1 Oct
It’s been a long while since I’ve picked out a few of my favorite plants to focus on, and the list of candidates is getting rather long. So, it’s high time to pick out three that happen to look particularly good right now, starting with… Continue reading
1 Dec
It’s been a while since I’ve trotted out some neat plants, and probably about as long since I’ve written about some interesting edibles. So, in this installment of Three Neat Plants, I present to you a trio of intriguing vegetables. Continue reading
16 Jan
Finding plants with interesting foliage is always a treat, but if they’re discouragingly expensive or too fussy to grow successfully, the thrill can go off pretty quickly. So these days, I turn first to seed catalogs to see what I can grow for myself before I start hunting through online nursery listings or visiting local garden centers. Here are a few of my favorite foliage finds that are easy to start from seed and easy to grow in the garden, too.
30 Sep
Sometimes it takes a new pair of eyes (or nearly 200 new pairs of eyes) to make you appreciate a plant that you walk past every day with hardly a second glance. Of all the bright flowers and in-your-face foliage plants I have here, one of the stars of this past weekend’s garden tour was a rather subtle, plain green annual with the common name of widow’s tears.
1 Aug
The list of neat plants I want to tell you about keeps getting longer, so it’s about time to have a crack at checking off a few of them. First up, a must-have shrub for those who swoon over scented plants: Abelia mosanensis, known variously as hardy abelia, fragrant abelia, and bridal veil.
13 Feb
Herbs were the first group of plants that grabbed my attention as a youngster, and they quickly became a passion in my later teens, when I started gardening obsessively. Eventually I moved on to ornamental perennials, but lately, I’m finding myself drawn to herbs again, and I’m excited about planning an herb-themed planting for a new space I have to fill. In the process of sorting through plants that I already have here to see what might be suitable, I found a number of neat plants are both ornamental and – at least tangentially – herbal.
12 Jan
I’ve long been a sucker for plants with showy foliage, often falling for their pretty leaves without careful consideration of their sometimes less-than-attractive habits. I don’t much mind plants that produce lots of seedlings; if they’re truly gorgeous, having to snip off the spent flowers or weed out excess offspring seems a fair trade.
Plants that sneak around by creeping roots or stems are another matter. They look all cute and innocent for the first year or two; then suddenly, they’re popping up everywhere and generally making a nuisance of themselves. If I suspect or know for sure that a plant is likely to be a creeper, I’ve learned to trial it in a pot first.
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