Love-in-a-mist might be the most romantic common name in the seed catalogue — and the plant earns it. A flower of cornflower blue floats in a haze of thread-fine, fennel-like foliage, as if it were rising out of green mist; then, as if one good trick were not enough, it retires into a striped, balloon-like…
Some flowers look designed; the protea looks forged. A great artichoke of coloured bracts opens into a pincushion dome of hundreds of thread-like blooms, on shrubs descended from one of the oldest flowering lineages on Earth — a family that was already flowering when the continents were one. It is South Africa’s national flower, Australia’s…
Coreopsis is the prairie’s answer to the question every gardener asks in June: what will flower all summer without asking for anything? The answer comes up gold — daisy after daisy on wiry stems, from late spring until frost, through heat, drought and poor soil, feeding bees all the while and finches after. Its only…
Every winter garden has a moment, somewhere around the darkest weeks of the year, when everything above ground looks finished — and that is exactly when the hellebore opens. Cups of white, plum, apricot and near-black rise through frost and leaf litter as if winter were a rumour, nodding over leathery evergreen leaves that never…
The snake plant has survived more neglect than any plant in cultivation — office corners unwatered for a season, dark hallways, holidays, forgetful owners, and still it stands, sword leaves upright, unbothered. It also carries one of gardening’s rudest nicknames (mother-in-law’s tongue, for the leaf’s sharp point and sharper reputation) and one of its most…
Some flowers shout for a fortnight and vanish. Veronica does something rarer: it opens slender blue candles in early summer, and when you cut them back, it simply lights them again — and again — into autumn. The speedwells are fidelity written as a habit: always there, always blue, always returning. That the plant shares…
Five plants, four families, three continents — one nickname. The dragon flower is whichever plant your grandmother, your nursery catalogue or your continent meant: the snapdragon whose seed pods dry into grinning skulls, the dragon-fruit cactus that opens a foot-wide moonlit bloom for one night, the dragon arum that smells of bad decisions, a shy…
Rain does something to this flower that sounds like folklore and is pure physics: the white petals go clear as glass. Water fills the air pockets inside the petal tissue, the scattering that makes it look white disappears, and the skeleton flower stands in the forest drizzle wearing nothing but its own veins — then,…
One points down from heaven, the other up from the earth — and gardeners have mixed them up for centuries. The angel’s trumpet hangs its great scented bells toward the ground; the devil’s trumpet aims its flowers at the sky. Add the orange trumpet vine swallowing fences whole and the yellow bells of the desert…
Look at a pincushion flower head closely and the name explains itself: a domed cushion of tiny florets, stuck all over with pins — the long stamens that give every butterfly a landing pad and every bee a week of dinners. Scabiosa is the cottage garden’s marathon runner, flowering from late spring to the first…
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