
We just snapped this photo of one of our more amazing fern introductions, Microsorum buergerianum ‘Datun’. This six year-old clump is from our 2008 spore collection of this fabulous mat forming, epiphytic fern from north of Taipei, Taiwan. Although the foliage burnt back at 11 degrees F, it re-flushed quickly the following spring. Hardiness Zone
Evergreen Fern Mat Read More »
A few years ago, I was fascinated to see a catalog listing for a new ornamental grass that I didn’t know, Calamagrostis ‘Cheju-Do’. This struck my eye because calamagrostis are great ornamental specimens, and in 1997, I had the opportunity to botanize Korea’s southern island, Cheju. We subsequently acquired a specimen, which prospered for us,
I first met the rarely-cultivated slender-leaf blazing star on a 2022 staff expedition with Patrick McMillan and Zac Hill, to Jasper County, SC. Here, Liatris tenuifolia grew throughout the dry, sandy habitat in between gopher tortoise mounds. The native range of this species, stretches from SC southwest to Mississippi. Our seeds from the expedition sprouted,
Slender-leaf Blazing Star Read More »
It’s hard to miss the giant Hedychium flavum (no relation to the rapper, Flavor Flav) in the garden this month. I first met this gem of a ginger lily years ago, when I was botanizing in Northern Vietnam, near the town of Sapa, where the arching stems were easy to spot, hanging from the steep
A Flava-rite Flavor Read More »
