fallen hero: bottlebrush buckeye

Gardeners across the U.S. are in varying stages of preparing their vegetable gardens. Most will choose to include tomatoes in their plans. According to garden.org, tomatoes are the number one vegetable grown in home gardens. For some home gardeners, the traditional row crop production of tomatoes can be inconvenient or take up too much space. Container gardening is a good alternative if a few key points are taken into consideration.

TALK ABOUT A SWASHBUCKLING APPROACH TO PRUNING. Apparently Andre the Doodler has a heavier hand than I do in such matters–and a bigger blade. I do hope he’s following the tactics in my Pruning FAQs. That headstrong boy!

AS IF IT KNOWS THAT FIREWORKS ARE CALLED FOR this weekend, the biggest old bottlebrush buckeye here, Aesculus parviflora (above), is in full bloom. Pow! A 15-foot-wide by 12-foot-tall mass of high energy, with each bloom more than a foot tall.

If you have a spot for a big shrub (my oldest of four or five here is more than 15 feet across and maybe 12 feet high) perhaps you want to adopt one? In the North, bottlebrush buckeye will do in either sun or shade, but they really sucker up nicely in semi-shade or shade, making a July splash with creamy wand-like flowers. The handsome foliage goes gold in fall.The full story on how I almost lost my beloved first-born bottlebrush buckeye is here (and probably in the photo links below, too). Miraculously, in just two years it has already regained half of its lost bits, and growing strong–even if it doesn’t yield any pears. Categoriestrees & shrubs

Flowers or not, I grow one pineapple sage plant each year because of its Jack-in-the-Beanstalk quality. A 3-inch pot containing a rooted cutting in May forms a shrubby 3-by-4-foot creature by high summer, and oh, the fragrance of those leaves—scenes of a sunny Hawaiian pineapple plantation in every stroke of the hand. In areas where it does bloom before this anti-climactic moment (which it’s doing even with much of its foliage battered by the intermittent cold), pineapple sage and other late salvias are appreciated by migrating hummingbirds. (For summering ruby-throated hummingbirds here, Salvia van houttii, S. coccinea and some of the other reds are more to the point, along with many other tender things like verbena and nicotiana, and keep going long after the little bird

I had only ever seen a bottlebrush buckeye (Zone 5-8) once before, at the public garden called Wave Hill in New York City, a giant suckering mound of a thing probably 20 feet across and more than a dozen high. It grew there in the semi-shade of tall trees, as it is does in its natural habitat of the Southeastern United States, specifically rich woodlands in Alabama, Georgia, and northern Florida. I loved its big mountain of a presence right away—and then on that shopping trip to Allen Haskell’s former nursery in New Bedford, there it was. My plant!Though from a distance the flowers appear to be cream-colored, each tiny one on the long wands (technically panicles) is delicately splashed with drops of orangey-red paint–actually the red anthers and pinkish filaments inside the little trumpets. Butterflies and many insect pollinators love to visit them (that’s a silver-spotted skipper sampling the offerings, above).One year, a group of Baltimore orioles explored them enthusiastic

THE ONLY THING THAT WOULD HAVE MADE THIS MISHAP a little more bearable: if I’d had a vase big enough for the spectacular flower-covered branch I lost to storms from one of my Cornus kousa, or Korean dogwoods, last week. Come to think of it, I don’t even have ceilings tall enough to accommodate the 11-foot consolation prize indoors, vase or no vase.

The ‘Rogers’ strain is technically Aesculus parviflora var. serotina ‘Rogers’ (I know, a mouthful), a selection of a Southern U.S. native variety labeled serotina. Though much younger than my plain old Aesculus parviflora, my ‘Rogers’ is already much larger—more than 20 feet across and probably headed for 15 or so high. It was too hot and sunny for a good photo while it was in is prime, but you get the idea from the one below. A beast! So big, in fact that I planted it way too close to something it is now engulfing (left side of above photo). Funny to think about this Alabama, Georgia and northern Florida native being perfectly at home and so robust way up North in my garden, but it is.Either Aesculus makes a bold statement and is perfectly happy in

THIS SIMPLY MAKES ME HAPPY. Talk about up close and personal, huh? Thanks as ever to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for letting us see such intimate views of the avian world. You may recall that the great blues like the occasional feast in my backyard frogponds, but I have a cure for that (or at least a semi-deterrent):

A splashily cream-variegated shrub of maybe 6 or 8 feet high and wide for any condition but waterlogged soil—sun to substantial shade—it’s moderately deer-resistant, too. It’s so cooperative, you can even shear Eleutherococcus as a hedge. I bet you have a spot for such a wonderful and willing thing, deserving not just of problem-solving garden spots but also front-and-center placement.I first saw Acanthopanax, as Eleutherococcus was then known (and still is to those of us who can’t get with all the name changes), in the garden of my friend Marco, who knows that a garden needs “doers,” as he calls reliable types. (Tip: One of his other doers is Aucuba japonica, a broadleaf evergreen with varying degrees of yel

Good thing I never trust myself and always look things up before I say them out loud, and this time that included emergency SOS’s to the two most Aralia-friendly people I know, Ellen Hornig (formerly of Seneca Hills Perennials), and Dan Hinkley, the founder of the original Heronswood Nursery who collected a particularly nice form of A. cordata on one of his explorations in Asia years ago, and has written about the genus in his book “The Explorer’s Garden.”No, Margaret, they said patiently; not Zone 8 A. californica, silly girl; A. cordata, probably one from Dan’s original stash (mine is about 8 feet high and wide). To make things worse there’s another one occasionally listed in the catalogs that starts with a C, A. cachemirica, and frankly they are all big and doing their thing now and if you don’t label your plants, as I didn’t mea culpa and total hubris, how can you expect to remember which A.c. it is years later?But now I have derailed: The point is that aralias are statuesque, late to flower (August into fall) and then loaded with fruit that birds, especially thrush re

This summer, 175ish of those pots and grow bags in Craig’s North Carolina driveway laboratory are tomatoes, and that’s what he talked to me about on my public-radio show and podcast.Craig is the tomato adviser to Seed Savers Exchange, and author of the bestselling book “Epic Tomatoes,” so whether you’re growing your own or trying to decide among the many distinctive beauties at the local farmers’ market: Craig LeHoullier has the insider info.Read along as you listen to the July 11, 2016 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to