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OK, so I'm on a gardening kick today. In this thread I want everyone who's interested to post an homage to their favorite plants. Tell us what it's like and why you like it. You may post as many times as you like, but please post separately for each plant. (If you don't feel strongly enough for a plant to give it its own post, it doesn't belong in this thread. I'll start:
Ostrich Fern
Ostrich Fern is the stateliest of ferns. Through the cold months, a tight knob is all that pokes out of the ground, but in the early spring it beings to unravel. Pale green tendrils un-curl upwards like a leafy octopus reaching up toward the sky. When fully opened, each individual plant looks like a headress created for an aztec king, tall and graceful and a beautiful parrot-green. It grows in the deepest shade where most plants tend to look sickly and lanky. It spreads by sending out runners so next year you have more of them, popping up in surprising places. In the late summer it puts up a seed (or spore) pod that looks somewhat like a version of its green fronds, only as if it were carved in dark wood. These can be harvested and dried. They look really neat alone in a vase. Ostrich Fern looks primordial, like it remembers the dinosaurs and is just awaiting their return.
Posts: 6394 | Registered: Dec 1999
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As a child I didn't really have an appreciation for flowers. I didn't see that they had any use to them and so why such a fuss over them? That they were beautiful and could bring people joy and the connection people feel while gardening was lost on me. There was, however, one flower that grew in my area that *could* do something other than sit around and be pretty. And so my love of snap dragons was born and continues to this day. The best flower there is.
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My affection for this flower is heightened by its brevity. It comes back every year, but its time from start to finish is only a few brief weeks. From a bare patch of earth in mid-spring small reddish tendrils will poke up from the ground unfurling into long airy branches with lacey leaves. From among these branches the plant will send out long slender stems in graceful arcs with small heart-shaped flowers hanging along each stem. The bottom of each heart is flared outward to the sides with a small white tear-drop shape hanging from the bottom. I've always thought the plant should be named "weeping heart" because the drops are white and not red. These charming flowers last only a couple of weeks, maybe a bit longer if the weather stays cool. The remaining plant is very pretty and sometimes can get fairly large, spreading out and up like an airy little bush. But once it gets hot, the leaves start to yellow, little golden streaks appearing at first, then whole branches turning yellow then brown till finally, by mid-summer, the whole plant has died back to the ground, sleeping until next spring. I have planted this brief gem next to the front steps at my house so I can enjoy it every day it lasts.
Posts: 6394 | Registered: Dec 1999
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I identify with smells better than anything, so all my favorite plants are strong smelling. Lavender, Basil, Roses, Hiacynths, and Lilies of the valley all make me very happy.
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But clearly none so favorite as to deserve their own post.
Sweet Alyssum
It's not a showy flower. In fact if one flower bloomed by itself you wouldn't even notice it. Luckily, when it blooms it blooms ten-thousand at a time.
Sweet Alyssum forms a carpet of tiny flowers wherever it grows. It spreads quickly to cover a large area, or it can be kept fairly easily in a tight clump. It grows in thick enough to choke out all but the heartiest of weeds. It comes in pure snowy white, deep purple, sky blue, or a beautiful antique mauve. It can survive light to moderate foot traffic, and when it is stepped on or brushed lightly, or even jostled by a light breeze it releases a delicious honey scent. It drops invisible seeds prolificly which will wedge in cracks in walls and walkways and bloom there next year. It's a great plant for a city yard and for guerilla gardening in the vacant lot or median strip. I like to mix the colors together creating a patchwork on the slope where my yard meets the sidewalk.
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It looks pretty, it smells pretty, I can use the blossom in soap, facial grains, and tea, or just as a decoration.
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Beautiful red-pink wild looking blooms, perfect for attracting hummingbirds and butterflies. This was a coveted plant along with my butterfly bush for my "prairie" It has many herbal uses as well and makes a great tea (bergamot).
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I've never been much of a gardener, and now that I'm an apartment dweller again, I don't have to feel guilty about it any more. But I do enjoy the fragrant plants that are abundant here in Hawaii. If I had to choose my favorite, it would probably be white ginger. The flowers are very delicate, but just 2 or 3 will fill a room with fragrance.
Posts: 2069 | Registered: May 2001
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These little heralds of the showier crocuses, hyacinths, narcissus and tulips are so hardy and spread so gently, gradual and not invasive, I look forward to their brief annual bloom. Their appearance says to me "Crocuses come! Winter rains flee! Bud trees! Cherries blossom!" (and some years: "Stock up on Claritin!")
Posts: 5948 | Registered: Jun 2001
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I've never planted Snowdrops or had them in my yard before, but this year they popped up all along both sides of my back yard. Spring is a lot of fun in a new house.
Morning Glory
I first became aware of this plant as a very small child. My grandfather was fussing about it invading a corner of his cornfield. I thought it was very beautiful for a weed.
