Reno gardens showcase old fashioned Jupiter's beard. On my recent trip to Reno I visited both public gardens and private gardens. A plant I saw over and over again was 'Jupiter's beard' or Centranthus ruber. I did not recognize it…
European gardens featured poison ivy. We all know that we need to avoid poison ivy when working in the garden. There was a time, however, when European gardeners cultivated this North American plant. In the book Flora Illustrata (2014) Elizabeth…
Victorian England loved US native plants. During the nineteenth century, the English sometimes included a garden called the 'American Garden', an area in the landscape filled with American native shrubs and perennials. The English loved American native plants, like Rudbeckia…
Differing Views of Nineteenth Century Garden The way to plant a flower garden changed during the nineteenth century. Two American seedsmen wrote differently about how to install a flower garden. Boston seedsman Joseph Breck (1794-1873) wrote The Flower Garden in…
It is nothing new that gardening is subject to fashion, just like food and clothing. The nineteenth century English garden went back and forth between borders of perennials and mass planting of annuals, especially in beds on the lawn. The…