Have you met Anna yet? This charmer is a member of the Gesneriad clan, first cousin to the better known African violets, sinningias, and gloxinias. Anna ophiorrhizoides has only been with us for a year and a half, but we’re certainly hoping to make this a long term relationship. Before she moved to North America,
An introduction to Anna Read More »
Pyrrosia polydactyla ‘Middle Finger’ is an excellent clone of the Taiwanese native five-fingered tongue fern with an exceptionally long middle pinnae. Quite a few nurseries, especially in the Pacific Northwest, offer this as another clumping, but uniquely different species, Pyrrosia hastata. In the garden, it’s quite at home in dry shade, especially happy growing on
Middle Finger Fern Read More »
Looking lovely in the mid-January winter garden is the fern, Neolepisorus fortunei ‘Green Ribbons’. This fascinating evergreen fern looks nothing like what most gardeners are familiar with, when they think ferns. Neolepisorus is one of several genera of ferns, known as ribbon ferns. These ferns grow epiphytically (on trees) and lithophytically (on rocks), mostly in
Decorate the Woodland with Green Ribbons Read More »
I was lucky enough to catch the winter fruit show on our clump of Iris foetidissima last weekend. This little-known, evergreen, woodland iris from southern Europe, suffers because of its specific epithet “foetidissima”, which means stinking. That’s probably a bit much coming from someone with hundreds of amorphophallus clones. The name reportedly was given because
For baseball fans, you know the Say Hey Kid as the great Willy Mays, but in horticutlure, we have a Say Hey Kid also, Arisaema sahyadricum (say-hey-dricum). This little grown, Jack-in-the-Pulpit hails from India, where it was just discovered in 1993. Compared to most jacks that flower in the spring, this is a summer flowering
It only took us five attempts to figure out how to successfully grow the North American native, Stanleya pinnata. For those who haven’t met Stanleya pinnata, it’s a native woody perennial from the Westernmost States (North Dakota west to Southern California), so it really doesn’t find the rainy southeastern US to its liking. After several
It was great during our recent winter open house to see so many folks noticing the aucubas in the garden. Of course, they are hard to miss with our collection of over 140 different taxa. There are few evergreen plants better for year-round interest in dry shade than aucuba. Here is one of the most
Aucuba…the overlooked winter shrub Read More »
Here are a couple of images this week from the garden of our older clumps of Cyclamen hederifolium. For garden areas that are dark and dry, where nothing else grows, cyclamen are your best bet. Of the plants below, one is at the base of a cryptomeria and the other at the base of a
Cyclamen and Cyclawomen Read More »
Throughout the years, we’ve grown literally thousands…perhaps 10s of thousands of seedlings of the Japanese sacred lily, Rohdea japonica. Each one varies slightly, but we only save those at the far end of the bell curve. Here are three of our seedlings which well represent that dramatic variation at each end of the spectrum…a wide
The Spectrum of Siblings Read More »
We love the evergreen ruscus in garden, but realize they are a plant that will never be found at most mainstream garden centers. A genus of only 6 currently recognized species, native from Europe into Eurasia, these horticultural oddities are so odd that they once qualified to have their own plant family, Ruscaceae. Now, with