Morning Glory needs only the tiniest connection to the soil, so it's great to plant between a fence and the sidewalk. Long tangly vines with heart-shaped leaves will cover almost anything they can wrap around. On a summer day, if you are patient enough, you can literally watch it reach out a tendril and sweep the area in a wide arc, blindly looking for something to hold onto. Finding something, it will wrap itself around and around the object in order to gain height and sunlight. But the best part is the flowers. Beutiful trumpet shaped flowers open wide with the dawn and curl closed again at night. They are the most luminous flowers around. They are usually shaded from pale in the throat to deep color at the edges making it look like the light they reflect is actually being produced from within. Morning Glories bloom all summer long, usually right up until the frost.
A neighbor once saved his Christmas tree long after it turned brown and lost all its needles. He planted it in a half-barrel tub next to his driveway and planted morning glories at the base. By mid-summer he had a tower of beautiful purple and blue flowers greeting him on his way to and from work each day. I'm going to have to try that one year.
Posts: 6394 | Registered: Dec 1999
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Dahlias are my favorite flower. You don't often see them in Texas, but when I lived in Switzerland, they were in every garden. I love the wide variety of sizes, colors and petal shapes. It is possible to have a goreous garden of different dahlias and none of the flowers look the same.
Posts: 862 | Registered: Oct 2003
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Especially the weeping variety. It's a pinetreeish thing with short short needles in little starbursts that are very blue, almost powder blue.
Sciadopitys verticillata.
Another evergreen. Long needles that are thick but bendy, and of the greenest green you'll ever see. They're in whorls and slightly weeping.
Cryptomeria japonica.
And yet another evergreen. Soft as feathers needles in little furry twigs. If you can't tell, I'm obsessed with texture in foliage.
Posts: 3636 | Registered: Oct 2001
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When I was a kid I loved Dusty Millers, no idea why.
Not so much anymore. If I had to pick a favorite plant, I'd say the Willow Tree. Always makes me think of Sleepy Hollow, they always look so creepy. I love trees.
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For pure romance, I love Wisteria. I love the way the name sounds and it fits its name. Vining up and over our arbor, the light lavendar blooms are much too brief as they drape down elegantly. Someday I would like to have a house where I can vine wisteria along the top of the front porch. It's much too romantic a notion for our current house, but someday...
Less romantic but longer lasting and far more showy is Clematis. Coming in perhaps a million varieties, my favorite are the evergreens. Even when the blooms are long expired, the evergreen leaves lend warmth even in the deepest weeks of winter. Then when the blooms arrive, it's like a festival. Our evergreen clematis died last summer and I'm still mourning the loss. Still, we have the non-evergreen variety lining both sides of our yard fence's arbor caps. They aren't much to look at as plants, but the blooms are so spectacular, you have to wonder where they get the energy to be so exuberant when their vines are so thin.
Posts: 5948 | Registered: Jun 2001
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Mmm, I planted a fence full of multi-colored morning glory. I hope some of them come back this year.
Gebra daisies --
Bright and cheery. The epitome of summer flowers. Great as cut flowers, but even better in my back yard with a hummingbird hovering over the top.
Posts: 1777 | Registered: Jan 2003
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quote: It provides leaves for tea, berries foe eating, and a attracts fairies (so I'm told).
Well I know I can't pass it by without picking a few
Lotus
This is one of my favorite water plants. The flowers are reason enough to plant lotus in your pond. Each one seems to glow from within, looking especially striking against dark water. And once the flowers die, they leave one of the most interesting seed pods behind. The pod looks like an inverted shower head with extra-large holes. These provide great interest in themselves and can be harvested and dried and displayed alone or with other flowers.
Aside from the flowers, lotus sports some of the most interesting leaves of any water plant. The leaves are very round with gracefully wavy edges and are held aloft, above the water, echoing any lilly pads lazily floating on the surface. In this way they almost make your pond a hyper 3D experience, extending the serenity up off the surface as if your water plants were slowly floating away. Unlike lillies, however, lotus leaves do not have the bi-lobal break at the top of the circle where the leaf turns back to the stem. Instead, lotus stems just end near the center of each leaf, leaving only an indentation and small dot on top of the leaf, looking almost as if the stem itself was flared open, trumpet-like, and flattened to make the leaf.
Lotus leaves also are covered with a near-invisible fuzz of tiny hairs. This in itself might be unremarkable, except when you splash water on one. The water just beads up and runs off like a drop of mercury, leaving no wetness behing. Or, if you splash just right, you can get a drop to slide into the stem indentation in the center of the leaf where it will sit and gleam like a tiny bead of pure sunlight. I could spend hours splashing lotus leaves and watching the drops run off. It's like they are in such a hurry to get back to the pond they forget they were supposed to leave a wet spot.
