Category: Interesting Plants

Blue orchids?

I was at a big box home improvement store yesterday, and after doing my legitimate business I felt myself drawn to the garden center.  I smirked at the “drought tolerant cactus gardens” that had died from lack of water and the ever-popular GMO “cactus strawflower” (GMO = glue modified organism as illustrated in my January 13, 2010 post).  Then I spotted my prey du jour: a blue orchid!

A disclaimer on the tag warns that new blooms will be white:

Oh, and the source of the magic?  Check out the needle track and its gooey exudate:

Just say no to dye!

New and/or interesting plants/stuff

Worst post title, ever. Sorry. 

Attended the bazillionth annual OFA "The Association For Horticulture Professionals" Short Course in Columbus, Ohio last week. It’s a huge 1500-booth trade show with educational session featuring 150+ speakers. Of which I was one.  The focus used to be strictly floriculture, but has expanded to include some woodies plus lots of garden center items and marketing options. This a "wholesale" show – attendees are mostly growers who purchase propagative materials to grow on and sell to consumers.  It’s always interesting to see what’s out there…here’s a few things that caught my attention:

Sedum ‘Maestro’ from Proven Winners. They’re expanding their perennial offerings a bit, and this looks yummy.  Dark foliage and very intriguing bud/flower color combo:


Every company has loads of petunia and calibrachoa in every shade imaginable. Some new introductions are notable for their subtle, almost vintage shades.  All of these would be fun for combination planters:

‘Glow Mocca’ from the Dutch firm Florensis, now a partner with Ball Horticulture. Closest thing to a black and white petunia (or any flower, for that matter) I’ve seen.  So new it’s not in a catalog. This little photo doesn’t do them justice.



‘Suncatcher Vintage Rose’ from Ball FloraPlant.  I’m not a pink petunia person (certainly wouldn’t admit to it, anyway) but the soft rose shades and neat, small flowers were lovely.


Weird lighting in their booth makes this Ball introduction ‘Pink Suncatcher’ much more yellow than it really is – more of a straw yellow with pinkish margins.

Enough with the subtle:

This new Ecke/Dummen poinsettia didn’t catch my eyes as much as claw them out.  ‘Luv U Pink’ is indeed screaming pink, which sounds gross but actually looked pretty cool with some of lime green decor around it (kind of preppy). The distinctive small overlapping bracts are because it’s not a straight-up poinsettia, rather a hybrid with some other Euphorbia species (secret recipe!).



This fluffy ornamental kale ‘Glamour Red’ is from American Takii – an AAS award winner, grown from seed. You  just want to grab it and floof the foliage with both hands. Or maybe that was just me.  Proof that kale can be both glamorous AND delicious…



More floofiness: Dianthus ‘Green Ball.’  From Ball, of course.  An apetalous mutant for every garden!

In the "stuff" department, saw the usual assortment of greenhouse equipment, garden center supplies, etc. with one notable exception: the infiltrations of Fairies. Fairy Garden decor was everywhere.  I must have missed this memo:



Hardscaping including pavers and fences; patio furniture, trellises, etc. At least you don’t need a truckload of gravel and an entire weekend to lay a fairy patio.



Fairy plants. Especially selected for…teensyness? There really was no rhyme or reason. Just a different (and named) fairy on each tag (collect ’em all!).  My Little Pony meets Horticulture.

Here’s a completed fairy garden. That’s a container of Fairy Dust on the table. I think it’s the same as stripper glitter, just in a much smaller jar.  Missing from this tableaux? Two tiny martini glasses.

Hope you enjoyed your brief whirl through the tradeshow!

One of my favorite wildflowers

I’m on annual leave this week, enjoying a family reunion in Sun River, Oregon. I’ve been coming here off and on for decades, and one of the first things I do is hunt down my favorite eastern Oregon plant. Forests in this part of Oregon are dominated by Ponderosa and other pine species, and beneath these trees you might find tall brown flower spikes which many people assume are dead. Actually, they are alive and kicking and fascinating. Meet Pterospora andromedea, otherwise known as pinedrops.

If you look at the flowers closely, their shape might remind you of some other flowers – perhaps blueberries or salal or andromeda. They’re all members of the Ericaceae, and pinedrops are the only member of the Pterospera.

What’s fascinating about this plant is that it spends most of its life underground as a parasite, siphoning food from mycorrhizal fungi (which are connected to nearby roots of pines and other photosynthetic plants). In the summer, it sends up huge reddish-brown flower spikes, with sticky, bell-shaped flowers.

