Think before you allow poppies to proliferate. Poppies rob a lot of goodness from your soil.
21.07.2023 - 22:21 / awaytogarden.com
SPRING, ALL PRETTY IN PASTELS, DOESN’T HAVE ENOUGH RED FOR ME, I suppose, which is why I like the red trillium or wakerobin, red tulips for cutting, and especially Pulmonaria rubra, the red-flowered lungwort. No fancy-pants, silver-splashed foliage like its more popular cousins, perhaps, but P. rubra is an ace of a plant, early and tough and ever-so-tolerant.Just after or even as the hellebores begin, and overlapping them, P. rubra (Zones 5-8) is the next perennial to open in the garden here each year. It’s even early among the pulmonarias, actually (which more often have blue flowers, or pinky-purple). The snow has barely melted, and there it is: starting to bloom.
We’ve had many years together, and owing to the generous divisions it’s always happy to offer (and the self-sowns, too), P. rubra has become one of my standbys for massing in loose sheets in the shade under deciduous shrubs, where I want cover and a little early fun, but not a lot of extra work. It spreads happily but not aggressively, and is very easy to dig out.
The maintenance regimen includes only one hard cutback a year, after flowering. Lungwort will sulk and perhaps go temporarily dormant if the area gets terribly dry, and doesn’t want to be sodden, either, which will quickly rot off the plants.
P. rubra combines well with various bulbs; I have clumps of white Narcissus interplanted in one mass of it, and everyone seems perfectly happy together.
There are named cultivars of P. rubra, such as ‘Redstart,’ and even one with variegated, white-margined leaves called ‘David Ward.’ But to me that last one’s overkill; the flowers are the point with this gem, that extra-optimistic flash of red that admittedly burns out after a good long show to pinkish-red, theThink before you allow poppies to proliferate. Poppies rob a lot of goodness from your soil.
Pulmonaria Blue Ensign
Are you looking at plants in your garden and wondering why they aren’t flowering?
Lovers of succulents and oddball plants in general grow bowiea with most of its showy, round green bulbs above the soil surface, and with its twining filigree of stem-like foliage trained up onto some kind of support. That’s how the plant in my dining room (shown) is growing right now. Probably neither is what happens in the wild, but no matter; let the foliage climb up something or let it dangle; bury the bulbs a lot or hardly at all.Order a baby at Logee’s, or better yet order three and cluster them in one pot for company. Each bulb can reach 8 inches in diameter over time, and as for the foliage—there seem to be no end to it (until it simply stops).What matters is that you give it bright light and gritty soil and respect bowiea’s desire to sleep all winter. Stop watering it when the tendrils start to turn yellow and dry up in fall, then water not at all or very rarely when it is sleeping. I usually give it a little drink perhaps once a month in winter out
My longtime friend and fellow garden writer Ken of Ken Druse dot com is author of many books including “The New Shade Garden,” and “Making More Plants,” and “Natural Companions.” We tackled subjects ranging from propagating coleus from cuttings, to repotting a jade plant—and repotting in general—and even why a jade might be blooming now, after many years of ownership with no blooms. Ken shared ideas about some of his favorite unusual houseplants, too (that’s one of his Thai hybrid euphorbias, above), including several that bloom in the offseason.Read along as you listen to the Dec. 17, 2018 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).year-end q&a with ken druse
Marc Hachadourian, Director of Glasshouse Horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden and I answer “yes” to both of the above. And he joined me to talk houseplants, and which ones make the best longtime companions to grow and even share—and how to match them to your site and meet their needs. Spoiler alert: He wants us all to start growing African violets again, and some of their other Gesneriad cousins.Marc is also Senior Curator of Orchids at the New York Botanical Garden’s 55,000-square-foot Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, and author of the recent book “Orchid Modern,” so no surprise that some of his suggestions today are easy to grow orchids because, after all, he’s @orch
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