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Smart as a Blue Oak

Looking great well into December is the North American native, Salvia chamaedryoides, known as Blue Oak sage. This evergreen, dryland native hails form 7,000′ to 9,000′ elevation in the Chihuahuan Desert of northern Mexico. For us, it flowers heaviest in spring and fall, with dark, cobalt blue flowers. It’s one of the few silver leaf […]

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It’s time for snow….roses

It’s time for the start of Christmas rose/snow rose season to begin. We were delighted to find our clump of the Balkan native, Helleborus niger ‘Jesko’ in full flower. These are always exceptional honeybee favorites, as well as being great evergreen perennials for the winter season. We find that light shade to a couple of

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Check out our Tioga Party

On of our obsessive plant friends, Glen Melcher, of Tioga, Lousiaiana, sent us several seedlings a few years ago, from his cross of Hibiscus paramutabilis x mutabilis. We made our final selection this fall, which we’ve christened Hibiscus ‘Tioga Party’. This 12′ tall x 12′ wide beast puts on quite a show, starting several weeks

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A Cast of Hundreds

Flowering in early December, this is our first time to see blooms on a cast iron plant collected for us in 2018, by the late Alan Galloway in northern Vietnam. It didn’t take but a glance to realize that it represents another new, undescribed cast iron plant species. Our taxonomist, Zac Hill, has already been

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Let’s Twist Again, Like we did Last Summer

Our title is obviously borrowed from the 1961 Chubby Checker song, which few people reading this, probably remember. Abutilon ‘Twister’ is looking absolutely elegant now in the fall garden. This amazing flowering maple hybrid from the folks at California’s Monterrey Bay Nursery, has thrived here since 2005, enduring several single digit F. winters. For us,

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Turkish Treasure

The fall-flowering Cyclamen cilicium has put on a lovely floral display in the garden this year. The honey-scented flowers will be wrapping up their show before too long. This native of the Taurus mountains of southern Turkey, grows in sandy soils above limestone rocks. Our plants have thrived in a deciduous woodland with our amended

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Suckin’ Suzy

Looking lovely in the garden now is Cryptomeria japonica ‘Sekkan’. This amazing, full-size selection of Japanese cedar has long been a personal favorite. It has solid green foliage all year until cool nights arrive, at which time, the yellow tips brighten to create a truly amazing sight in the garden. Commercially, it is often sold

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Falling for Spikemoss

We were recently admiring the lovely russet fall coloration of a mat of Selaginella uncinata. This lovely woodland groundcover from Central China and south into Vietnam, has a lovely metallic blue hue during the growing season, but we also like this change to the semi-evergreen foliage in fall. This is such a great, well-behaved garden

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