The innocuous looking Hyacinthoides hispanica grows everywhere around here. They are in bloom right now, and I’ll admit that they have pretty flowers. But I still hate them. They are quite invasive here in Portland, and hellishly impossible to get rid of. If torturing the zillions of new baby bulbs we get every year in [...]
The Fothergilla gardenii puts on a great fall show, but I love the clusters of weird-looking flowers that appear in April, with the leaves barely showing as of yet. This is an easy-to-grow, deciduous perennial shrub that grows quite slowly and is particularly outstanding in the fall and early spring.
Last summer, Brooks and I spent quite a bit of time thinking about adding plants to the yard that would result in more continuous blooms from early spring to frost. There are wads of graph paper stashed around the house that are basically hand-drawn Gantt charts of planting and blooming schedules; this, to my mind, [...]
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