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By Hilda, on May 8th, 2011
I took this photo one year ago, on Mother’s Day weekend. I was visiting friends in Fancy Gap, Virginia, just off the Blue Ridge Parkway, and found myself being called upon to identify a few varieties of wildflowers that had sprung up in my hostess’ yard. And while I had never seen one of these in person before, I knew immediately what it was — the pink lady’s slipper orchid, increasingly rare and very much endangered.
This lady’s slipper is sometimes called moccasin flower, for the shape of its pouch-like lower petal. In Latin, it goes by Cypridedium acaule. And it’s endangered for one simple reason — it’s extremely picky about its habitat, requiring extremely acid soil and very specific conditions.
If you come across one of these in the woods, enjoy it and take photos, but never try to move it. No matter how carefully you try to transplant pink lady’s slipper, you will almost certainly kill this delicate wildflower in the process.
Here’s why: the lady’s slipper has a symbiotic relationship with an organism known as mycelium that exists in the soil. (Mycelium is the vegetative part of a fungus, and consists of a mass of branching, thread-like filaments.) Without it, the lady’s slipper plant can’t extract nutrients from the soil. It’s nearly impossible to cultivate this plant at home, so it’s best to let it do its own thing in its natural habitat.
By Hilda, on April 22nd, 2011
It’s easy to run into problems when you’re trying to identify a plant using a common name, rather than its Latin designation. Here’s one such dilemma: just about any shrub at all with big, round, fluffy, white flowers can ostensibly be called a “snowball bush.”
At one time, I had a snowball bush of my own. Like many snowball bushes, it belonged to the viburnum genus – and its proper name (Viburnum plicatum var. tomentosum ‘Kern’s Pink’) was quite a mouthful. Even its common name — pink snowball viburnum — was problematic though, because the round blossoms opened to snowy white, not the suggested pink hue. (Though the unopened buds may have had a faint rosy blush to them.) The shrub had actually been given to me by a nursery manager who was desperately trying to eliminate ‘Kern’s Pink’ from his stock, because he was tired of customers trying to return the bushes when they failed to produce pink flowers.
Recently I was taking pictures of this absolutely gigantic snowball bush in my neighborhood, when the shrub’s owner came out of the house to chat. The photo is below — it’s pretty impressive, isn’t it?
While I had assumed that this 20-foot tower of snowy blossoms was also a viburnum, she informed me it was a pee-gee hydrangea (Hydrangea paniculata), planted by her dad more than 30 years ago. And while I listened politely, this didn’t seem right to me – it was far too early in the year for hydrangeas to be blooming, for one thing.
So I did a little investigating on the Internet and talked to a friend who’s an expert at plant identification. The pee-gee hydrangea, wouldn’t you know it, is also sometimes called a snowball bush – it’s very similar to the large, blue mophead hydrangeas that you see everywhere in June, but with creamy white blooms.
The towering snowball bush in my neighborhood, however, was almost certainly Viburnum macrocephalum, the Chinese snowball bush. It’s the only one of the white-flowered wonders with the ubiquitous “snowball” moniker that is likely to reach a height of 20 feet. The flowers themselves are also huge, starting out lime-green before they turn to white. Unlike many other types of viburnums, they have no scent at all – and they’re sterile, so you won’t get the brilliant red berries that viburnums are known for either. It hardy matters, though, when the spring display is this spectacular. 
By Hilda, on April 5th, 2011
 Photo: Wikimedia Commons “I was sorry because I had no loropetalum, and then I met a man who had no snowdrop.”
With tongue in cheek, the famed garden columnist Henry Mitchell wrote these words three decades ago, and I had to smile when I read them recently in an anthology of his work. The only loropetalum that gardeners knew way back then was the original species – Loropetalum chinense, sometimes known as the Chinese fringe flower, a rather nondescript evergreen shrub that wasn’t especially popular.
But things things have changed since then!
If the great man were alive today, I bet he’d trade his snowdrops in a heartbeat to get his hands on one of the modern loropetalum cultivars pictured here. The hybridizers and nurserymen have really done their magic. Today, bright flowers, burgundy foliage, and a graceful, arching habit combine to give loropetalum year-round appeal.
It was back in the early 1990s when these pink-flowered selections made their debut, and I can still remember when they first hit the garden centers. They’re usually classified as Loropetalum chinense var. rubrum, and they are currently seen absolutely everywhere where winters are relatively mild (they are hardy as far north as zone 6).
