Blog

I have a thing for caramelly/biscuity coloured flowers. I can’t help but think that it’s linked to a sweet tooth.  As I scan quickly back through memory files, every one of the plants that spring ...

One of the great ‘discoveries’ of my unwatered ‘steppe’ garden has been Euphorbia ‘Copton Ash’. I’d admired it, from a distance, for several years.  It’s always hard to recall why you ...

OK, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that today’s Plant of the Week has to be out of season.  Once the last of the autumn leaves blows away in my garden, there’s really nothing to see until the ...

If only there were more trees with the emphatic verticality of the Italian cypress. But there aren’t.  The Italian cypress (also known as pencil pine) is a stand alone, in every sense.  It stands ...

Elaeagnus x ebbingei is a great big brute of a shrub.  At a maximum of about 5m tall by the same wide, it’s unlikely that you’ll ever want to release it into your garden in an untamed form.  But ...

OK, I’m a bit nervous about this one.  I guess it comes down to whether Plant of the Week is about raising plant awareness or whether it represents plant promotion. For I want to write about Cotone ...

My suggestion for plant of this week is one which holds deep significance to a country currently enduring great suffering. The war in Ukraine continues to shock the world with Russia’s obscene bruta ...

If you’re a long-term reader of The Gardenist, you’ll know that I’m forever in two minds about evergreen grasses.  Nearly everyone in a climate sufficiently moderate to grow the wide range of e ...

Like most kids, I grew up plant-blind.  But Virginia creeper, along with its relative Boston ivy, somehow broke through and made itself known to me.  I recall, from the earliest age, a charming old ...

Decades ago my gardening friends and I attended a lecture given by the renowned Irish gardener Helen Dillon. To be frank I remember little of that event except one outlandish statement declared by Hel ...

How would you respond if told there was a new deep purple/blue salvia on the market, that absolutely laughed at root-ridden soil and flowered brilliantly in quite deep shade?  First, I’d be skeptic ...

I vividly remember the day I thought I had to get better acquainted with Lespedeza.  How could I forget? It was a day of ridiculous perfection on Lake Como, Italy, and the garden at Villa Melzi was a ...

The very first time I recall hearing the name Koelreuteria was at Sissinghurst, where there was a comically lame specimen in the cottage garden.  No one seeing it would ever be tempted to grow one.  ...

It’s a magic moment every year when my crepe myrtle, Lagerstroemia ‘Natchez’, starts flowering. It’s specially magical because the blossom is scented. I had no idea that there was such a thing ...

In one of the lockdowns last year (can’t recall which.  Who can?) I cut down a long row of past-their-use-by-date Acacia retinodes along my northern boundary.  That left a huge, deep bed of really ...

The truth is that virtually any well-grown clematis, except perhaps the more common montana types, is likely to induce a groan of acquisitive longing from me.  There’s just something so other-world ...

There are few plants more striking in the garden, right now (just pre-Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere) than the nemorosa-type salvias.  They’re powerful in shape (piercingly vertical), in flor ...

I remember well receiving a packet of Orlaya grandiflora seeds from that fabulous gardener from the NSW Southern Highlands, Col Blanch, about 20 years ago.  I was between houses, or some such thing, ...