Description
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Blue bottle-like or oval balloon blooms in late summer
Blue bottle-like or oval balloon blooms in late summer
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Note: This is a plant not currently for sale. This is an archive page preserved for informational use.
Blue bottle-like or oval balloon blooms in late summer
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Note: This is a plant not currently for sale. This is an archive page preserved for informational use.
Large, nodding flower heads with recurved petals white, glowing pinkish in August, fragrant.
Size: 3-4’ x 12”
Care: Sun to part shade in moist, acidic soil
Lilium was named for the Greek word for smooth, polished referring to its leaves. This species introduced to Europe by Carl Peter von Thunberg around 1777. Von Thunberg (1743-1828), student of Linnaeus at Uppsala University in Sweden. He made three trips to the Cape of Good Hope 1772-1775 where he collected about 1000 new species, Java and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) 1777 and 15 months in Japan (1775-1777) where he befriended local doctors who gave him hundreds of plants new to Western horticulture. He succeeded Linnaeus as professor of medicine and botany at Uppsala. Knighted by Swedish King Gustav. Grown at America’s 1st botanic garden, Elgin Botanic Garden 1811. L.H. Bailey (1935) highly recommended this lily as “(o)ne of the most beautiful and satisfactory of all lilies, robust, permanent (and) easily grown…”
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Cheerful, small white daisies flower all summer and autumn.
Size: 18-24” x 12”
Care: Full sun moist well-drained soil
Native: Europe and Caucasus
Common name “Feverfew” speaks for itself, referring to the plant’s medicinal qualities. The species’ name parthenium comes from Plutarch who claimed that the plant saved the life of a construction worker who fell from the Parthenon. Feverfew was prescribed to remedy coughs, indigestion, congestion, melancholy, hysteria, vertigo, freckles, opium overdoses and for “them that are giddie in the head.” Parkinson. A favorite early cottage garden flower. Pressed specimen in Emily Dickinson’s herbarium.
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Rosette of thick silver-grey leaves with an inch-long terminal tip of each spine and offshoots, knowns as “pups” emerge near the base, even of young plants. Flowers only once & takes +10 years. In Z 5-6 plant in spring to get established.
Size: 18” x 18-28”
Care: sun in well-drained soil. We grow this in Z 5A on the south-facing side of a mound of well-drained soil, with a few large rocks nearby and gravel mulch.
Native: mountains of Arizona and New Mexico.
First Americans in the SW traded baked leaves and buds hundreds of years ago. Roasted stalks,baked buds & water mixed & fermented make pulque, further distilled to make mescal or tequila.
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Pale pink “pussy-toe”, resembling the pads of a kitten’s foot, flowers in early summer, great silvery-gray foliage, good groundcover and rock garden plant.
Size: 2” x 18”
Care: full sun in well-drained soil, drought tolerant
Native: Temperate areas worldwide
Antennaria from the Latin antenna originally referring to the mast of a sailboat. Part of the flower supposedly resembles a butterfly’s antennae. Historically used for medicine as an astringent, a cough remedy and to break fever. First described by German physician and botanical author Leonhard Fuchs (1501-1566). Gertrude Jekyll (1848-1931), mother of the mixed perennial border, planted this in her own rock garden at Munstead Wood and in the Sundial Garden at Pednor House in Buckinghamshire. The pink version, A. dioica rosea, collected in the Rocky Mountains by C.C. Parry before 1860.