 Photo: Terry DelValle, University of Florida extension service
In early spring, usually March, loropetalum will be in its full glory. The hot pink flowers are like little tassels, made up of delicate, fringe-like petals. The show starts slowly, as just a few blossoms open at a time, but by the time the shrub reaches its peak, it can rival an azalea in full bloom. Altogether you can expect three weeks of flowers from loropetalum. At one time, I happened to underplant one of mine with a creeping veronica (Veronica peduncularis ‘Georgia Blue’) and it was a happy accident to find that the two bloom at exactly the same time. The brilliant, cobalt blue veronica combined with the fuchsia tassels of the loropetalum is probably the most spectacular plant combination I’ve ever seen – and it was especially gorgeous where loropetalum’s branches would arch down low toward the ground, so the colors could really mingle. I wish I had a picture of it, but I don’t.
More than any other flowering shrub I can think of, loropetalum has year-round appeal. After they bloom, most of these new cultivars put out reddish-colored new growth that can actually look like flowers from a distance. This new foliage eventually matures to a dark olive or purplish green that makes a nice backdrop for your summer perennials. When cool weather arrives in fall, the foliage deepens again, to a deep burgundy shade – and because it’s evergreen, it makes a nice focal point in the winter garden. During warm spells in December and January, the shrubs will even surprise you by throwing out a few colorful, sporadic blossoms – just a little taste of what’s to come again in the spring.
All things considered, you just can’t go wrong with loropetalum. It fits in everywhere and no matter what the season, as my next-door neighbor puts it, “it just always looks good.”
By Hilda, on March 16th, 2011
I was taking a walk around the neighborhood recently when I caught the sweetest scent imaginable. I knew immediately what it was — a wonderful, early blooming shrub known as winter daphne (Daphne odora) — and began looking around to see which yard it was blooming in. There was actually a large cluster of perhaps five shrubs growing close together, which explained why the scent was so strong. Later, I went back with my camera to get these photos.
 If you look closely, you can barely make out that there are two slightly different varieties of daphne growing here. See how the shrub in the left forefront has variegated leaves? That’s a cultivar known as ‘Aureo-marginata’ and the cream-colored leaf margins bring a little bit of light to shady places. (The shrub directly to the right of it has plain green leaves.)
 The buds are a bright rosy red, while the waxy flowers open to a pale blush pink.
 Daphne likes a semi-shady spot and slightly acid soil. It has a reputation as a finicky grower, and the shrubs will sometimes last just a few years after planting. This is a Southern favorite, growing only in zones 7 to 9.
 I found these shrubs growing in a large front yard, down by the street — but I recommend planting them near your front door, or at least where you’ll pass them on the way to mailbox. You’ll want to enjoy the sweet smell for the short time it lasts!
By Hilda, on March 3rd, 2011
I inherited a front yard full of daffodils when I bought my house, and their numbers have been increasingly slowly for the past two decade. This year, the display seemed especially spectacular. There were so many yellow jonquils out front that I decided to cut some and bring them inside. The resulting display is below; there are somewhere around 40 daffodils in this vase, and it was a lush and cheerful bouquet for my office.
 Photo: H. Brucker
But maybe you don’t have hundreds of flowering bulbs in your yard — maybe you just have a handful. You can still cut a few to bring inside, and even a tiny arrangement can make an impact. I recently received a packet of ideas from the Netherlands Flower Bulb Information Center, including suggestions for displaying cut bulbs indoors. Here’s a few that I really liked — simple and elegant!
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This is really clever! If you look at the little “vases,” you’ll see they’re just empty plastic pill bottles, like you might buy vitamins or aspirin in. They’ve been loosely wrapped with what appears to be strips of felt, but I think ribbon would have been prettier.
The flowers are regular hyacinths, but I could see this on an even smaller scale with little bulbs like snowdrops or grape hyacinths as well. The twigs look like they were freshly cut from a flowering shrub (forsythia, perhaps?) and nothing says springtime like those swelling buds!
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These double daffodils, with their stems bound together, give an effect almost like topiary.
This picture, before I cropped it, showed one these arrangements at each place setting on a dinner table. But it would be simple to make just one, for a nightstand, bathroom vanity, or breakfast bar.
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When you float a single flower in a pretty, antique teacup, each blossom becomes a whole bouquet. The pink flower is a popular double tulip called ‘Angelique’ and the apricot blossom is actually a ruffly narcissus named ‘My Story’ — the extra petals in each of these give an effect similar to floating a rose or camellia in a shallow bowl.
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Hyacinths, some greenery, and sprigs of unopened buds in a crystal water glass. I think it’s the mixture of blues and purples here that really makes this simple arrangement pop.
