I am beside myself trying to find plants to put in a brick flower bed. The flower bed was built with the house, in 1973, when we were 24 and built this house. I am now at the point of planting something lush, and perrenial, and not much maintenence. I see these split leaf plants in yards all around here in southeast Louisiana, zone 9, but don’t know what they are called. My bed is about 20 inches deep, and L shaped, about 10 x 6. It is 20 inches deep. What can I plant that will look good and not die out in winter completely? The 6 foot area is along the front porch and not against a wall. The 10 ft is against the brick. The bed faces the ENE.
Thanks if you can help. Jeanette from Louisiana

This weekend the Mississippi Native Plant Society will meet in Oxford, Mississippi. Registration will begin at 9:30 at the Oxford Public Library on Saturday 10/27/07. E-mail me at gail@gailbarton.com for details.

I am by no means a purist, but I do love native plants and I would guess that at least half the plant materials in my garden are native. When I first began to learn native plants, Caroline Dormon’s books were among my best resources. Caroline Dormon wrote Wildflowers Native to the Deep South and Natives Preferred. She was a very talented artist who illustrated all her own books with watercolors and line drawings. She also illustrated Elizabeth Lawrence’s Gardens in Winter.

After Miss Dormon passed in the ’60’s, her friends purchased her home and land near Saline, Louisiana. They established a foundation and turned the property into a nature preserve. Briarwood is managed by Richard and Jessie Johnson. The Johnsons live on the site. Richard grew up working odd jobs around Miss Dormon’s garden and knew her very well. He and Jessie are kind and wonderful people who tell great stories about Miss Dormon.

I am surprised by how few people have visited Briarwood. To plan your road trip, go to the Briarwood web site at http://www.cp-tel.net/dormon/

A few months after Hurricane Katrina, I had the bright idea to use some of the refuse wood to grow shitake mushrooms.

I did some research and found that I had plenty of the right type (hardwood oak, sweetgum, etc.), age (recently fallen) and size wood.  All the fallen wood that I wanted to use was in a good shady growing area with a source of water nearby.

I ordered the spores or spawn from www.fungiperfecti.com and they arrived incorporated into short wooden dowels. I drilled holes in the logs and tapped the dowels into the holes with a hammer.   Then I just left the logs alone.  Over the past couple of years, whenever the weather begins to get cool and we have a little rain, I harvest a bumper crop.  I gathered my biggest crop ever last week.  It is pictured here.  If I were more efficient, I could soak logs overnight and force a “bloom” of mushrooms more often.

Meanwhile we’ve given tons of mushrooms away to our friends.  Richard has cooked many wonderful meals including a righteous mushroom gravy with mashed potatoes a couple of nights ago.

Confederate roses are actually large hibiscus relatives that bloom in fall.

The normal form in my part of the state is the pink one pictured here. Notice the bumble bee dozing inside the flower.

I also have one that opens white and turns pink as the flower matures. This is quite appropriate since the Latin name for confederate rose is Hibiscus mutabilis which probably means mutating hibiscus.

These old fashioned flowes are definitely passalongs. In early winter, the cane-like stalks are cut to the ground. Most folks save a few, often in the garage in a bucket of water. Roots form in this frost-free area by spring and new starts can be shared with friends.

When this imposing perennial is in bloom, it can reach a height of 10 feet or more and be covered with dozens of flowers. It’s a traffic stopper!

This weekend I drove from Meridian to West Point down Highway 45. I saw large stands of narrowleaf sunflower all along the highway near Lauderdale. I also hear through the grapevine that Dr. Dirt’s majestic sunflower display is in full swing. For details about visiting Dr. Dirt’s garden in Edwards, Mississippi, check out his new soon to be website at www.dirtsgarden.com

Every year I optimistically plant a vegetable garden. I spend too much money on the seed and get to busy to do the high maintenance weeding required. I make a few harvests and then the garden ends up as a weed patch. Still - it is very satisfying to eat those $10.00 tomatoes and $5.00 peppers.

I have an ongoing argument with my husband Richard. He believes that a vegetable garden should only contain edibles. I always have to stick a few flowers in. I planted a row of zinnias in my vegetable garden last April. Now that the tomatoes have declined and the garden is full of weeds, I am still harvesting zinnias for my flower arrangements.

