It’s far more common for new perennials to be discovered than new trees…it’s a size thing. Botanists were excited in 1960, when Chinese professor H.T. Chang published a new small tree that he thought to be a witch hazel, named Hamamelis subaequalis. The original Jiangsu Province collection actually dated to 1935, but it took 25
A New Ironwood earns its mettle Read More »
Flowering this week is the amazing Southeast native subshrub, Clinopodium georgianum. The leaves have a wonderful fragrance of strong peppermint, and the flower show isn’t bad either. This is Zac/Jeremy’s collection from Henry County, Alabama. A carpenter bee working nearby stopped in for a floral snack.
This is one of the rare summers we actually got flowers on Amaryllis belladonna in the gardens at JLBG. The only problem is that they aren’t really Amaryllis belladonna. This poor South African native has suffered a series of nomenclatural mix ups over the last 250 years, that sadly continues today. First was the battle
The Case of The Beautiful Imposter Read More »
One of the fabulous ferns in our garden during the summer months is the sun-tolerant Dennstaedtia hirsuta ‘Sohuksan’. This fabulous specimen came to the US from a 1985 collection from Sohuksan Island, South Korea, where it was discovered by a team of intrepid plant explorers that included horticultural legends as Barry Yinger, the late Ted
Celebrating Ferners Read More »
The late plantsman Alan Galloway was a prolific plant collector in Southeastern Asia, and one of the plants that has surprised us with its winter hardiness is the giant evergreen Solomon’s Seal, Disporopsis longifolia. In the wild, Alan and I encountered this throughout Thailand and Vietnam, but our tallest clone is one which Alan collected
Alan’s Laosy Giant Read More »
One of our treasured finds from a recent botanizing trip in East Texas with plantsmen Adam Black and Wade Roitsch (Yucca Do), was a gold-foliaged Vaccinium arboreum (farkleberry). The parent plant was 30-40′ tall, but there were plenty of root suckers from a recent road grading. This could turn out to be a wonderfully exciting
One of the gems from our 2012 botanizing trip to the Balkans, was a growable selection of Paris quadrifolia. For those who haven’t mastered Latin, quadrifolia means 4-leaves. All cultivated forms of this widespread European trillium relative had failed to thrive in our hot humid summers. Our collection from the Croatian town of Rude (I’m
Flowering today at JLBG is Crinum ‘Walter Flory’…not only a superb crinum, but one named after one of NC’s pre-eminent botanists. Dr. Walter Flory (1907-1998) was a botany professor at Wake Forest University. Dr. Flory received his PhD in 1931 from the University of Virginia for his work with both edible asparagus and phlox. From
Who is Walter Flory? Read More »
Just flowering at JLBG is our largest clone of the hardy aroid, Dracunculus vulgaris, that we named ‘Supersize’. This one produced a massive 30″ inflorescence. A typical length is 15-20″. We’d be curious is anyone has grown one any larger. As you can imagine, it was quite a feast for the pollinating flies.
Supersize & Vulgar Read More »
Just snapped this photo of the amazing Amsonia ‘Storm Cloud’ in the garden. This was a 2011 discovery in Central Alabama on a botanizing trip with Hans Hansen.