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All photos courtesy of the Netherlands Flower Bulb Information Center, unless otherwise noted.
By Hilda, on February 16th, 2011
Imagine this scenario: it’s a bleak winter morning in February – that colorless sort of day when the sky is the same shade of gray as the pavement. All of a sudden, from the car, you catch a glimpse of a little tree blooming gloriously, a profusion of pink flowers against the drab backdrop of sky.
This happened to me twice this week while I was driving in my neighborhood. At this time of year, such a sight can only be one thing – the Japanese flowering apricot tree, Prunus mume. It’s an amazing sight in the dead of winter, much more showy than the autumn flowering cherry, which sometimes puts out flowers at this time of year but is generally easy to pass by without noticing.
Since the Japanese flowering apricot is hardy as far north as zone 6, it’s hard to figure out why it’s not more widely planted – people just don’t seem to know much about this amazing little tree, and nurseries don’t always carry it, instead favoring the old stand-bys like dogwood and redbud.
 On my street, nearly every yard has a dogwood tree. I have one too, alongside the driveway down near the street (it came with the house). And when my dogwood succumbs to old age, I will happily replace it with Prunus mume. It’s a nice thought, that someday I could be coming home to the only house on the block with a floriferous, blooming tree in January and February. And when April rolled around, I could still enjoy the borrowed view of my neighbors’ snowy white dogwood trees. But you know, flowers just aren’t at a premium in April the way they are in February.
By Hilda, on February 11th, 2011
The yellow blooms of winter jasmine (Jasminum nudiflorum) make an early appearance — usually January or February here in Atlanta where I live. Those who aren’t familiar with it often mistakenly believe it to be a confused forsythia bush, blooming out of sync with the natural order of things.
I actually much prefer this shrub to forsythia, which is so ubiquitous around here that those brassy blooms start to seem tawdry after a while. By the time the forsythia blooms in late March, there’s already so much yellow in the world that it’s easy to take it all for granted. Not so with winter jasmine, which offers up its little six-petaled stars to a mostly colorless landscape.
Arching stems give winter jasmine graceful, weeping habit — here, the shrub just seems to flow off a small embankment. Although in the jasmine family, this shrub bears flowers without scent, and it’s quite a bit less hardy than forsythia, hailing only as far north as Zone 6.
Photos courtesy of David Williams
By Hilda, on February 9th, 2011
When I was growing up on the Great Lakes, there was always that one day, usually in late March, that signaled winter’s dreary days were numbered. I’d come home from school and there, right next to our side door, in the narrow strip of earth between the driveway and the foundation, would be a clump of yellow or purple crocus, often still surrounded by patches of melting snow.
I pretty much hated winter as a girl — I guess that’s why I live in the South now — and the sight of those little flowers meant more to me than I could begin to describe. It didn’t mean winter was over; there could easily be blizzards well into April. It was more like a promise of better days soon to come, a little tiny light at the end of a long, snowy, frigid tunnel. And it was almost mystical, the effect that crocus had on me back then; the pure joy it could inspire. (At one point, one of my college roommates told me that every time she saw a crocus, she pictured me jumping up and down.)
Admittedly, winters are easy here in the South. I don’t find myself watching for the first crocus the way my mom and I did back in Cleveland, and they don’t have the same significance for me here.
Still, when I take a walk around the neighborhood and come across a lawn absolutely filled with lavender crocus, it gladdens my heart. Now THIS is the way to have a beautiful lawn — and it’s nice to see someone out there gets that, rather than using chemical warfare to create a monoculture with a single, boring species of grass. Biodiversity is beautiful, isn’t it?
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©2011, photos and text
All rights reserved
By Hilda, on December 1st, 2010
For many years, I’ve favored cyclamen over poinsettias when choosing a flowering plant to brighten up the indoor landscape at this time of year. To my mind, cyclamen is so much more interactive than poinsettia. From the day you bring it home, a poinsettia begins a slow decline toward the compost heap. A cyclamen, on the other hand, will entertain you for many weeks.
 cyclamen buds in hiding When you bring home a cyclamen already in flower, there’s likely to be a myriad of tiny, nodding buds nestled beneath that handsome foliage. As the flower stalks gradually lengthen, these buds will slowly emerge from hiding and produce flowers to keep the show going.
I find it deeply satisfying, watching the cyclamen’s daily progress (and I love the fact that I even get to deadhead it!) For me, it’s a lot like watching the natural evolution of outdoor plants, which tend to be more dynamic than, say, a florist’s azalea that was forced into bloom out of season so it can sit sullenly on winter windowsills.
