If you want to create a colorful, fire-like spark in your woodland garden, without endangering your neighbors, there are few plants better than our 2021 introduction, Lychnis senno ‘Once in a Vermillion’. This Chinese woodland native catchfly, has proven both durable and reliable, starting to flower for us in July, and continuing through September. Below
A Cool Forest Fire Read More »
Through the years, we made a couple of selections of the giant Chinese Solomon’s Seal, Polygonatum martinii, including the one below, Polygonatum ‘Bellissimo’. These amazing plants often top 6′ tall, so are truly giants in the woodland garden. We’ll start chopping on this soon, so we can one day have enough to share.
We love plants that look great in the woodland garden in the midst of our summer heat. Below is an image of Rohdea japonica ‘Tamagawa Ryu’, looking absolutely fabulous this week. For those who haven’t yet tried rohdeas yet, think evergreen hostas. Rohdeas are one of our specialty collections, and the JLBG collection includes roughly
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Looking great in the woodland garden now is the amazing Asian (China, Korea, Manchuria) native Solomon’s Seal, Disporum flavens. This species is probably the showiest of the genus, putting on a tremendous show in spring garden. While there are both running and clumping species in the genus, Disporum, this gem remains in a nice clump.
Is anyone other than us growing, the Japanese woodland perennial, Ainsliaea cordifolia? This odd member of the aster family has strikingly patterned foliage, but for us, has been painfully slow to grow. The plant below is all we have after 18 years of cultivation of a plant we purchased originally from Barry Yinger’s Asiatica Nursery.
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Looking lovely in the garden now is the woodland perennial, Actaea pachypoda, commonly known as doll’s eyes. Most of the commercial material available in the trade comes from much colder climates, and will not survive our summers. It has a huge native range from Canada south to Louisiana, so it’s surprising that introductions of heat
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One of the most interesting discoveries over the last few years, is the realization that our rohdeas are mating with other rohdea species in the garden. Below is our first documented hybrid between the commonly grown Rohdea japonica and the little-known Taiwan native, Rohdea chinensis var. watanabei. We use the name Rohdea x japensis for
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
Starting off the new year is our flowering clump of the Taiwanese endemic wild ginger, Asarum hypogynum. The huge, glossy, evergreen patterned foliage is enough reason to grow this gem, but through most of the winter, the incredible floral display silently sits virtually unnoticed by most human visitors. JLBG currently houses one of the largest
Coming in second place to the Helleborus niger we posted earlier is Helleborus x ballardiae ‘Mahogany Snow’. This is a cross of the Christmas rose, Helleborus niger and Helleborus lividus. The flowers emerge white, then age to a lovely salmon pink. We find this hellebore hybrid much easier to grow than either parent.
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