50 Black Flowers and Plants to Add Drama to Your Garden

The gardens at Great Dixter.

During the Victorian era, there was a craze in the British Isles for ferns. Ferns were collected from the wild (often sadly to the point of destroying precious habitats) and grown in gardens and homes, often in specialist planting schemes called ferneries, where numerous species could be displayed and enjoyed.

Warmer weather means spending more time outside. This means time for planning and preparing your garden space. But before you can begin sowing seeds or planting starters, such as strawberries, tomatoes, or sunflowers, you’ll need to make sure the soil is ready. One way to prepare the soil is by tilling. Tilling is when you turn over the soil and add amendments to get it ready for planting. But not every gardener agrees that tilling is the best method. 

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The weekend before was Mother’s Day, and Mark and I went down to see our son at university. Our daughter and her boyfriend were also away seeing his parents so it was a rather unusual Mother’s Day albeit a different way to spend Mother’s Day. So that weekend I didn’t get anything done in the garden because the Saturday it poured with rain.

One’s mailbox is one of the first contacts with the household, being in the front yard, in an accessible area for the postman, it often enters the perspective of the pedestrian walking along; in some cases, the mailbox itself is the only item that connects you with the outside world, reason for which, cool mailboxes are carrying an immense responsibility, they`re meant to connect buildings with the pedestrians, with the road, they`re meant to function as small landmarks for households, and more importantly, businesses; in some cases they facilitate mailbox correspondence too.

If you do not know about  Maryland’s State Flower,  we are happy to help you! Keep reading to find out  How to grow It!

Rosa ‘Boscobel’ in a walled garden in east London

When we talk about native plants, we’re often referring to landscaping, but what about growing your own edible native plant garden? Native plants have adapted to where you live, after all, and unlike, say, your usual tomatoes and strawberries, native edibles have new flavors and scents to try. Meanwhile, planting edible native plants helps to forge a connection between the way we live now, and the way communities in the West have existed for thousands of years. “Just growing these plants is a way to tap into the continuum of time,” says Evan Meyer, the executive director of the Theodore Payne Foundation. “By growing edible plants, your garden can become a much more meaningful place.”   

The day I meet David Godshall, one of the founding members of the progressive landscape architecture firm known as Terremoto, I climb the concrete steps outside his home in East Los Angeles, open a worn hinged gate, and see his garden for the first time. What I find is not quite what I was expecting, yet it makes perfect sense. Rather than the composed plants and austere rigor of the poolside landscaping Terremoto designed for actor Mandy Moore, for example, Godshall’s own garden is a tangle of mostly native and low-water plants, placed in a way that seemed haphazard but that the plants seemed to love. A dirt path is surrounded by bursts of unruly pitcher sage, sprawling California buckwheat, and Ceanothus ‘Ray Hartman’, all flourishing under the canopy of a Western sycamore. Cross-sawn timber planks from fallen local trees that otherwise would’ve been pulped weave through the yard like mini-bridges for his kids to play on. Raised beds tumble down the slope. A fashionable composter (yes, there is such a thing) sits under the eaves of a house that’s been painted black. Meanwhile, in one corner, a clawfoot cast- iron bathtub sits on a humble wood-plank base. This, I find out later, is where Godshall likes to bathe. 

We’ve all been there, the premature demise of our cilantro bolting into bitterness and a head full of seeds after an unexpected heat spike. But what if we started thinking about these “failures” as new flavor opportunities? One gardener’s flop is another’s feast after all. I’m talking seed-turned-spice drawer—yes, that downed cilantro is now your own hefty supply of gourmet coriander. 

The twigs and branches you usually throw away from the garden can be pretty helpful. Wondering how? Check out these fantastic Twig Craft Ideas for Garden Design and make the best ones for yourself!