Posts: 6394 | Registered: Dec 1999
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DANDELIONS have always been my favorite flowers. You cannot keep them down. They are the children's favorite, and the fairies' shaggy beanbags. They feed bees and a variety of insects. They smell good. You can do that "Do you like butter?" thing with them where you rub pollen on your friend's chin. You can pick them forever, and no one minds. Every mommy gets them as a gift of love from a grubby toddler. You can make wishes on the fluffy seeds and send them out to the universe. You can even make a coffee substitute from the dried roots. The young greens of dandelions are an extremely nutritious green. You can see cheerful dandelions everywhere. Their strong taproots break up hard clay soils. They are joy and love personified. You may call them weeds, but dandelions are ever my favorite plants.
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With the colors of a Caribbean sunset, Climbing Peace is almost the perfect rose. The flower itself is nearly the same as the hybrid tea rose of the same name, but as you can guess from it's name Climbing Peace will grow up a trellis or along a hedge, making it a nice foundation plant in your garden. This rose blooms in the spring with a veritable torrent of blossoms, and will often re-bloom in the late summer/early fall. If it's happy, it will often pop out a few surprise blossoms in between. Unlike many climbing or rambling roses, this climber, which was cultivated from a hybrid tea rose, produces flowers that make excellent cut flowers or boutonnieres. Mostly yellow, but blushing through peach to rose-magenta at the edges, each blossom is a work of art. This rose is also delightfully fragrant, with a light perfume scent with just a hint of citrus. I had one at my house in Baltimore. I just planted one at my mom's house in PA.
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If I were to dobie this thread, it would be about "Your Favorite Pants", and feature the Annie Pants.
Posts: 751 | Registered: Apr 2005
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I love them. I have never owned my own home, always rented all my adult life. If I ever own a home, I will plant lilac bushes.
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I just planted a lilac bush in my mother's back yard. It's really nice having her next door. I get to enjoy her garden as well as my own. Posts: 6394 | Registered: Dec 1999
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I really like the prairie wild flowers. Butterfly milkweed, various asters,big flower coreopsis,white evening primrose, purple coneflower, and so many more.
I think I gained an appreciation of the prairie when I took botany classes in college and we went for long expeditions keying flowers. It was a great time then.
The prairie of Kansas can be beautiful, and some of the best years are the dry years.
Posts: 440 | Registered: Oct 2001
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Wow. I'm impressed that so many of these plants grow outside for some people. I worked at a florist/greenhouse for two years and learned all about houseplants, and then I was in Mexico one summer and kept seeing them growing along the road! As trees! (It's a bit unnerving to look up and find that you're sitting beneath a giant schefflera.)
My favorite plant (one that I can grow outside, even in the frozen North, as long as it's in a portable terra cotta pot) is Rosemary.
'Tis the noblest of the herbs. I love it in a culinary sense - I grill chicken in olive oil, salt, and rosemary quite often - in a cosmetic sense, and in an aesthetic sense.
Florists can get in cut rosemary as a specialty green and my boss (the only AIFD florist in Montana) once made a bride's bouquet out of decorative rosemary, various ivies, purple waxflower, and small pink asiatic lilies. It was lovely.
Once I was wandering around in Brittany and came across a rosemary (romarin en français) bush just growing there - a whole bush. (Non-desert places constantly amaze me) It was a decorative shrub outside a train station. I thought it was the most lovely thing I had ever seen and longed to someday live in a place where I can have a whole bush of rosemary just growing outside from which I can pick leaves all the time.
You gotta be careful with rosemary, though. It's especially susceptible to powdery mildew. Do not overwater it!
Also, I will name a child Rosemary if I can, which might be difficult, since I plan to name them alphabetically.
Posts: 285 | Registered: Apr 2005
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I have three monster rosemary bushes to give away. Otherwise, I'm just going to trash them. They have completely taken over my front walk, and my wife thinks she is allergic to them.
But that's not exactly an homage. Here's the homage:
While in Central America, I became enamored of the Ceiba tree. It is the national tree of Honduras, but is also found in other nearby nations. It can grow to immense proportions, has a smooth trunk and just looks cool. At the Mayan ruins at Copan, there was an enormous Ceiba growing right out of the ruins, which indicated it was younger than the structures themselves. And yet the lowest branch of that tree was bigger than the trunk of any other tree I had ever seen in my life.
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Wow. I wrote an entire term paper on the Ceiba tree. Well, not on it specifically, but it figured greatly into it. It's called the Birth Tree by some Maya and Zapotecs, and it was believed that its trunk split open and gave birth to the first man and the first woman. I saw a very old one at the jardín etnobiological in Oaxaca, which is a very cool place.
