My Virtual Maryland Garden

Some of the plants I'm most proud of are apt to engender perplexity in some garden visitors. The several members of the genus Smilax wh...

You wouldn't know it from the picture, but this is the form of Iris foetidissima with pale yellow flowers. The seed pods are beginning ...

What a charmer this one is! And it's easily grown. Give it what in the old days we called "gladiolus culture" : i.e. plant the...

Several days of cool, dry weather got me into the baking mood. Cool, dry weather is ideal for making puff pastry, and I didn’t let this spel...

The winsome little bloom shown above is the Egret Flower, a tiny Japanese and Korean bog orchid named Habenaria radiata or Pecteilis radiat...

Achimenes 'Cattleya'  On first consideration I shouldn’t like achimenes: the ones I grow are not fragrant, they are not frost...

Wayne wrote to me asking if the colors in the images of the hybrid Japanese morning glories were accurate. I assured him that they were, and...

The Japanese morning glories can be grouped into two sorts: those which are derived only from Ipomoea nil , and those which are hybrids of I...

Of the tropical hibiscus, this one is probably the most widely grown. The flowers now come in a bewildering range of colors, some a far cry ...

There is a range of bulbs which bloom in late summer, before the official start of fall. Many of them are amaryllids, and they bring to the ...

What would summer be without tomatoes, corn, peaches - and crabs, plenty of salty, succulent Chesapeake Bay blue crabs. My niece and her hub...

One of the advantages of gardening green and living next to a park is that all sorts of interesting little creatures move into the garden a...

I don’t remember when I first became aware of garden nasturtiums. They were among the familiar flowers which grew in the neighborhood garden...

I found this little plant, Sedum pachyclados , in a nursery in western Virginia earlier this year. What is there about sedums which makes t...

This startling flower, Tigridia pavonia , has been known in the English-speaking world since at least the sixteenth century: there is a crud...

Our little dog Biscuit provided some unexpected merriment yesterday. Wayne and I were examining a plant of patchouli, Pogostemon cablin : th...

For this gardener there are few pleasures keener than that experienced when he's digging bulbs and big, fat bulbs come out of the ground...

This year I made an effort to inventory the entire bulb collection. I never finished, but I dug and stored so many bulbs that I've heard...

Lilium superbum , which still grows wild here in the greater Washington, D.C. area, is blooming now in the garden. How is it that this lily...

This odd Japanese woodlander is blooming here for the third time this year. It first bloomed in 2000, then again in 2004. As Cardiocrinum g...