We’ve recently wrapped up our Winter Open Nursery and Garden and would love thank everyone who took time out of their busy lives to attend. Despite the snow just a couple of days before we opened, we were blessed with absolutely beautiful winter weather and plenty of sun. Visitors who attended were able to see
The Plants of the JLBG Winter Open Nursery and Garden Read More »
Looking wonderful in the garden in mid-February is Aspidistra retusa ‘Nanjing Green’. This little-known cast iron plant species was shared with us in 2000, by the late plantsman, Greg Speichert. The specific epithet “retusa” is a Latin word meaning blunt (adj.), and not blunt (noun), despite it also being pretty smoking hot. We like the
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The cast iron plant, Aspidistra elatior ‘Morning Frost’ is looking particularly dapper in the winter garden. We think the variegated cultivars of cast iron plants provide a lovely touch of brightness in the winter woodland. Typically, cast iron plant foliage lasts for 2-3 years, and by year three, it begins to look ragged. Every spring,
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
Cast-ing a Wider Net Read More »
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
Casting Around in Bogner’s Shadow Read More »
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
A New Cast of Characters Read More »
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
A Cast of Hundreds Read More »
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
