A Native Groundcover for Areas with Part Shade

My childhood self never owned a Barbie doll. Instead it was her British-made rival Sindy that I loved with a passion, from her sleek blonde chignon, sugar-pink tutu and hot-pink ballet slippers to the distinctive magenta-pink-and-black, heart-shaped Sindy logo that featured so prominently on the packaging. Too many years later, I still remember her with fondness.

If you’re anything like us, then you love your dog and want to include them in as many of your daily activities as possible. Every dog owner has experienced the joy, frustration, and laughter caused by our four-legged friends who decide to help us complete a task and, in most cases, create even more chaos as a result.

California is well known for its trees and this article shall provide a list of the most popular California’s Native Shade Plants. So let’s begin!

Slugs and Snails

Some of my favorite natives for fall leaf color grow in abundance in the Piedmont, and when the weather cooperates, we are in for a spectacular show. Sugar maples occur naturally further north of here and are a favorite for fall color. We can grow sugar maples here, but we have a little-known, although common, maple species native to our region. Chalkbark maple, Acer leucoderme, does not grow overly large and is commonly found as an understory tree in the sunny margins of our deciduous forests. Chalkbark maples grow to about 25 to 30 feet high with a rounded canopy and are found in dryer, upland soils. The fall color rivals the best that a sugar maple can put out.

WHAT A TREAT: THE TEAM AT APARTMENT THERAPY brought my recent appearance and slideshow at their New York City Meetup to life on their site, and even transcribed the fun interview that AT founder Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan did with me that night, to accompany my images. Might be a first; not sure I’ve ever been transcribed before.

Out of the leaf litter they ascend.When I purchased this native of woodsy streambanks in northwestern California and southwestern Oregon for my New York garden, it was still called Peltiphyllum peltatum. I have a thing for big-leaved plants (likeAstilboides, its cousinRodgersia, and even thuggishPetasites). I had to tryDarmera, whose leaves can reach 18 in

Northern (also called upland, or inland) sea oats is native to Eastern North America, says the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, specifically “from PA south to n. FL, west as far as s. IL, e. KS, and central TX,” and into northern Mexico. It’s easy to grow, and some birds enjoy its seeds, as do small mammals. Me, too.Chasmanthium likes a semi-shady to shady spot where the soil is moist, and it can even take poor drainage. This is a low-maintenance plant suited to that hardest of spots–a shady slope—because sea oats forms strong, widening clumps, and also reseeds (some gardeners in certain locations say it does t

Read along as you listen to the June 26, 2107 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).evaluating monarda with george coombs of mt. cubaQ. We’ve talked before on the show about your past trials of other native plants like Baptisia and Heuchera—and native plants are the mission of Mt. Cuba, which is both a garden for visiting and a research center, right?A. Mt. Cuba Center is actually a former du Pont family estate, the Copeland family estate, and they left their estate to become a public garden. What kind of sets us apart from others in the area is that we focus on native plants. We broadly define our nativity region as the Eastern United States.We do a lot of work promoting plants in a display capacity in the gardens itself, and then we also do research like what I do, trying to help

Our guide is Virginia Tech associate professor of horticulture Dr. Holly Scoggins, a herbaceous plant specialist and educator, who also teaches greenhouse management and ornamental plant production and marketing. She conducts research to help commercial growers of container plants get it right, optimizing inputs like water and fertilizer, for instance, or different kinds of growing media.In other words: Holly Scoggins knows a well-grown plant when she sees one.Because she apparently can’t get enough plants, Holly also operates a U-pick blueberry farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains, blogs at The Garden Professors blog at extension.org, and contributes to the Professors’ popular Facebook page.On my public-radio show and podcast I learned a whole new style of plant-shopping etiquette, and got over my sti

It begins with a dedication that includes these words:“…to everyone who tears up their front yard to plant big chaotic wildflower gardens, to farmers who think hedgerows and wildflower field borders are just as important as crops, to urban planners and landscapers wh

At least dear H. niger dared flower when nobody else really did, or could.May 5—my first Open Day of the season—looms. Uh-oh; I was getting nowhere except panicky, save but for a few big beds of hellebores I’d cut back so far, against my better judgment and usual admonition never to work in frozen or mucky soil.The moles and voles, incidentally, seem undeterred by any such conditions, and when the snow disappeared there were signs of their handiwork—including an impressive series of mole hills, above, signs that those fossorial insectivores (underground-dwelling insect-eaters) were tunneling energetically deep below. I never trap moles, but am far less benevolent toward the unrelated plant-eating rodents whose name starts with a “V.” (More ontelling the two apart.)Then it started snowing again at mid-week, and dipped to around 20F, and the rhododendron leaves curled up like t