What do all these plants have in common?[1]
Agastache x ‘Blue Fortune’ – Anise Hyssop
Category: Plants
photos of plants
Buying Boxed Perennials
The calendar says it’s spring, and who is a gardener to disagree? Walk down the aisle of any Lowe’s, Home Depot, or Walmart, and you’ll find a colorful display of boxed bare root perennials, ready to pop into your warm spring soil. Cannas, lilies, bleeding heart, and clematis. Peonies, six dormant plants. Gladiolus and hostas. Caladium, phlox, and kniphofia. The photos on the packaging are so enticing to our flower-starved souls (especially after experiencing our recent “bomb cyclone,” a blizzard of apocalyptic proportions, which dumped 4-foot drifts in our yard)!
Plants Have Noses!
While plants don’t have lungs, they do need to exchange gases with the atmosphere in order to live, just as we do. To accomplish this, they have various sorts of openings.
Spring’s Dandy Lions
In spite of this week’s blizzard, spring is almost here, and soon we’ll be seeing bright yellow flowers filling the lawn or growing in a crack in the sidewalk. Dandelions—you either love them or you hate them, but it’s hard to ignore them.
Starting Seeds: Containers
I first posted this about ten years ago. Since my husband had unexpected bypass surgery today, I don’t have the time (or the concentration!) to write a new post. I hope you find this flashback to be a helpful reminder as we start our seeds for the upcoming growing season.
Raise your hand if you remember starting seeds in elementary school. Perhaps they sprouted in the cells of a cardboard egg carton. Sound familiar? Now, did your seedlings grow and thrive? Hmm, thought so. Granted, you probably forgot to water them, or you dropped the whole shebang on the way home from school. But it wasn’t all your fault. Egg cartons make awful seed starting containers.
What should you use to start those little seedlings? There are a number of excellent choices. Suitable containers share several attributes.
Meet the Apiaceae
What do carrots, cilantro, celery, and poison hemlock have in common? Think like a botanist. How do the leaves look? What shape is the root? What about the flowers? Yes, they’re all members of the Apiaceae (aka Umbelliferae) family of plants. So are caraway, anise, parsley, parsnips, and a whole host of other familiar species.
Members of this family are relatively easy to distinguish. The most obvious feature is in the way their flowers are arranged—like an umbrella, with a stalk and a cluster of flowers on stems all springing from a central point.
Turquoise Sunflowers, Fuchsia Daffodils?
Why do we always seem to gravitate toward things that are rare? Precious stones, one-of-a-kind art objects, limited edition car models—we always seem to want most what’s hardest to find.
Gardeners aren’t exempt. We’re continually on the lookout for unique cultivars, with odd shapes or unusual colors. While lots of flowers are yellow, peonies usually come in shades of white, pink, and red. Yet, I have a good friend who paid a lot of money to get a yellow peony. Why? She thought it was “interesting.”
Amaranthaceae
Celosia (above) & Gomphrena
Love-lies-bleeding
Family Amaranthaceae has a lot of members—over 2,000 species. You will likely recognize many of them. Some are ornamental—think of the garden annuals Gomphrena, Ptilotus, and Love-lies-bleeding (Amaranthus caudatus). The Celosias are also amaranths—you might know some of them as the old-fashioned flower Cock’s Comb.
Gorgeous Ginger
I love Asian cooking, or at least the American version of it. (I didn’t recognize anything on the buffet at the hotel in Bangkok!). Anything with plenty of onions, garlic, and ginger makes my mouth water. I’ve grown onions and garlic before, when I had more room for such things. But living in the cold part of Zone 5, any ginger I planted would have to be in a pot so I could bring it in for the winter. And at the rate I use ginger, it just didn’t seem to be worth the trouble.
Common Mullein
After the storm earlier this week, snow blankets the fields, hiding most signs that anything ever grew there. But interspersed with the even white blanket and occasional dried grass leaves are spikes, sticking up like posts in the empty landscape. We’re finally noticing the dead and dried flower/seed stalks of Common Mullein (Verbascum thapsus).
Mountain Plover 