Indoor Plant Care Tips Guide

and plants that haunt, and other flaunt their finery....and then there are those that just hang in there and delight year in year out. Such a one is this delightful shrublet. I realize that to the untrained eye, this spiny shrub from Morocco and Spain may just look like a Lobularia on steroids...and it is in fact a cousin to our fragrant annual alyssum. Like it's modest ground hugging cousin, the spiny alyssum of the high Atlas and Sierra Nevada comes in purply pink and white shades. In nature it's usually a less than stunning white, but occasionally there are populations where the pink predominates, and someone, some time took cuttings and rooted them of what goes by 'Purpureum' among other cultivar names. I might have suggested 'Arnold Schwarzenegger', in honor of is muscularity... no wonder my cultivar names are shot down at Plant Select meetings... Ptilotrichum spinosum 'Purpureum' is technically (and in every other way, I guess) a shrub, but sinc...

There is something funny about 'em all right! Especially a cluster of miniatures that are found here and there in the Intermountain region: above is classic Yucca harrimania e , from the Uncompaghre plateau of Colorado (in my old Eudora garden): it has a much narrower inflorescence than Yucca glauca on the eastern slope. It has whiter flowers produced several weeks earlier, and of course it tends to have leaves about half the size as glauca. It blooms reliably each year, and is tough as nails: I am amazed it's not more often grown. This much dwarfer and wider leaved variant grows in the Uinta Basin of Utah: I've seen it growing for miles along one road near Roosevelt: it was named Yucca sterilis by Stanley Welsh since he's not ever seen it with seed. I have a hunch Pronubia moths might be scarce in the Uinta Basin! Although I've never had seed at home come to think of it either (probably for the same reason!)... I find it amazing that a desert plant like this adapts...

I remember overhearing Bernice (Pete) Peterson admonish T. Paul Maslin (both my mentors, both long gone) at DBG's plant sale: "So you'll visit Lu Shan! You must bring back Sedum chanettii ". She explained that Praeger goes on about this sedum in his monograph (which I must read some day!). Paul returned to that not quite sacred Chinese mountain (it should have been #6) where he grew up and was enthralled by Nature. He found a sedum and brought it back the next Plant Sale (what transpired on Lu Shan over the man's lifetime would fill encyclopaedias): Sedum sarmentosum ...I still remember Pete's tremolo and profound disappointment ("Oh Paul, yes thank you....). Chanetii is to sarmentosa as Catherine Deneuve is to Paris Hilton, you see...All this transpired, by the way, almost 40 years ago. In the perfect afterlife, my mentors gardens would be closer to one another than they were on Earth: Pete lived in Littleton and Paul over 30 miles away in Boulder, an...

Let's not beat around the bush: that's larchleaf penstemon ( Penstemon laricifolius ) growing in a trough at Quince St. (where I live). I've had that blasted plant forever--in that trough and in other troughs where each year it produces some wan pink flowers and doesn't exactly ring anyone's bells....until that crazy spring three years ago--the spring of 2007. Tons of late snow and cool and then rain and then more coolness. Never have I seen bulbs bloom so prolifically. And for the first time the larchleaf penstemon bloomed as it does all over Wyoming--with that luminescent, almost nacreous pink that really can't be photographed. The plant may sneak over here and there into Montana (the white subspecies barely makes it into Colorado) but across Wyoming you can find it in a good year coloring the steppe with their lavender/rose/purple flowers in June. What fun to have had the bloody thing decide to bloom densely and darkly rather than the pallid flowers it gives ...

Wouldn't you know, right after I'd posted the picture below, I found a much better one above: I put them both in...paralax. Sure miss that plant! Continue below... I suppose there are plants that are monumental in size, like redwoods. I'm talking more about those plants that loom in one's life. This modest looking morsel in the picture is Daphne jasminea , a very local, and probably endangered daphne that comes from Mt. Parnassos in Greece and perhaps a few other spots introduced to cultivation by Brian Matthew (then of Kew) a few decades ago. At first it was viewed as very challenging to grow--in their monograph Matthew and Brickell suggest that alpine house culture is necessary--so when I first obtained a rooted cutting I suffered and anguished because our alpine house was no great shakes at Denver Botanic Gardens. We propagated that first plant and had enough to experiment with so I planted a tiny rooted piece at my new home on Eudora street. That plant proceeded t...

