Think before you allow poppies to proliferate. Poppies rob a lot of goodness from your soil.
21.07.2023 - 23:07 / awaytogarden.com
IF I WERE SHOPPING in the mail-order plant catalogs, and if I didn’t already have it, I’d order Astilboides tabularis, perhaps the most asked-about plant here during garden tours. I say “if” on both points because I am trying to practice restraint over here, so instead of buying things I’m pretending—and recommending them to you instead. Talk about armchair gardening. But there’s nothing virtual about Astilboides. It’s a shade-garden must.With nearly 2-foot-wide, light green leaves on hairy stems that can approach 4 feet here, Astilboides tabularis is no shy thing, though it’s not a spreading thug at all. The stems attach in the middle of the leaf, so the foliage is held aloft like a small, round pedestal table—or some people say an umbrella.
But its name is so descriptive, if you think about it: the tabularis part (meaning flat-topped, like a table), and even the genus name, Astilboides, since its flowers look like a giant creamy astilbe plume of sorts. Its “common” name (though I’ve never heard anybody say it) is shieldleaf. Make mine Astilboides.I brought my first clump home from a plant sale at the nearby Cary Arboretum, as it was then called, now the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. That was probably in the early 1990s. My original clump has been pilfered from to spread the beauty various times, but other than said pilfering and a late-fall cleanup, I don’t do anything to this plant. A tip: Don’t cut it back too soon. The way it fades is lovely, with yellow and tan phases worth enjoying as it relaxes on its way to sleep (above).
I find Astilboides easy to grow, as long as it has good, season-long soil moisture, a shady spot, and isn’t zapped by frost early in the going, as the leaves are
Think before you allow poppies to proliferate. Poppies rob a lot of goodness from your soil.
Are you looking at plants in your garden and wondering why they aren’t flowering?
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We’d been to hear another old friend, Dan Hinkley, speak at nearby Berkshire Botanical Garden’s annual lecture with several hundred other winter-weary types, and afterward gone off with Dan and friends to eat.We didn’t really talk plants at the meal; nine crazy gardeners traded pet stories. I know—insane. Either we are getting old and soft, or have spent too much time on Cute Overload. But the next morning my breakfast guest and I shifted from zoology to botany, stirred up by a few of Dan’s slides, including one of Mukdenia rossii ‘Crimson Fans,’ a shade plant Dan’s helped bring to market as
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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
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Its native range, says the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, is New York and southern Ontario to Wisconsin, and northeast Iowa to Maryland, also appearing in the mountains from Georgia to Tennessee. Depending whom you ask, twinleaf is hardy in Zone 4 or 5 to 7 or 8.The New England Wildflower Society’s Garden in the Woods, in Framingham, Massachusetts, was the first place I saw it in profusion, though it is apparently not technically a
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