The varieties I chose were ‘Benary’s Giant’ which comes in mixed colors and ‘Envy’, a green zinnia. A lovely orange zinnia from the mix is pictured here.

They say that flowers are food for the soul. At this point the zinnias are the only food coming from my garden!

We’ve spent a very lazy 3 day weekend mostly hanging on the porch. Our porch is tiny. It seats 4 fairly comfortably or 5 good friends knee to knee.

The porch overlooks our tiny pond. One of our main diversions this weekend has been to watch our 3 fish (George, Cynthia and Sheba) swim aimlessly around the pond.

A 20 year old Persian ironwood tree (Parrotia persica) has grown up and around the area - giving the illusion that the porch is nestled in the tree’s branches. The parrotia is a fine specimen in which to nestle. It was a gift from the late J. C. Raulston and is said to be Parrotia persica ‘Pendula” which means that it is supposed to be a weeping form.

Our Perdian ironwood is not really a weeping tree. Michael Dirr describes it in his Manual of Woody Landscape Plants in a somewhat derogatory fashion. Dirr believes that instead of weeping, the ‘Pendula’ form is “nothing more than a side shoot, i.e. plagiotropic growth with a more or less horizontal nature”. In other words, it was grown from a cutting taken off a side branch and tends to list in the same direction as its parental unit. Personally, I think it is more beautiful than any weeping tree I have ever seen.

The anole lizards love it. They scamper around the parrotia and over into the black bamboo grove. From there, they enjoy sunning on a wonderful ceramic head (sometimes known as The Optician), that was given to us by Marc Pastorek.

There’s lots to see on the porch if you just slow down long enough to look.

The irony of this situation is that I’m sitting here at the computer blogging instead of hanging on the porch.

Our native plant society made a field trip to south Mississippi a few weeks ago. One of the highlights of the trip was seeing the silky camellia (Stewartia malacodendron) in full bloom. I’ve used the picture here as my screen saver since then.

It’s interesting to view all the flower parts at close range. The stamens are royal purple. The top of the pistil has a untique star shape. It’s just a beautiful flower.

I have a five year plant growing on my creek bank. It looks healthy and has survived some serious drought. However, it has yet to bloom.

We are used to buying flats full of annuals in full bloom but flowering takes a while in the wild. I have an almost 20 year old stand of bigleaf magnolias (Magnolia macrophylla) in my back yard. They bloomed last year for the first time and then skipped this year. Musta needed a rest.

What can I say? I took a blogging break for spring. I’m in a kind of writing rut. I write a gardening column and am stuck if I try to write anything longer/shorter than 2 double spaced pages or if I try to write anything inappropriate for the local paper. So my goal is to begin writing a daily or almost every daily post.

It’s late spring and things have calmed down a bit on the home front. The highlight of my garden right now are the hydrangeas. My vases are full of them and the garden glows with pearly white oakleaf hydrangeas in late evening.

We usually sit on the porch in late evening after work and inhale the enticing aroma of magnolia flowers. Around 6:30 the fragrance wafts through almost every neighborhood mingling with the last musky remnants of privet and Japanese honeysuckle.

Richard and I are particularly lucky to have a righteous grove of sweetbay magnolias growing in a wet area on our land. Sweetbay is one of my favorite native magnolias. I love the lemony overtones of its scent. Its leaves are a little bigger than a bay leaf and have the same spicy aroma when crushed. I’ve heard that country folks use them to season spaghetti sauce. The tree itself has lovely form and bark.

The grove came with the land. Yet another reason that I love native plants!

Rules for Watering Plants Effectively

1. Water slowly at low pressure
2. If hand watering, break the force of the water
3. Water thoroughly so that the root zone is saturated
4. Allow the top inches of the soil to dry before watering again
5. Don’t allow water to accumulate at the bottom of the root zone

For more details on maintaining plant health check out Gardening In The Deep South.

Today is National Teacher’s Day and I would like to dedicate this post to all teachers ( especially my sister, Gail, who I am posting for today) and say “thanks” for making a difference and I hope you reap a hundred harvests.

“If you plan for a year, plant a seed. If for ten years, plant a tree. If for a hundred years, teach the people. When you sow a seed once, you will reap a single harvest. When you teach the people, you will reap a hundred harvests.”
–Kuan Chung