Pinedrops are threatened or endangered in some midwestern and eastern states, and should never be dug from the wild.  It doesn’t transplant well, anyway, so take pictures instead – they’ll last longer!

Worth seeking out – Silphium perfoliatum

A couple of years ago (have we been blogging for that long?!) I wrote a bit on defining our terms – beyond simply native, non-native, invasive.  One of my points was that natives can be overly-vigorous, but some people take exception with the term "invasive" when used with native plants.   I chose "passive-aggressive" as a way to describe certain mild-mannered natives that end up reseeding rampantly. 

One example: Silphium perfoliatum – Cup Plant.


Climbing right out of the garden and onto our deck.

The genus Silphium is comprised of fifteen (+) (at the moment) species, often grouped under the common name "Rosinweed."  I’d not paid much attention to the genus until a trip to a bit of tall grass prairie in 2004 got me hooked on these towering lovelies.  I’ve grown S. terebinthaceum, S. trifoliatum,  and S. laciniatum.  All seem much better behaved than S. perfoliatum; but not as fun.  The coarse, square stems; perfoliate water-holding leaves, and overall grand scale makes  cup plant perfect for back of the border or scattered throughout a meadow planting.

Silphium perfoliatum ranges up through eastern N. America from Louisiana  to  Quebec and west to Nebraska and Kansas.    Big, round buds give way to golden yellow flowers – yet another “yellow daisy thingy” or YDT  The YDT designation is a totally non-scientific teaching term for the yellow-flowered Asteraceae clan that grace the mid- and late-summer garden.


Honeybees and butterflies love the ring of oversize, nectar-filled disk florets and bees collect pollen from the stamen. The ray florets are fertile and a flower head can set copious amount of seed. Once ripe, the achene floats away on a breeze (if not scarfed up by a goldfinch)…to land and germinate in some part of your garden not intended for a 9’ tall yellow daisy thingy.  Hence the aggressive part.  Weed out the unwanted early on, when those first coarse leaves appear; wait too long and the tap root will make it tough to pull. I say this from recent experience (last night) when I upended myself trying to yank some unyielding Silphium from a clump of unsuspecting Echinacea. Ended up chopping the huge stems off at the base -possibly to be used as firewood.

MossTiles – a really bad idea

A few months ago a colleague alerted me to MossTiles, which can be attached to walls to create interior vertical gardens. They look really cool, and I assumed they consisted of some tough little moss species rooted in a mesh-enclosed planting mix. But the more I read about them, the more confused I became. They don’t need light – or fertilizer – or water (though misting them occasionally is recommended). More investigation was in order.

It turns out that these aren’t made from moss at all, but lichens – specifically reindeer moss (Cladonia rangiferina). This slow-growing lichen is harvested in Scandinavia, "stabilized" in a salt solution, glued onto tiles with a resin, then dyed one of twelve different colors.

Come on. This isn’t a plant anymore. It might as well be made out of plastic. All the misting does is keeping them from drying out and crumbling to pieces.

Even worse, reindeer moss is a major food source for caribou and other large ruminants. It’s so slow growing that it’s a threatened (and protected) species in some parts of the world. Do we really need to have preserved plants hanging on our walls like some kind of botanical trophy?

If so, be sure you’ve got a fat wallet. Installation of MossTiles costs about $200 per tile.

Grow Something Rude and Smelly!

Tired of
Tradescantia? Sick of Stachys? Exhausted from Echinacea?
Stick THIS in your border!



Dracunculus vulgaris  at the Hahn Horticulture Garden, Virginia Tech. Hardy to USDA Zone 5b.

Closely related (as one might imagine) to
Amorphophallus. Lovely silver-splashed foliage, velvety crimson spathe, and big honkin’ spadix in early summer.


Easy to grow; part shade and good drainage seem to work well. After a few years, you’ll have several offsets to share with your dearest friends/worst enemies.

At the peak of bloom, the fragrance is reminiscent of lily or tuberose (if they were arranged on a patty of rotting hamburger).



Garden Interns Brittaney and Anna think it’s JUST FABULOUS!

Available from that purveyor of all plants phallic, 
 Plant Delights.
(They have lots of other stuff, too.)

