Every December the same green-and-red silhouette appears on a million cards, wreaths and mantels — and most people could not tell you a single thing about the living plant behind it. Holly is not just Christmas décor that happens to grow: it is one of the world’s great garden genera, more than 400 species strong,…
Every garden has one plant with a reputation, and datura’s is earned twice over: at dusk it opens huge white trumpets that pour scent into the night air, and in the same leaves and seeds it carries some of the most potent poisons in the plant kingdom. Temples in India offer it to Shiva; soldiers…
Every garden has a first page of the year, and this is the flower that writes it: a single white drop on a green stem, nodding through frost in the bare weeks when nothing else dares. The snowdrop does not wait for spring — it starts without it, flowering in January and February, sometimes pushing…
Here is the world’s most successful seasonal disguise: a Mexican shrub wearing its leaves painted red, sold by the tens of millions every December, and thrown away by January by people who never learn it is a perennial. The poinsettia is not really a flower at all — the scarlet stars are coloured leaves called…
Every flower shop knows this one’s secret, even if half its customers cannot pronounce its name: the alstroemeria is the bouquet that refuses to die. Two weeks in a vase is normal, three is not a record, and the blooms keep opening bud after bud while costlier flowers fold in days. Gardeners know it by…
One of the garden’s great jokes is that the most beloved fruit starts life as the smallest, humblest flower — five white petals no bigger than a fingernail, scattered in drifts over low green leaves in spring, so easy to overlook that most gardeners step over them on the way to the roses. Then the…
Most flowers compete to be the brightest thing in the garden. The black bat flower does the opposite — it is the one bloom guests cross the room to stare at, a near-black flower shaped like a bat in flight, with whiskers trailing beneath it like something out of a gothic fairy tale. It does…
Most yellow flowers open with the sun and close against the evening. The sundrop inverted the schedule — or rather, it never read it. A sundrop is an evening primrose that opens its lemon-yellow cups in broad daylight and keeps them open through the hottest hours, a spill of sunshine at ground level from late…
One plant in this whole series is famous for two completely different reasons, in two different costumes. In a cottage border it is the shamrock of Ireland and the four-leaf charm of every childhood meadow; in a modern suburb it is the rebel lawn — the ground cover people sow on purpose where their grandparents…
Every garden has the impossible corner: the dark side of the house, the shade of the fence, the ground under the tree where grass gives up. Impatiens is the flower that moved into those corners and lit them. Mounds of flat, jewel-bright blooms pour over shade beds and hanging baskets from late spring to frost,…
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