Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2024 i Horticulture

JARED BARNES is an award-winning professor of horticulture at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. He also hosts The Plantastic Podcast and publishes a weekly e-newsletter called plant•ed, both of which can be found at his website, https://www.meristemhorticulture.com. At home, he gardens with wife Karen and daughter Magnolia. SCOTT BEUERLEIN: Jared, you are known as a very young, passionate professor of horticulture who has a wonderful connection with your students. Tell us how you came to be in your position. JARED BARNES: There’s a photograph of me, four or five years old, out hoeing corn and tomatoes in my garden. And I’m a lot skinnier because I haven’t eaten as much ice cream then as I have now. I loved the natural sciences as a kid. My great-grandfather…

Like most passionate gardeners, I am always looking for new plants. Whether I’m visiting a friend’s garden, hiking a nature trail or just driving down the road, when I spot an interesting plant, I must check it out. This usually leads to wondering if I could grow it at home. That’s why I always have pruners, paper towels, plastic baggies and a bottle of water handy to take a cutting. In propagation from cuttings, a gardener cuts off a piece of an annual, perennial, tree or shrub and grows an entirely new plant from that part. There are three types of cuttings: stem, leaf and root. Stem cuttings form roots and leaves; leaf cuttings form roots and stems; root cuttings form stems and leaves. The concept is simple. Placing the…

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 new options with special appeal to pollinating insects and hummingbirds. 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. BUTTERFLY CANDY BUTTERFLY BUSH BUDDLEIA BUTTERFLY CANDY SERIES Sweetly fragrant, jewel-tone flowers deck the five cultivars in the Butterfly Candy series of dwarf buddleia. Each plant remains compact enough to suit small garden spaces or…

DEEP ROOTS I’M A CURIOUS and impetuous guy. Good at thinking but terrible at remembering. And dammit if I’m not impatient. My history of jumping in and starting on ideas rather than thinking them through is legion. I suppose I just plain fear ideas falling through the cracks far more than I fear the consequences of them being bad. Or poorly executed. Or really, really bad. Without a doubt, this is a blueprint for an extremely efficient mistake-making assembly line, and I’ve made a warehouse of them. Especially in my garden, which is where the greater part of my creative energy goes. It is where most of my thoughts and dreams manifest themselves in the form of plants and birds and rocks and things, which are all scattered around out…

GARDENING LIFE SOMETIMES THE SETTING in a tv show or movie is such a prominent part of the story that it almost becomes another character. Examples include coastal Cornwall in the BBC series Poldark and the Rocky Mountains in Robin Wright’s movie Land. Sometimes even a garden functions in this kind of way, becoming an integral piece of the story. In the last issue of Horticulture, I wrote about poetry inspired by gardens. Now let’s look at some films that feature a garden or gardening. These films don’t have major plot twists or surprise endings. In fact, they may be pretty predictable. But if you can forgive them that, you might enjoy these wholesome movies that all recognize and celebrate the importance of growing. All three movies I’ll discuss are…

The shade tables at your favorite garden center offer a full gamut of perennials with foliage as their main feature. (Picture the intricate fronds of hardy ferns, the bold, broad leaves of giant hostas, the polka dots on pulmonaria.) We’ve learned well to combine foliage perennials for texture and color in shaded spaces, yet this strategy isn’t as often employed in the sun—likely because there we have many more options of plants with flowers as the main draw. Still, wouldn’t it be nice to mix in some leafy delights? To get started, here are a few perennials and shrubby plants that like the sun and contribute interesting color, shape or texture through their leaves. If you look beneath the sun tables’ blooms on your next plant-shopping trip, you’ll likely find…

NOTES FROM THE GARDEN I ENJOY TAKING A BREAK from yard maintenance over a New England winter. It gives me time to enjoy other pursuits, travel and reflect on what I would like to do with my yard in the future. While getting revitalized last year in the land of palms and papayas, I decided that it would be nice to kick off summer with a bang, having an absolute blaze of floral color to greet guests that I entertain around the Fourth of July. To that end I decided to expand my use of two very reliable varieties of lilies that I already had here and there in the yard. Neither has ever been prone to any disease or insect damage and both prolifically provide plenty of stock for…