Indholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2024 i Horticulture

Here are a few of the lesser-known fruiting plants that caught my fancy as I explored the Manatee Rare Fruit Council’s collection at Palma Sola Botanical Park on a beautiful, sunny February day. Hopefully you will be teased into visiting this park to see so much more. The setting makes it easy to envision how the trees may fit into your own landscape for fruit production or, in many cases, just for their aesthetic or attention-grabbing value. Lychee (Litchi chinensis) The only member of its genus, it was first introduced into Florida from China and Southeast Asia in the 1930s. The white, fleshy, fragrant, grape-sized fruit is easily removed from a shell. With a very sweet taste, it is usually eaten fresh but lends itself well to drying and canning. I’ve…

AFTER GARDENING for more than 35 years, I can tell you with absolute certainly that there is no such thing as a perfect vegetable garden. I can also say that while experience may be the best teacher, avoiding the following common mistakes can save you time, money and frustration: 1 NOT STARTING WITH A PLAN It may be tempting to wing it each spring and plant your veggies wherever you’ve got space. However, putting in some planning pays off. It helps you stick to a crop-rotation schedule, ensures seeds are started indoors and planted outside at the right time and helps organize successive crops. My planning strategy is simple and visual. Each winter I sketch out a map of my garden beds (all 36 of them!) and decide where each…

SINCE 1992, Fergus Garrett has been the Head Gardener at Great Dixter in England, first working alongside his mentor and the renowned garden’s creator, Christopher Lloyd, and later assuming the additional role of Chief Executive after Lloyd’s passing in 2006. He spoke with Scott Beuerlein about Dixter’s role in contemporary horticulture. SCOTT BEUERLEIN: Please tell us how your career in horticulture developed. FERGUS GARRETT: I was interested in geography and chemistry at school and my geography teacher said I should go to university to perhaps study agriculture, because I was interested in what was happening in West Africa with agriculture. I don’t know why. But he saw a connection there and said I should get into Wye College, which is part of London University and was the best place to…

In a vast world of plants, botanical Latin miraculously allows one gardener in Japan and another in New Jersey to compare notes on the same plant. It gives valuable clues to a plant’s height, attributes and uses. But it’s not perfect—and not just because the taxonomists keep changing plant family names, sending gardeners into a swirl of confusion. Today we are reexamining choices in nomenclature, from plants to animals and birds, because of words or names that have taken on negative associations or to honor indigenous cultures rather than colonizers. “We live in world where plants and animals are suffering from a variety of causes, so to preserve a given species we need to understand and know about it,” says botanist Ross Bayton, author of The Gardener’s Botanical: An Encyclopedia…

Praise to the garden for all it has given me, many years of soil between my fingers and sun on my face. For it has taught me to appreciate beauty when beauty presents itself, no matter how fleeting. When the peonies, tall and sumptuous, get flattened by a flash flood, I look for beauty elsewhere. Do not always wish for more. To accept failure. I struggle to grow sweet peas, lupine and eggplant so turn instead to plants that come more easily: runner beans, sorrel, and basil. To appreciate the unexpected: the volunteers that survived winter—the poppy or cleome, nigella, nicotiana or borage, doing their own thing—the radicals, the free thinkers of the garden. How I love their whimsy. Gardening has taught me to listen to the plants. They tell…

DEEP ROOTS IF YOU GARDEN LONG ENOUGH, you run out of garden. Planned and unplanned plant purchases can really eat up some ground, and whether your garden is large or small, sooner or later it gets used up. And it’s not like the garden centers make it any easier to pace yourself. Besides serving up endless offerings of better and better, they lie to you. Yes, they lie. If the tag says a perennial will spread 12 inches, it will spread 24. Any shrub said to grow three to four feet will grow six to eight. Six to eight means ten to twelve. Ten to twelve means you might as well park a bus in your yard. In a way, plants are like spouses: they just keep getting bigger. And,…

What is your ideal garden? Perhaps you’re thinking of beautiful flowers, inviting paths and insects eating the plants. Yes, you read that right. While it sounds odd, insects are integral to holistic gardening, a gardening method that uses native plants to enhance our local ecosystems. As native species become more popular, gardeners are digging deeper into how these plants help their local ecosystems. WHAT IS HOLISTIC GARDENING? For a clear answer to this question, I spoke to Mark Konlock, Director of Horticulture at Green Bay Botanical Gardens. He’s done extensive work to help gardeners see the benefits. “As we think about garden design, we often start with the color palette, amount of sunlight and the soil conditions,” he says. “The holistic approach takes those concepts and adds another layer to…

ROADSIDE SIGNS or advertisements of any other kind that have descriptors like “botanical” or “horticultural” in conjunction with words like “garden,” “plantation,” “nursery” or “arboretum” will draw me to the highlighted setting like a bee to goldenrod. I have been known to drive great distances to satisfy my curiosity about all things that grow. While in Florida last winter, I did not have to travel very far at all to find the tropical fruit collection at the unassuming little gem called Palma Sola Botanical Park (PSBP), with which I had become familiar while ferrying small busloads of grandchildren to their favorite treetop playground in Manatee County’s Robinson Preserve. My curiosity regarding “rare” tropical fruits has been piqued by the relatively recent establishment of Caribbean and Latin American food markets near…

EACH YEAR plant brands release exciting new cultivars to market, the results of years of breeding, selecting, trialing and propagating. New plants are bred to enhance traits that make them stand out against comparable cultivars—and in your garden. On these pages we’ll take a look at recently introduced options with evergreen foliage. Note: Although all these plants will be sold at retail in 2024, their availability may be limited because they are new. Keep an eye out for them reaching your area in the future if you can’t find them yet. LUCKY LEU LEUCOTHOE LEUCOTHOE AXILLARIS ‘BAILCOTHOE’ This new cultivar of a species native to the southeastern United States carries its lance-shaped evergreen leaves on arching stems. New foliage emerges with a peachy orange color and matures to rich green.…