Innehållsförteckning för July/August 2019 från Horticulture

THE BLACK CURRANT (Ribes nigrum) is chockablock with welcome features, making it like the botanical equivalent of a shmoo. (Don’t know what a shmoo is? You have a treat coming if you Google it.) A black currant has loads of rooting hormones, so cuttings from one plant can become a hundred plants in just a few seasons. Its fruit is highly nutritious. A handful supplies 450 percent of an average person’s daily requirement of vitamin C; the berries have twice the potassium of bananas. It makes an impenetrable hedge when closely spaced. And yet plants are well-behaved in the garden, growing into pretty four- to five-foot shrubs that can be worked into a fence row or ornamental flower bed. (Why not nibble fresh black currants while you’re deadheading your roses…

When we think about garden flowers, we typically picture diurnal, or day-blooming, plants. Unless we’re designing a moonlight garden, we overlook night bloomers, which are generally undermarketed. Of course, it’s for good reason—after all, gardeners and plant professionals spend most of their time in gardens in daylight. But at night, when our weary heads rest on soft pillows, insect activity in the garden continues, courtesy of the night-shift pollinators, those crepuscular creatures like moths and nocturnal bees and bats. UNDER DARKNESS Most nighttime pollinators are crepuscular, active at dawn and dusk rather than in the dead of night. (Most diurnal pollinators like honeybees and bumblebees have muscles that require certain critical temperatures to function, so they tend to sit still during chilly mornings just after dawn.) Since moths often pollinate…

FOR TOO LONG American gardeners have struggled under the repression of British garden writers, and it’s about time we overthrow this tyranny. Yeah. That’s right. Your time has come, Christopher Lloyd. Better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone, Penelope Hobhouse! Roll over, Roy Lancaster. And I, for one, will never again try to pronounce “clematis” with a stiff upper lip. Yep, I am so done with Rosemary Verey and her ilk. And I’m just going to say this: On behalf of every American gardener everywhere, “Beth Chatto, ‘bugger off’.” Let that sink in for a while. And, for good measure, here’s another word: Yorktown. Oh, Brit garden writers have had it so good for so long! Your books—gloriously illustrated, perfect King’s English, filled with classic design ideas and…

CONSIDERED THE WORLD’S most expensive spice (by weight), saffron is surprisingly easy to grow in a home garden. Saffron is produced by the saffron crocus, an autumn-blooming plant with showy lavender-purple flowers. Each flower yields just three orange-red stigmas, the wispy threads that are saffron spice. You can grow saffron at home by following five easy steps. First, pick the right spot. Saffron thrives in full sun and well-drained soil, preferably sandy or loam based. If your soil is clay based or generally less than ideal, consider planting the corms in raised beds, which offer improved drainage. Dig in compost before planting. Plant at the right time: late summer through early autumn. Plant the corms three to four inches deep and three to six inches apart. The plants typically flower…

IF IT SEEMS TO YOU that commercial or residential real-estate development projects in your community are incorporating more features related to storm-water management than older developments did, you’re not mistaken. Retention basins, rain gardens, concrete-lined channels and pumping stations, to name a few, are becoming standard requirements for builders to meet. You may wonder, why the change? All these features help capture, convey and clean the water that moves over the surface of the earth—what we call surface runoff. Surface runoff occurs whenever the rate of precipitation exceeds the ground’s ability to soak it up. Through history, as civilizations continued to create buildings and roads, and as towns grew into cities, more of the earth’s surface was covered with impervious materials. This created a need for systems to manage the…

A glance at the garden of Joan Moyers tells you an artistic, creative person lives in the storybook cottage behind the exuberant flower bed. On a street lined largely with nondescript landscaping, this yard stands out. Joan is a graphic designer and a professional gardener, and her expertise in both areas shines throughout the garden that she and her husband, Ryan, began 16 years ago. Beginning at the front of the one-acre, suburban Cincinnati yard, big, bold plants, attention-grabbing colors and quirky ornaments combine to make further exploration undeniable. Joan, who designs the pages of Horticulture, is always on the lookout for ideas and items that she can add to the garden. She also has clients for whom she provides garden maintenance and installations as well as container designs. In…

IF YOU HAVE ANY interest in outdoor things—plants, insects, the environment—you’ve probably heard that monarch butterflies are in trouble. Their larvae only eat milkweeds, plants in the genus Asclepias. There aren’t as many milkweeds as there used to be. You’ve probably been a kind-hearted soul and planted some of three milkweeds commonly available in the trade: orange milkweed (A. tuberosa), common milkweed (A. syriaca) or swamp milkweed (A. incarnata). You might have even engaged in some light milkweed promotion: sowed some seed bombs or stuck a monarch window decal to the back of your Subaru. But you may not know that there are a lot of different milkweeds out in the wild. Worldwide, there are over 200 milkweed species currently identified. The Biota of North America Program (BONAP) currently lists…

Garden cosmos are annuals derived from several Cosmos species native to Mexico and other areas of the North and South America. They have long been treasured for their simple but profuse flowers, which can occur throughout summer and into autumn, and the frothy mass of fine foliage that they create. Recent years have seen diverse selections come to market, moving well past the typical tall pink- or white-blooming plants of the past to include cosmos with varied heights and ray colors and fanciful flower structure. USING COSMOS Thanks to the breeders’ efforts, cosmos varieties can be had in a range of heights appropriate for various positions in the garden, from the front of a border right back to the rear of a flowerbed. Short varieties also take well to containers.…

At the landscaping company where I work, our clients sometimes ask about changing to an organic lawn-care program. I can spot two assumptions by the way they phrase the question: They think it’s simply a matter of swapping out traditional (synthetically derived) products for natural ones to yield a similar result, and that letting the lawn “go organic” means less work. Making the switch is more complex than that. For the most part, you won’t find exact one-for-one product swaps. And it’s not so much less work as it is different work. Perhaps the trickiest part is managing your own expectations of what your lawn should be. But don’t be deterred. Just be ready, by asking yourself the following five questions. 1 WHAT’S YOUR MOTIVATION? Do you want to keep…

“WHERE DID YOU get that?” I query. “Annie’s Annuals,” I am told. How many times have I heard the same response? And the likelihood of that answer seems to increase with the desirability of the plant in question. From its rather amorphous start in the early ’90s, Annie’s Annuals has become known—and treasured—by keen gardeners across North America. The loyalty to the nursery comes as much from the selection and quality of the plants offered as it does from the lilting personality of founder Annie Hayes. While she shares a history common to most nursery owners—a magnetic draw to the natural world at a young age—the path she followed to fulfil her destiny has a bit more color than most. Annie Hayes was born to a family of Greek immigrants…