Drinks anyone?
Couldn’t resist this photo of a couple of carpenter bees looking for a drink after a hard day of work, and happened on this enticing stray pitcher full of water. Oh, if they only knew…
Georgia Savory
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.
Aster ‘Hillandschmidt’
Symphyotrichum pilosum Here is a future introduction for Plant Delights, a 2018 Wilkes County, Georgia collection of a dwarf, compact form of our native frost aster, Aster pilosus (Symphyotrichum pilosum), collected by our research staff, Zac Hill and Jeremy Schmidt. It’s looking rather impressive in the trial garden this week, 30″ tall x 5′ wide.
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Rigid Rods
We’ve really enjoyed the show of the native rigid golden rod this fall, aka: Solidago virgata ‘Golden Voice’. Our plant is growing in our pitcher plant bog.
Freckled Beauty
There are several freckled/variegated selections of beauty berry (callicarpa) on the market, but virtually all are variegated forms of Asian species. We were excited to learn that plantsman Ted Stephens of Nurseries Caroliniana had found a speckled form of the native Callicarpa americana on his property in South Carolina. Our garden plant of his C.
Dalea…not Dahlia
Our favorite fall-flowering legume is looking fabulous now. While most daleas (baptisia cousins) flower in spring and summer, only one that we’ve grown waits until fall to produce its amazing floral show. Dalea bicolor var. argyraea is an easy-to-grow species, found in the dry alkaline sandy soils of Texas and New Mexico. Here at JLBG,
Bushy Muhly
I fell in love with the Arizona/Mexico native ornamental grass, Muhlenbergia dumosa when the the late JC Raulston first brought it back from Yucca Do Nursery in 1992. This odd member of the genus muhlenbergia resembles a clumping bamboo unlike other members of the genus. For those non-connoisseurs of Latin, dumosa means “bushy”. JC touted
Zig Zag Fern
One of our favorite of the US native (Central Texas) desert ferns is Pellaea ovata. Here is our clump in the crevice garden looking quite nice this week. This is scheduled to return to the Plant Delights catalog in January. Hardiness should be at least Zone 7b and south.
Holy Zauschneria, Batman!
Try as we might, we have been epic failures trying to grow the showy southwest native Zauschneria (now epilobium) in our garden, due to the combination of high humidity and torrential summer rainfalls. No matter where we tried them in the rock garden, they quickly expired. That was in the years BC…before crevice. Here is
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Blazing Stars
JLBG is full of blazing stars this fall…some seen when looking down in the garden and others looking up in the night sky. Here are couple of recent images, starting with a Texas collection of the widespread native Liatris aspera that’s looking great in the garden. Looking up in the early dawn hours is also