I always use the same oblong ceramic planter for my cyclamen – it has a crackled glaze finish and lovely curves, like a Victorian bathtub. And usually I buy a basket of needlepoint ivy to use as a companion plant. Its dark green, finely dissected foliage has a beautiful texture that makes a stunning contrast with the mottled, heart-shaped leaves of the cyclamen. I just slip the ivy out of the basket and use a bread knife to cut it in half; then I plant the ivy on each side of the centered cyclamen so that it flows dramatically over the sides of the planter. (Why have I never taken photos of this oft-repeated arrangement?)
Last year, I received a potted cyclamen as a gift, just before the holidays. Hmmm… no ivy basket handy, and no time for a trip to the nursery. Still, I got out my planter and slipped the cyclamen into the center. (I love to use my kitchen as a potting shed!)
It looked lonely.
I was going to tuck some green moss from a bag around it – but then I remembered I had a whole flat of living, growing peacock moss recently dug from a friend’s garden, so I used that instead. It looked nice, very natural and woodland-y, but still a little bare.
From the window, I saw my neighbor outside cutting holly branches and I got a flash of an idea. Lauren Liess, on her design blog, often writes about using cut branches indoors and I’d just seen some of her pictures online. I went out to forage for twigs, tucked them into the potting soil around my cyclamen, and enjoyed my instant centerpiece.
By Hilda, on November 25th, 2010
Things turned out pretty well for the settlers at the Plymouth colony. Every year we acknowledge, through our Thanksgiving celebration, the Pilgrim’s agricultural successes. It’s practically legend, the way they learned from friendly natives which indigenous plants could be gathered for food, and how to grow New World crops like maize, beans, and squash.
 jimson weed (Photo: MissouriPlants.com) Then there was the ill-fated Jamestown settlement. Colonists there also had much to learn about the native flora – and they left behind a very different kind of legacy. What we remember today is mainly their misadventures with Datura stramonium, a shrubby, flowering plant that we know now as jimson weed (shortened from “Jamestown weed”). Reportedly, those who ingested the notorious weed “went mad” for several days, due to the hallucinogenic properties of the plant.
Flash forward to the modern, gardening world — and many of the ornamental plants we currently know as angel’s trumpets belong in the Datura genus, and are closely related to the devilish jimson weed.
From its divine scent to its startlingly large, coronet-shaped blooms, angel’s trumpet is an aptly named flower. A single plant can put on quite a show, easily reaching 10 feet in one growing season. Flowers tend to close during the hottest parts of the day and open in the evening. At twilight, fragrance is at its most intense, as the plants seek to seduce lunar moths and other nocturnal pollinators.
 Angel's trumpet comes in many shapes and colors, including ruffly double forms not seen here.
Though tree-like in form, angel’s trumpet is actually an herbaceous perennial in warm climates (zones 7-10), and it’s grown as annual further north. Here in my Atlanta neighborhood, angel’s trumpet is still blooming like crazy at Thanksgiving time, as we haven’t had a frost yet.
But let the gardener beware:
The Jamestown stories are more than myth. Today, Datura’s effects on the central nervous system are well known. All parts of the plant are toxic, containing the alkaloids atropine, hyocymine, and scopolamine. Ingesting the seeds can cause delirium and disorientation, even hallucinations that have sometimes resulted in harmfully reckless behavior.
 Gardeners should also know that the plant’s sap contains large amounts of atropine, the substance used by ophthalmologists to dilate the pupil during eye exams. There are numerous reports of people who have rubbed their eyes after working with angel’s trumpet and have suffered from dilated pupils for days. Since you can also absorb the alkaloids through an abrasion, it’s best to wear gloves and wash your hands frequently if you’re cultivating angel’s trumpet.
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Want to collect Datura seeds for next year’s garden? It’s easy to harvest them from the pods – just be sure to label and store them safely. In 1983, according to a CDC report, a couple lapsed into a coma just after phoning for an ambulance. Upon their awakening, this is what doctors learned: While making dinner, the wife had added a seasoning to the hamburger, but later realized it was Datura seeds she’d saved from her garden. She scraped most of the seeds off the meat and served the meal. Shortly thereafter, the couple began hallucinating and passed out. They were hospitalized for three days.
The genus Brugmansia, once lumped in with Datura, is also made up of plants known as angel’s trumpets. The easiest way to tell them apart? For the most part, Brugmansia has dangling, pendulous blooms, like these, while Datura sports trumpets that are a bit more upright. They are equally toxic.
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About
The Author
Hilda Brucker
 Hilda combines her
love of gardening
and passion for writing
in her blog entries.
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