A plant that’s really thriving in our summer heat and drought is the Southwest US (Arizona, Texas, New Mexico) native cactus, Grusonia emoryi. This colorful, compact, rock garden-sized specimen, matures at 1′ tall x 3′ wide, with great age. If you have free-range pets, who like to play with such plants, you may want to
Looking lovely in the dryland garden is the fascinating Wooly Lip Fern, Myriopteris tomentosa. This evergreen North American native, which can be found naturally growing with cactus, has an odd native distribution from Arizona east to Virginia. The foliage emerges a silvery green, that becomes more silver as the new fronds mature. It grows best
We were delighted to host two phenomenal UK plantsmen last week, John Grimshaw (l), and Tom Christian (r). John is the Editor and Tom, the Assistant Editor, of the encyclopedic Trees and Shrubs On-Line project, which we’ve written about before. Sponsored by the International Dendrology Society, their goal is to update and expand their on-line
A Day of Dendrology Read More »
One of our favorite fall-flowering trees is the tropical-looking Schefflera delavayi. As a child, I was always enamored with schefflera on our family vacations to Florida, never dreaming it would be possible to grow these “tropicals” in our Raleigh garden. Fast forward 60 years, a number of “hardy” schefflera species in the Arailaceae family have
Delavay’s Schefflera is a now a Heap of Pleureum Read More »
Now that we’ve passed 2,600 blogs, which equates to one blog per day for 7.17 years, I thought it might be interesting to pull back the curtain on how we organize the images we share. Much of the way we look at images was influenced by our mentor, the late J.C. Raulston. J.C. once lamented
Pulling Back the Image Curtain Read More »
On Friday, August 13, I received a short, 5am text from a friend, plantsman, Laurence (Larry) Hatch, saying goodbye. Larry 65, had notified me a few weeks earlier, that he was in the late stages of heart failure, brought on by a life of obesity. All I could think was how odd it was to
(aka: Costus speciosus) Hellenia speciosa ‘Wizard of Oz’ is an amazingly winter hardy form of the typically warm tropical, southeast Asian native crepe ginger. This gem is a 2013 Ozzie Johnson collection from near Yan Ming, Vietnam at 3,900′ elevation. Emerging in mid-June (NC), the thick, fleshy green stalks, quickly rise to 6′ tall. The
I first met Juniperus chinensis ‘Aurea’ at the JC Raulston Arboretum in 2018, grown from cuttings taken at Richmond, Virginia’s Maymont Garden. We struggled to find a cultivar name, toying first with naming it Juniperus ‘Maymont Gold’. It wasn’t until horticultural cultivar historian, Larry Hatch, of Cultivar.org, told us that this is the true Juniperus
I remember first seeing on-line images of Agave bracteosa ‘Monaco Princess’ over two decades ago, and it was lust at first sight. Tracking down my new found target of desire proved much more difficult than I could have ever imagined. After some deep on-line dives, I was able to determine that the plant was discovered
Lusting after the Princess of Monaco 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
