kerria japonica ‘picta’ 2011: everything in excess

The Chervil or Anthriscus cerefolium is a delicious annual herb that never fails to create a solid impression in kitchen gardens and outdoors with its lush green look. With a unique, sweet, peppery flavor that loves to grow in cool, shady spots, it can be a superstar plant to grow at home.

Ah, garden dreams. We all have them. You drive by someone’s front yard and gasp at how original, yet welcoming it is. Or you go to a friend’s garden party and get positively green with envy over their, well, greenery and the overall flow of the space. To achieve such greatness, you decide you need to hire a landscape designer. And then you realize you have no idea what to do next. 

Here’s Everything About Growing Malanga, from care tips, pot size, growth needs, and much more, so you can relish the plant’s amazing tubers and foliage in your home!

Compact, early flowering shrubs with jam making potential from fruit in autumn make these plants well worth cultivating. As I think you can now imagine Chaenomeles make good and often under utilised shrubs and small trees in the garden  landscape. Varieties vary from 3 feet to 12 feet in height. I grew my plants from seed supplied by the Royal Horticultural Society in the annual seed distribution.

The larger Acer is not Japonica but Davidii. Under it’s branches is a more tender Acer palmatum Japonica var. dissectum ‘Inaba-shidare’ or the purple leaved Japanese maple.

Also known as the Japanese rose, Kerria Japonica it is a cottage-garden regular that grows dependably almost anywhere. The flowers are a distinctive single or double yellow flowers in April and May. The arching stems are thin and the leaves serrated.

My Fastia Japonica is coming into full winter flower after a summer of evergreen leaves that provide interest and structure in the border. For short while the plant was treated as an indoor decoration but it has not looked back after it was planted out 2 years ago. The white pompom flowers are rich in nectar providing food for the few flying insects that are around during winter. They stand out against the dark green leaves. It is strange that a tropical style plant with large hand shaped leaves should flower so well late in our season. When the growth has been lush I have to occasionally give it a prune. I try not to cut individual leaves.

Growing Mushrooms in Buckets is an ingenious idea that’s great for anyone with a limited space like a patio or balcony! Let’s have a look at how to do it.

It can be hard to reduce sugar in your diet as it is present in many foods, and cravings can be difficult to manage. Consuming too much sugar can increase the risk of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, fatty liver disease, and heart disease. To lower the risk of developing these chronic conditions, the World Health Organization recommends consuming less than 25 grams of added sugar per day for maximum health benefits.

I’ll be roaming the Northeast in the early going, in places as close to home as the Berkshires of Massachusetts and the Hudson Valley of New York, but also across Massachusetts and as far as New Hampshire, Maine, New Jersey and coastal Connecticut. Events here in the garden will begin again in April; stay tuned for a fuller schedule of those, with just the first couple mentioned below.What’s planned already:Saturday, February 19, 2 PM: Lecture to benefit Berkshire Botanical Garden, Monument Mountain Regional High School, Great Barrington, MA.Thursday, March 3, 7 PM: R.J. Ju

My plant came home with me in the early 1990s from Western Hills Nursery in Northern California, which still sells it today (including by mail, apparently).Much smaller on all fronts than the all-green Kerria japonica, and with single (not the bawdier puffy double) flowers, K.j. ‘Picta’ is an airy thing, perhaps 4 or 5 feet tall. Because it’s a bit of a colonizer, the potential width varies greatly; mine is now 10 feet across. I dig up suckers and share them or move them to another part of the garden, if it gets too wide, and a few times over the years when it was looking thin, I simply cut the whole thing to the g

I DONT KNOW HOW LONG A POPPY SEED can actually lie dormant, but I know that precious things are often a long time coming. Though another image was scheduled for today, “the poppy doodle,” as we refer to it, just seemed made for this historic week, Andre and I agreed.