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This is the prettiest of all "worry free" flowers. Portulaca is actually the scientific name for purslane, which is an edible (and nutritious) weed. The hybridized variety has incredibly delicate and beautiful flowers. The plant itelf is very easy to grow. It loves dry spots so it's perfect for any sunny spot you have trouble keeping watered. Portulaca forms a carpet of fleshy leaves and stems. It produces flowers in abundance. Each flower is as delicate as a cactus flower. Each one opens in the morning and blooms for only a day. But the plant produces flowers continually from early summer to frost, so there is never a day when there are no flowers open, and usually there are several. When the flower is done, usually in late afternoon, it wilts, then actually shrivels back in on itself before falling off the plant. The remains are tiny and fall under the plant so there is no need to "dead head" them or otherwise bother the plant. You don't normally even need to water portulaca as it gets on fine with normal rainfall in most areas. You will find it thriving and beautiful in the heat of summer when the rest of the yard looks dry and stressed.
Portulaca comes in two main types. One has narrow leaves and double flowers. The other has rounded leaves and single flowers. The first type is by far the most common and easiest to locate in seed catalogs or nursuries. In both types, there are a large variety of colors. However, my favorite type is the second type (with single flowers), especially a variety often called "desert sunset". I can't find it online, but it's available in many nursuries. What is special about this flower is that it has a gradation of color on the petals, running from pink through purple. The effect is striking. I love to plant this in hanging baskets or in containers. In my yard, I'll plant it on a well drained area where it's hard to keep less drought tolerant plants.
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That narrow-leafed Portulaca always reminded me a bit of the Hardy Ice Plant, which has cool flowersPosts: 3636 | Registered: Oct 2001
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Beautiful name, beautiful enormous leaves. Grows faster than you could believe. Curse or blessing, it's a fascinating piece of nature.
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Just saw this in my Burpee email and thought of you. I've never seen it, so I can't vouch for it, but it looks like a neat fall blooming shade perennial.
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I love cedars, oh I love them. There's nothing like the springy feel of the earth in a cedar forest. They smell so gooood.
I also love lilies of the valley. They're tiny and cheery and they let me know spring is here. Plus they smell so very good.
I love mint because it smells good and tastes good adn I can chew it raw or dry it for tea or use it as a garnish.
I love wild raspberries. And strawberries. And cherries. And apples and nectarines and if I start talking about fruit you'll never shut me up.
And one final plant that holds a special place in my heart is the Tamarack pine. It's a deciduous conifer! A deciduous conifer!! How can you not love a plant like that?
I love plants, yes I do. I only wish I weren't so deadly at growing them.
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I love lilacs as well. I don't know what else to say about them. They smell heavenly and they're pretty too.
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Grow to 4-5 ft tall, bloom heavily, annual but can be seeded or will self-seed if bare ground underneath. Require full sun. In our area, NC, I typically plant them early April and they will bloom from late April / early May through at least September / October as long as I seed and deadhead them. Also fairly drought-tolerant. Once growing, they require very little care other than deadheading.
They are fantastic. About eight years ago, a friend gave me a pack of seeds after she returned from a trip and I have been growing them since. They've always come back true to seed, with no obvious variation. They attract butterflies like crazy. I also see bumblebees on them at sundown and early morning, lying on the petals - very cool.
While they are "orange", I see colors ranging from dark yellow to deep orange, sometimes even on the same petal. I have seen a few petals split entirely in half - yellow on the left and orange on the right. Also very cool. I usually plant them around the outside of my garden and sometimes at the mailbox. Very eye-catching, especially when in a large clump.
As an aside, I will not be able to plant my garden this year, and, so, while I'll use some of it, I have lots of seed harvested from last year and I'd love to share. If anyone would like to have some, let me know. I wouldn't want to clutter up this thread (great thread, btw); I believe my email is available through my profile. (Also, after 9 or so this a.m., I will be unable to access email until late, late this evening, so if you email, please don't think I'm ignoring you!)
I'm not certain the proper name; these actually have been passed down through our family. They originally were planted by my great-grandmother in her yard; she had an embankment covered with them.
They develop long "stems" that stand up tall until the first heavy rain where they tend to then lie down, but still remain upright somewhat. They have a pink, almost crepe-like flower at the end of the stem. They love full sun and spread like crazy. They can fill a good sized area in no time.
I really like the fact that we are keeping them going - I've planted them in the yards of the houses I've lived in and have shared them with friends.
Posts: 142 | Registered: Jan 2005
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To get rid of those plants and possibly benefit someone else, try Freecycle. You can post your offer, someone who wants the plant will contect you, and the plants don't end up in the landfill (the purpose of Freecycle).
Posts: 2034 | Registered: Apr 2004
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I live in a dorm, and I'm bad at taking care of plants. Anyone have suggestions for something relatively small and very low-maintenance?
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