The plants in genus Dionysia are some of the most demanding in cultural requirements that few people attempt to grow them. They possess beautiful flowers, form tight domes of tiny leaves and the intriguing habit of growing on near vertical walls with a ledge of rock protecting them from full sun and weather.
Clearly, they are not easy to please. Mostly they are grown in pots…
Coming back from the recent NARGS Annual meeting in New Hampshire, we took a side-trip to stay with Robin & Juliette Magowan for a couple of days, knowing that they will be moving to New Mexico in the winter.
What a surprise on driving in the lane to the front entry. Greeting us before this curious, stiff 3-story New England style house is the most exuberantly luscious display one…
Aside from the great swaths of poison ivy, this was a wonderful place to be 30 minutes from our home/nursery. Why?
The Pinery has the largest Oak Savanna woodland remaining in North America Even though the Pinery is directly North of our nursery, it experiences a frost-free period 2 weeks longer than our area near Strathroy. This is the Northern most fringe of the…
The heated greenhouse is almost empty. We leave the plastic on the hoops and clear out all the newly propagated material into the uncovered holding houses.
This place is a burning sauna in the summer - you kind of hold your breathe - run in and get what you need - and run out.
Strangely though, there are some plants that have seeded, or rooted into the sand and thrive here...…
Of all the shrubs that can be put in a rock garden, Daphnes are at the top of everyone's list. It helps to have the image of the nymph who escaped the lust-filled Apollo by turning into the laurel - now Daphne laureola. But plants must have more than mystique; gardeners are practical, earthy types, and their plants must perform. Two of my favorites are Daphne velenovskyi and Daphne arbuscula,…
Soldanellas: delicate, fringed purple flowers. But this David Attenborough clip from "The Private Life of Plants" makes it look absolutely stunning. Now I understand why people drool over them...
A few that we offer: Soldanella alpina, Soldanella pindicola, Soldanella minima, Soldanella carpatica, Soldanella cyanaster.
The last two weeks in the garden have been all blue, the mystical colour that everyone wants...and the gentians haven't even started to open. A plant people are reluctant to grow is the blue corydalis. I remember the days when my dad badly wanted blue corydalis (years and years ago), and as a rough rule of thumb he had to kill it 3 times or so before he had success. My guess is it has nothing…
All leaves have such a fresh texture. Even though it's flower, flower everywhere in the alpine gardens right now, the leaves are doing their best to compete. Here's a taste of what is happening in the garden right now.
Arenaria sp. Wallowa Mt. - the perfect mat. Nobody ever asks if it has flowers. Now and then it has some white flower-blips, but nothing showy enough to take a picture…
Typically, we regard the members of Ranunculaceae as lush perennials growing in rich, moist soils and giving us flowers that may be either flamboyant as the aquilegia spp. or as elegant as Anemone spp. A quieter demeanor can be found in some of the alpine buttercups. Ranunculus alpestris is a little fibrous rooted clump that covers wet areas where the high elevation snow collects. The…
We live in an area that some call "the barren wasteland." Flat cash crop land that is thankfully interrupted with a small bush (woodlot, for you Americans!) here and there . The odd ditch, or maybe a river is a novelty.
Not that this bothers me...I kind of like it (or am comfortably used to it). It's small town rural Ontario, and so are the people - Alice Munro's short stories nail it…
This has been the perfect spring for Saxifraga here. The slow, cool, moist weather has let the blossoms slowly come out with perfection. Some springs, when it is dry, warm and windy the petals are tattered and whipped - none of that this year.
Saxifraga x 'Valerie Keevil'
Saxifraga bursereana
Saxifraga x 'Redpol'
Saxifraga x 'Mother…
Finally it was 20C this weekend. Finally the snow is gone.
We've had too much snow this year. Really, I like snow, but my kids had more then 10 snow days off from school this winter - so many that they just expected a snow-day-a-week all winter. It started in December already (I never heard of a snow day in December) -- we had three in a row, and the next week another three.…
Gardening was just something that you did in my family; and knowledge of alpines was absorbed by osmosis, even as a kid. So many visits to relatives' homes and many family trips involved gardens. Thankfully gardeners are pretty interesting people and rarely are they only obsessed with just plants - they have other interests that are pretty intriguing to a kid. Boots showed us girls…
The biggest pleasure of the past season was watching the new plantings of Chinese gentians growing in the garden. Gentians are slow to develop. G. acaulis takes 3 or 4 years to form a mat/mound of ~15 cm circumference. At that size, it is a colony of individual plants both competing and helping each other to survive. As the mound expands, the population increases. It adds to the…
20 years ago I was enthralled with offering of eritrichium howardii seed in Jim & Jenny Archibald's North American collections list, "...Dead Indian Pass NW of Cody. 2800m. Limestone gravel patches and rock fissures... this is certainly not impossible to cultivate well... of course it needs superb drainage and protection from winter wet... Silver rosettes packed into dense…
