Hardy plants for hardy souls
Native plants, those that are naturally occurring in your garden's locale, are adapted to your climate. They won't leaf out while there's still a chance they'll be harmed by cold weather, and they drop their leaves when it's clear wintery cold is returning. Alien plants came from Somewhere Else--whether by your hand or uninvited--and don't [...]
There comes a time in every gardener's life when she realizes that a plant she has admired is not all it seems to be. Whatever the initial attraction, another side of the plant is discovered, and the gardener decides the relationship must end. I met Rosa multiflora through his fragrance. At this time of the [...]
A while back I wrote an essay for Horticulture detailing my attempt to figure out the difference between ladybells and creeping bellflower, and I wrote up a blog post with additional information. Anne Larson, the Des Moines Gardening Examiner, has tracked down more information about these two plants, including how to determine if you really [...]
If you know invasive plants could you reply to this comment? A reader has commented on an older post about an invasive plant she can't identify. I don't recognize it from her description, but maybe you do.
Carol's done it. Mary Ann, the Idaho Gardener's done it. So has Mr. McGregor's Daughter and Cindy from My Corner of Katy and M Sinclair Stevens from Zanthan Gardens. They've all used a reciprocating saw to prune woody plants. Not only have they pruned with a recip saw, they raved about how easy it made [...]
I call creeping bellflower (Campanula rapunculoides) the evil twin because it looks just like ladybells, (Adenophora confusa), only it is aggressively spreading and ineradicable, and ladybells is well-behaved. So they say. I outline my futile attempts to figure out the actual differences between these two plants in an essay on the last page of the [...]
Isn't this a stunning specimen of Polygonum cuspidatum? The generous rainfall we've had this season has brought it into top form. Too bad it's on America's Most Wanted list. Yes, this is Japanese knotweed, aka Japanese bamboo, Mexican bamboo, fleeceflower, and Fallopia japonica. (I've been told that it's also known as privy weed, but I [...]
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