I am admittedly not a big fan of autumn. I don’t dislike the season itself and in fact, some of my favorite garden plants flower as the days grow shorter, temperatures drop and summer begins to lose its grip. My problem with autumn is that it precedes winter, and of winter, I am not a fan. In…
I’m sure that for each of us there are a host of characters who played important roles in our lives, especially when we were children. My cast of characters happens to be a rather long list and oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, almost all of them had something to do with shaping me as…
I sat down at the computer today prepared to blog about Hedychium, or ginger lily, but as I was scrolling through my photos this iris (cultivar ‘Total Recall’) caught my eye. It reminded me that I had just been in a garden earlier this week where the remontant (re-blooming) iris were in their full fall…
I must admit, autumn is not my favorite season. You see, I don’t really care for winter much, so for me autumn is just sort of the precursor to what can be several months of cold, damp, drizzly weather that sometimes seems as though it may never end. But even though autumn means that winter…
I have a lot of friends who are plant hybridizers–good hybridizers–and for the most part, I love their plants. But there is one group of plants where my preference runs toward the wild species–untouched, unmanipulated, unmarred beauty. Species lilies. These are lilies as they appear in the wild, untouched by human hand, and they are…
Being a Kansas boy by birth, one of my favorite of all wildflowers is the sunflower. “Wildflowers?”, you may be asking yourself. Sure enough. Across the hills and plains of Kansas, at about this time of year, the wild sunflowers (Helianthus annuus) begin flowering. If you know where to look, you can find entire fields…
Gladiolus are another of those plants that hold a nostalgic place in my heart. The next door neighbors used to grow rows and rows of them at the far end of the vegetable garden, carefully lifting and storing the corms each autumn and replanting them the following spring for tall spires of summer blooms to…
One of the groups of plants that I have always admired–even lusted after–but have never experimented with much is Kniphofia, the “red hot pokers”. Even as a child, I remember seeing those full color pictures in the Wayside Gardens catalog (and many others) and thinking that there just couldn’t be a much prettier or more…
Hello everyone! It has been almost a month since I posted last. A lot of great things have been going on and I have been in the process of moving my office to my home, which has taken a little longer than expected. I’ve had very limited and extremely slow internet access up until just…
Well, March has certainly come roaring in! For those of you who didn’t see it on the news (or experience it personally), parts of Tennessee received nearly a FOOT of snow last Saturday and Sunday. A FOOT!!! I know that to some of you that’s pretty average, but in the South, where people (cities) are…