We’ve got a thing for botanical oddities….plants that only a mother could love, and the spikemosses certainly fit that bill. We currently grow 19 different winter hardy species, which include 10 North American native species, and 9 from other lands. Current taxonomic trends are splitting the spikemosses into an array of different genera, making it
Wright’s Spikemoss Read More »
We’ve grown a number of seedlings of the former Schefflera delavayi, now Heptaplureum delavayi, but none have the character of the deeply-lobed clone I first saw several years ago at Dan Hinkley’s Windcliff Garden. Dan christened his plant, Heptaplureum ‘Windcliff Lace’, and we were fortunate to acquire a rooted cutting, a couple of years ago.
Below is a current photo of our oldest plant of Sabal ‘Blackburniana’, planted in 2008. This plant is one of several elusive mysteries in the hardy palm world. Some references say it’s the same as Sabal palmetto, but our plants look nothing like that species, and our plant is dramatically more winter hardy than Sabal
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Putting on an elegant show in the fall woodland garden is the hardy gesneriad, Briggsia mihieri. Some taxonomists have recently moved it to a sister genus, Glabrella mihieri, but we’ll let the dust settle before making the change. Native to only three Chinese provinces, Guangxi, Guizhou and Sichuan, it’s a high elevation plant, occurring between
One of the most colorful plants of the fall garden is Clerodendrum speciosissimum ‘Arkansas Hardy’. This Indonesian native is rightly listed as only hardy to Zone 9 by most sources. Years ago, however, Arkansas customer, David Cockrell, told us about a form that was winter hardy there, which he later shared. His clone, shown below
Looking great during the fall harvest moon season is its namesake hardy begonia. Unlike all of the West Coast hybrids we’ve tried, Begonia ‘Harvest Moon’ is another gem from Georgia plantsman, Ozzie Johnson, that handles both our brutal summer heat and our cold winters. We can never have too many woodland perennials that flower in
One of the truly great WHATZAT plants of the fall garden, that results in more questions than anything else is the weeping fall shrub mint, Rostrinucula dependens. Little known outside its native haunts in Shaanxi, China and south to Yunnan, this deciduous shrub to 4′ tall is adorned with flaking brown bark and acts as
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One century plant that had long frustrated us was the exquisite Agave parryi ssp. truncata. This southern form of the species is hugely popular in California and Arizona, where temperatures are milder, but it never would overwinter for us here in Zone 7b/8a. In 2010 we planted a form from Mountain States Nursery in Arizona,
A Truncated Search Read More »
Flowering for the last several week is the South American (Argentina, Uruguay) iris family member, Cypella (Phallocallis) herbertii. The narrow foliage is almost invisible, so this gem can be tucked into any sunny spot for a splash of summer color. We have grown this for over three decades, and it never fails to perform. Hardiness
Our patch of the Chinese, Thelypteris bombadilii is looking quite fabulous, as we wrap up summer at JLBG. We offered this amazing, deciduous groundcover fern in 2021, only three years after the species was published, and as occasionally happens, sales were miserable, despite the purported green mulch movement. Consequently, most of our left over stock