Groundcovers for gaps

I promised on last week’s post that I’d mention some other low-input methods of keeping weeds out of the gaps between paving stones.  Here are a few photos of my own yard, where we’ve been installing flagstone pathways and terraces.  (Money-saving hint: check out craigslist and/or freecycle for free pavers and other types of stone.  We got all of ours free – just had to pick them up.)

We bought flats of groundcovers, such as woolly thyme, Irish moss, and blue star creeper.  In sunny areas, these plants thrive and spread quickly. But in shadier, moister areas they haven’t done so well.  Instead, we’ve allowed nature to fill the gaps for us.  Naturally occurring mosses, ferns, and other small plants keep out annoying weeds yet are small and attractive in their own right.

You can jumpstart the process by making a moss “milkshake” to spread between pavers.  There are recipes on the web, so I won’t bother repeating them here.  I prefer to let nature take its course (or maybe I’m just lazy).

A great way to plant perennials “en masse”

North Creek Nurseries in Landenberg, PA is a marvelous, native-centric (but not exclusively native) nursery.  North Creek is a wholesale propagator (sells liners
to other nurseries for finishing).  But if you can meet the $300 minimum, they’d probably be happy to fill your order.  They have, among the usual liner sizes, a very neat product – "Landscape Plugs." I’ve been wanting to try them for a while – our work with the backhoe this past summer cleared some nice large swathes of the cursed autumn olive, and made room for perennials.  I selected a number of locally-native species from North Creek’s extensive listings, with the plan to scatter them along the creek sides and sunny spots of our 4-acre field/meadow/thingy.

Primarily marketed for restoration and conservation projects, these"landscape plugs" are simply huge liners – great for anyone who wants a large number of a certain species without paying an arm and a leg.  Each 5" deep tray holds 32 plugs.  North Creek carries a wide array of Eastern N. American natives perennials, grasses, and ferns – mostly straight species with a few named cultivars.  I ordered eight different species for a total of 256 plants (and 256 holes to dig). The species I picked out ran from $1.08 to $1.40 per plug. They arrived within a few days via UPS, packed two trays per box, and all were intact and in good shape.  All were well-rooted, having been "stuck" the previous season and then overwintered/vernalized. I expect most will bloom this year. Will report back!

North Creek Nurseries landscape plug of Solidago shortii ‘Solar Cascade.’ Nice roots, no?

The new American chestnut tree: resistant survivor or Frankentree?

Recently ScienceDaily.com posted an article about American chestnut trees due to be planted in New York City. Researchers hope that these trees will be resistant to chestnut blight, an introduced fungal disease that pretty much wiped out mature specimens over the last 100 years.

When I lived in Buffalo, I was a member of the American Chestnut Foundation and every spring I helped with efforts to replant chestnuts in the hopes that resistant individuals might be found.  The problem is that the disease doesn’t kill young trees: it can take many years to find out whether a particular tree is resistant or not.


Chestnut suckers from live roots of blight-killed tree. I saw these a lot in western NY forests in the 1990’s.

Part of the earlier research efforts involved crossing resistant European chestnut with American chestnut in hopes of creating resistant hybrids.  The downside, of course, is that such offspring would not be “pure” American chestnuts.  More importantly to many people, these hybrids might not produce the same quality of nuts.

The research mentioned in the Science Daily article involves creating transgenic plants: a wheat gene resistant to the fungus was inserted into the chestnut genome with the hopes that the resulting trees would be immune to blight.  These trees are genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.

It’s worth noting that it’s this kind of work that has been branded as “Frankentree” research, which incites a lot of fear and hysteria.  It’s what caused ecoterrorists to mistakenly firebomb the UW Center for Urban Horticulture in 2001 when I was faculty there.  It’s what causes people to freak out about eating GMO foods.

So my question for you – does the fact that transgenic chestnut trees will be “on the loose” fill you with fear?  Or does it make you hopeful that we’ve possibly found a way to overcome an introduced disease?  (As I just noticed in reading this over before posting that I used some form of the word “hope” in nearly every paragraph.  I guess it shows where I stand.)

Quiz answer – difference between spores and pollen

You got it!  Horsetails don’t produce pollen, and those airborne particles are spores.  Primitive plants such as mosses, ferns, and horsetails don’t have the same reproductive structures as flowering plants and conifers. Instead of producing seeds, they form tiny, windborne spores that can be mistaken for pollen.

(To its credit, the Seattle Times corrected this error the next day.)