Getting ready to open in late January at JLBG is the very rare, silver-foliaged form of the Southeast US native toadshade, Trillium underwoodii. This species is known for its highly mottled foliage, but if you look long enough, you’ll eventually find one of these odd silver-foliage variants within each species. Trillium underwoodii ‘Black Silver’ is […]
Black Silver Toadshade Read More »
After a couple of warm days, the lenten roses (Helleborus x hybridus) have begun to pop. Here are a couple of our seedling selections in the garden today. Over the last decade, we have made these selections from our Winter Delights strain, looking for great colors, more outfacing flowers, and of course, good flower form.
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
In 2004, plantsman Hans Hansen sent us an amazing variegated sport that he’d created for us to trial, of our native Yucca x recurvifolia. Without getting into the details, that sport, Yucca x recurvifolia ‘Mellow Yellow’ will finally be released in January 2024…twenty years after if first went on trial. We could not be more
I grew my first cycad over 55 years ago, and the excitement of these prehistoric, dinosaur-food plants still hasn’t worn off. Although I’ve long since given up on those that need to go indoors in winter, the number we’ve found to be winter hardy here at JLBG keeps expanding. Once we exhausted the available species,
Cher says we’re never too old for Sex? Read More »
We’re preparing for the release of a new cast of characters for 2024, through our current funding arm, Plant Delights Nursery. One of the “cast” that we’ve been trialing for six years is a new cast iron plant hybrid from Japan, Aspidistra ‘Hanado Raku’ PPAF. This is one of those plants that elicits all kind
A New Cast of Characters Read More »
Looking lovely in the garden during the Christmas holiday season is a plant that hails from around the world, most notably Iran, and into the surrounding Caucuses. Despite this disparate climatic origin, Danae racemosa has thrived in much of the country as a pass-along plant for over a century. Danae is one of many plants,
A Laurel and Hardy Garden Addition Read More »
The thuds on the roof of our nursery office isn’t the hooves of eight reindeer, but instead is that of the roof height citrus trees planted nearby, dropping their newly ripened fruit. Here are two Citrus ‘Ichang Lemon’ fruit that dropped into my pocket on a recent garden walk. Well aided by gravity, these dense,
At the lowest levels of the horticultural world are those plants that naturally carpet the forest floor. One of our favorites belongs to the genus Aspidistra, commonly known as cast iron plants. During the spring and summer, they are barely noticed in the garden, but as everything else around them goes dormant in fall, their