When people ask me "why a rock garden" I can think of no better answer than to say "it's the best way to grow trumpet gentians ( Gentiana acaulis )". There are a cluster of gentians that are found from the Pyrenees in the west to the Balkans in the east that resemble one another closely, and are often subsumed by the single epithet: these variations ( G. angustifolia, G. alpina, G. dinarica to name a few) do vary significantly in their geographical distribution, ecology and detailed morphology--but in bloom they are very similar to one another. I had large clumps of a half dozen subspecies growing in my Boulder Garden thirty years ago. I had these divided into hundreds of pieces and established in pots, and set most of these into the Rock Alpine Garden where almost all of them perished over the next two years (I planted them in too hungry and lean of soils: they like rich loam. A lesson I learned expensively.) There is a sort of intermediate beast that has been...

The thermometer is plunging again below zero F, so you can hardly blame me for delving once again in to my archives: I stumbled on this image as I was preparing a talk for tomorrow's Turf Conference...I suppose by the time spring arrives, I will be reminiscing about the quiet, simple elegance of winter's intaglio landscapes....not! This picture was taken in mid May: high point for rock gardens. It's mostly Helianthemum numullarium (lower right), bright pink Phlox in the center (creeping and clumping and lilac in the upper right) and the vibrant blue is Turkish veronica. A shrubby penstemon is dangling on the far left...dontcha just want to take a stroll up that gravel path? There are lots of goodies where it's headed, I assure you! I have to savor the images of spring this time of year because when spring does come I am so busy touring people, weeding, potting, giving talks, visiting other gardens, taking quick field trips to nature and just generally hyperventilating ...

Is there a person on the planet who couldn't guess where these pictures were taken? It's -11F outside right now, and the memories of April in the Netherlands are positively tropical by contrast. The irony, of course, is that tulips and most bulbs come from vicious steppe climates and only grow superbly in Holland by being cosseted and pampered. I wonder if it has ever been this cold in the Netherlands? The sun is nearly 2 hours up in the sky, and everything is that deathly still and quiet that it gets when it's beastly cold....brrrrrr.....time for me to load my stuff and be grateful that my car is in a garage!

I have only met one person who told me he didn't like Juno iris. I don't think he really knows Juno iris. Most people who've seen or grown a few are usually smitten with their grace and variable beauty. This giant section of the genus (over 50 species) grows from the Mediterranean in the far West all the way to Central Asia in the east, with the largest number concentrated between the Caucasus and Tien Shan mountains: friendly territory like Iran, Afghanistan and suchlike. There are a number of species that are very tiny high alpines, and a few giants of the steppe, but most come in that handy size between 6" and a foot. Unlike other irises, that often are fussy and need to be divided and sited perfectly, junos in Colorado grow almost anywhere provided they are not overwatered or too shady. They come in virtually all the colors that iris have perfected: especially blues and yellows, although some approach deep violet purple and there are lots of whites, near orange spe...

In the teens and near zero temperatures (Farenheit of course) predicted for the next few days. I have to admit, the dusting of powdery snow is gorgeous. But as I sift through my digital images preparing some talks for the coming weeks, I bask in the high summer glory of my Quince garden, and especially the wide swaths of perennials that thrive in the unwatered gardens. I treasure the woodlanders (that can be a challenge to grow well here), and dote on high alpine treasures in the rock garden, but the xeriscapes with their accommodating mats and mounds and stunning display rate higher and higher in my estimation. This distant cousin to the perennial border is really a novel form of garden art practically invented in the Denver area: the use of plants from steppe climates in naturalistic drifts has been imitated elsewhere ( the Gravel Garden , by Beth Chatto for instance): but in wet climates, trees and shrubs would invade eventually. The steppe climate is really meant for us. And hoveri...