Have a look at the Best Blue Fruits that you can grow along with different plants and flowers in your garden for a touch of royal tint!
12.07.2023 - 18:25 / finegardening.com
Shade is welcome most of the year in the Southwest, but too much shade can limit other options. Larger-leaved trees can cast dense shade, and when their leaves drop, extracting them from spiny desert companions can be difficult. However, many ornamental plants that thrive in the Southwest actually appreciate the bright dappled shade cast by the light open canopy of desert trees. This provides ideal conditions for succulents in the genera Aloe, Aeonium, Echeveria, and Agave, as well as cacti such as flowering Echinopsis hybrids.
The best trees for underplanting are those with smaller leaves that nearly disappear when they drop. The increased winter sunlight filtering through their open branches is ideal for the understory plants, but even a light canopy can still moderate winds and provide a bit of protection from light frosts.
Here are a few favorites.
Native from New Mexico to central California and deep into Mexico, velvet mesquite (Prosopis velutina, Zones 9–11) can form extensive bosques where ground water is accessible, or it can be found as scattered individuals in smaller desert washes. A valuable wildlife tree and reliable source of nectar for bees, it has a sweet scent that wafts through the garden in spring. Pods drop in midsummer and are easy to rake up. The canopy is not dense, and most leaves drop by midwinter, allowing winter sun to keep under-plantings happy. Long-lived and deep-rooted, its strong arching branches can host native desert mistletoe (Phoradendron californicum, Zones 8–11), a favorite food of the shiny black Phainopepla bird. In Zones 9 to 11 expect a velvet mesquite tree to reach about 25 feet tall and wide and to need no irrigation once established.
Little-leaf palo verde (Parkinsonia
Have a look at the Best Blue Fruits that you can grow along with different plants and flowers in your garden for a touch of royal tint!
Native to Mexico and Central America, the dahlia (Family asteraceae) is a bushy and beautiful flowering perennial. The dahlia is Mexico's national flower, and its tuberous roots were eaten by Aztecs before the Spanish Conquest. Following Central America's colonisation, the dahlia was exported to European nations, where it thrived even in countries with harsh or cold winters. Since the 18th century, botanists, taxonomists and gardeners have held a certain fascination for the flower, identifying over 850 different species each with unique petal or stem structures (this number includes the plant's hybrids, too). Since dahlias are extraordinarily varied in appearance, they also tend to be categorised by the shape of the flower, with 10 categories that include anemone, peony, pompom, ball, decorative, cactus, single and waterlily.
If you’re well-versed in TikTok food trends—cottage cheese, rat snacks, or boozy pineapple spears, anyone?—you may already know about the recent sushi-related food trend that influencers are trying their hand at: the sushi bake. This riff on the super popular Japanese dish is quick and easy to prepare, making the flavors of sushi much more accessible from home.
Does Firebush Attract Hummingbirds? – If you have this question in your mind, then this article will clear all your doubts!
Did you know that citrus fruits are one of the only fruits in season during the winter? Not too long ago, the joys of taste-testing some unique citrus fruits was limited to winter, but now we can enjoy many citrus fruits (and their many benefits) all year long. One delicious type of orange that you may not be familiar with is the cara cara orange. A relatively new kid on the block, the cara cara is not only beautiful, but it also has a flavor profile that might just make it your new favorite citrus.
Nothing says Christmas more than a poinsettia (Euphorbia pulcherrima). Did you know that December 12th is known as National Poinsettia Day? Plant breeders have developed a wide range of colors in hues of white, purple, orange, and pink, but red poinsettias continue to be the most traditional color of the holiday season.
The Monarch Highway is busy this time of year. So, keep an eye out while you are driving or outdoors. First, you may only see one, but keep watching, and eventually, you will see them fluttering by in masses. Monarch butterflies are probably the most recognizable and beloved butterflies in the world. Monarchs are currently making one of the most magnificent migrations of any animal in the world. Some travel close to 3,000 miles to their wintering grounds in Mexico. The Upstate of South Carolina along the Blue Ridge Mountains is one of their prime migration corridors and fueling stops on their journey south. This migration is unique because, unlike whales or other large mammals, who have previous generations to learn from and guide them, the monarchs making this migration have no help and are making this trip for the very first time. They are making the same journey that their great-great-grandparents made the previous fall. This ‘super generation’ of monarchs will make this journey south only once in their life. Next fall, it will be their great-great grandchildren’s turn.
The English-born Capon, a doctor of botany from the University of Chicago who went on to be a professor at California State University, Los Angeles for 30 years, has since retired, leaving time for the revamping of “Botany for Gardeners,” the bestselling title for its publisher, Timber Press, in the U.S. and England.Not only did Capon write it; he illustrated it, too, and even took the plant photographs that further bring the text to life. Capon is also a lifelong gardener, though images of his own place never appear in the pages.“Botany for Gardeners” was born as a textbook out of lecture notes for a botany class Capon taught for many years to non-science students, so it’s thorough—but not the kind of dense, full-fledged botany text that will scare you away.In fact (even 20 years later), it just keeps drawing me back in, especially for tidbits like these. Did you know:That litmus, the dye used to indicate acidity and alkalinity, is
Called “the mystery plant of the herb world” by The Rodale Herb Book, “oregano” is the common name for a small multitude of plants that are mostly useless in the kitchen. Among them are many true oreganos, in the genus Origanum, and also many plants that aren’t. Mexican oregano (Lippia graveolens) is a relative of lemon verbena, not oregano. Cuban oregano (Coleus amboinicus) is a succulent that tastes and smells somewhat like oregano and makes a good houseplant. It is used like oregano in Cuban cuisine. Italian oregano thyme, a member of the genus Thymus, also has the familiar oregano scent.Among the true oreganos there are choices for great beauty, like O. vulgare ‘Aureum,’ a golden-leaved form. (My sorry plant was probably just plain O. vulgare—not even pretty like the golden kind.) Sweet marjoram, a kind of oregano known as O. majorana, is more the stuff of French cuisine, and an excellent culinary herb. Pot marjoram, O. onites, is also savory-flavored.But if you want to cook with the classic oregano taste, you want to try Greek oregano, O. heracleoticum, which is a pungent
E. palustris, as its species name reveals, is a marsh-type plant, so wet and heavy soils are no problem for it (though it doesn’t seem to require them). Most spurges are finicky about such conditions. Not this one. It gets to between 2 and 3 feet tall and at least as wide.I grow seven or eight other Euphorbias, including the basic polychroma, its newer, red-foliage variant called ‘Bonfire,’ and the fiery-colored one called E. griffithii ‘Dixter’ [above]. In California, mail-order Digging Dog Nursery has a good list of spurges, but not palustris. I swore I got my most recent generation of plants at Forestfarm, but I don’t see it in their current list. Hmmm….how about Annie’s Annuals?The hardest thing about growing spurges is cutting them back,
I have two other Abies concolor here (I know, there’s evidence of my former“everything in threes” insanity again), the other two grown naturally, unshorn, and therefore quite different-looking. I won’t tell you what I paid for the big guy, all thick and a perfect pyramid and already near 10 feet tall when he came to me to live on my hillside of a backyard, among the crabapples and a giant island of ornamental grasses. The others were scrawny little things, maybe 3 feet high, though each is more than 15 tall now.The white, or concolor fir, a Western American native species ranging from Colorado to Southern California, New Mexico and into Mexico, can grow to 100 feet in the wild, apparently, but in a garden setting you are more likely to see it get to 30 or maybe 50 feet in time, and half as wide.Its long needles, which are particularly silvery-blue in the cultivar ‘Candicans,’ curve outward
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