Plant Profiles

Below are links to articles posted in Plant Profiles.

My 2021 Plant Wishlist

2021 is fast approaching, over the last, maybe year, maybe 18 months. I’ve developed a plan (a 30 year plan) to turn my property into botanical gardens. I am now thinking very long term with my plantings and I’ve been saving bookmarks of plants I want to get in the next year but I thought, […]

Weeping Blue Atlas Cedar, Cedrus atlantic ‘Glauca Pendula’

I’ve been pining after a weeping blue atlas cedar Cedrus atlantic ‘Glauca Pendula’ since I first saw it on Paul James’ Gardening by the Yard way back when. It is hard to put into words what I like about it, or all the cedrus. I remember it being one of Paul’s favorite trees so maybe […]

Great Flowering Groundcover: Homestead Purple Verbena canadensis

I have always liked flowering groundcovers, something about a carpet of blossoms just does it for me. Plus the more ground covers I have, the less mulch I have to buy. When I lived in Michigan my go to was creeping phlox, which I had planted all over my yard like in the below photo. […]

How to add more topsoil the natural way

The modern method of building is to wipe all the top soil away from a lot, build a house, and bring back 3 or 4 inches or soil or just sod and call it good. This, of course, is not good for gardening, and many people want to increase the depth of the top soil […]

Last Trip to the Tree Store

For Father’s Day I took the family to the tree store here, probably for the last time, since we’re moving next month. In Chattanooga, where we are moving, I’m sure there are nurseries with a large variety of stock, but I haven’t found them yet, and I didn’t want to risk moving there and not […]

Double Coneflowers

I find myself lately really enjoying double coneflowers (echinacea). Often in gardening we must make choices, do we want big, complex, showy blossoms, or do we want blossoms for a long period of time. Stella de Oro daylily blooms for a long time with relatively small plain yellow blooms, but there are other daylilies with […]

The World’s Largest Flowers

I had a chance to experience two of the worlds biggest flowers recently, only mere weeks apart. The first was the infamous corpse flower, amorphophallus titanum (which means giant misshapen phallus). There is a specimen at MSU near my house that was flowering for the first time in years, and I dragged my kids there […]

Red Hot Poker – Something not to grow, and bunnies.

When I first got into gardening I was attacted to large blooming perennials, and planted mostly those. I have come a long way since then, namely I appreciate things like edibles more, interesting foliage, and length of bloom time as much as bloom shape, size, or color. But sometimes that interest in large blooming perennials […]

Weeping Larch, Larix decidua ‘Pendula’, Like a big Bonsai

Somewhat as a followup to my previous post Niwaki: Bonsai in the Garden, about training unpotted garden trees in a bonsai fashion, today I bought a weeping larch. Long time readers of this blog will I know that for years and years I have wanted a Weeping Blue Atlas Cedar, Paul James had one on […]

Pinus Cortorta Taylor’s Sunburst Update

I first blogged about this tree last summer when I planted it, well after it’s spectacular Spring color had faded. So, it was definitely time to do an update, with the pretty colors, which have lasted, so far, around 8 weeks. The color is spectacular, just as I had hoped. This is basically a conifer […]

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