I DON’T THINK I’ve read a mystery novel since the “Nancy Drew” books of my long-ago childhood, though I will confess to having watched more than a few who-done-it TV series over the years, most of them from the BBC. But I never noticed how many mystery writers from Edgar Allen Poe to Agatha Christie incorporated elements of the garden into their tales of intrigue.

Marta McDowell picked up on all the clues in their stories, and many others, and put them together in her own latest book, titled “Gardening Can Be Murder” (affiliate link).

In each of her many books, “New York Times” bestselling author Marta McDowell digs into the way that plants have influenced some of our most cherished writers, including Beatrix Potter, Emily Dickinson, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Now she’s focused her latest one on mystery writers, and how they, too, have often drawn influence from the garden and its plants.

What better place than a garden to bury a body…and oh, all those poisonous plants and sharp tools!

Plus: Enter to win a copy of Marta’s new book by commenting in the box near the bottom of the page.

Read along as you listen to the Nov. 20, 2023 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

‘gardening can be murder,’ with marta mcdowell

https://robinhoodradioondemand.com/podcast-player/36743/gardening-can-be-murder-book-a-way-to-garden-with-margaret-roach-nov-20-2023.mp3

Margaret Roach: It’s funny, when I first saw the title of your newest book, “Gardening Can Be Murder,” I thought maybe it referred to the way I feel after a long day of spring or fall cleanup at my advancing age.

Marta McDowell: Well, of course, it means that, too. But yes, and I will say, of all my books, I think this is the first one that Timber has used my exact title, so I really view this as a-

Margaret: Timber Press, your publisher. That’s funny. So they went with the title.

Marta: … a small triumph.

Margaret: Yeah. So I mean, is there any genre that you don’t read? I mean, or maybe I should ask, is your filter for what you do read for something that makes your reading list, determining first if the author or characters in the book have a relationship with plants? Because I mean, you really have gone all through different types of writing, children’s writing, and now, mystery writing, poets. [Laughter.] Amazing.

Marta: Well, that was kind of accidental, Margaret, because it was total serendipity, I bumped into the fact that Emily Dickinson was a gardener on this kind of really offbeat trip to Amherst, Massachusetts. It was kind of an unintentional trip. And that opened this … It’s like, the light bulb comes on [laughter]. It’s a very cartoon moment. And I always say, Emily Dickinson changed my life, because from then on, it was like, oh, are there other authors who gardened? This is really interesting to me, and maybe there’s a book in it, or at least an article.

Margaret: Well, and this one seems like … This is one that I never would have thought of, to tie all of these connections. And of course, you make the case in the book, over and over and over again, you give us examples, but I never would’ve thought of it. Yeah, so pretty fascinating.

Marta: [Laughter.] It might be the fault of WGBH in Boston, because I watched a lot of those mystery series that came on, it was in the ’80s. I remember Gene Shalit introducing them, all the way up to Alan Cumming, and of all the people in between. And an early series was “Brother Cadfael,” which is an Alice Peters … the pen name for Edith Pargeter. She was in the way west of England, very close to the Welsh borders, and she wrote these historical mysteries set in the 12th century in a Benedictine abbey. Talk about piling things on.

And so, that kind of always stuck with me. It was played by Derek Jacoby, a really good series. And … I don’t know, it was much later on. That doesn’t answer your question; I do read lots of things that don’t have gardening in them. Yes, absolutely [laughter].

Margaret: O.K., so it’s not a requisite.

Marta: No, no, no, I’m apparently reading a book by Muriel Spark, called “Memento Mori,” which is very good.

Margaret: Yeah, so the subhead on the cover of “Gardening Can Be Murder” reads, “How Poisonous Poppies, Sinister Shovels, and Grim Gardens Have Inspired Mystery Writers.” And within, you have these different chapters in the book, sort of grouping things.

But the garden, as you pointed out, is a good place to hide a body [laughter]. It’s a source of poisons; there’s a lot of sharp tools.

But again, I never thought of that. But it’s funny, it reminded me of a conversation I had years ago with a scientist at the University of New Mexico, who studies host-parasite evolution, like creatures that parasitize other creatures, and especially this one type of nematode relative, these hairworms, these things called nematomorphs, that parasitize, and then, zombie-fy creatures; they turn other creatures into zombies [laughter]. Yeah, I’m not kidding.

Marta: We do plant horror, that is really amazing.

Margaret: Yeah, so they lay their eggs in crickets or beetles or grasshoppers, and turn those into zombies [laughter]. And so, science-fiction writers would approach this scientist to ask him to explain the process so that they could make their science fiction writing more authentic.

And so, in a way, it reminded me of your story of these mystery writers who wanted to have these accurate portrayals, whether it was of the plants or the processes, or whatever, that inspired them.

Some of the mystery writers you include in the book don’t just use elements of the garden in the stories that they weave, but they garden themselves. Like I didn’t know that Agatha Christie was a gardener, not just her Miss Marple character, who had plant references; she had plant references, right?

Marta: Right, so Agatha Christie is one of these authors, you got to love her. If you go to a bookstore today—and I hope all of your listeners have their favorite local indie bookstore that they support—and you look on the shelves in the mystery section, invariably, you’ll see a solid representation of Agatha Christie, who died in the 1970s. I mean, the woman, the author, has legs [laughter]. They keep doing adaptations, there’s a new Kenneth Branagh film that was an adaptation of Agatha Christie. And that’s fabulous, and the fact that she gardened, I think, really added to it for me.

I knew that she had some education in poisons because of being an apothecary or working for an apothecary during the war. But she also grew up in a home with extensive gardens; her grandmother had a rose garden that she adored. And in later life, Agatha Christie bought a home very close to her childhood home in South Devon. And Greenway appears in some of her books in very vivid descriptions, although it’s not called that. And her husband had a very extensive collection of rhododendron, so Greenway, which is now a National Trust property, on my list of places to go visit, because I’m sure there’s a great gift shop, right?

Margaret: Right. She loved camellias, too, correct?

Marta: Yes, camellias and rhododendron. So I think when they acquired the property, they already had quite a few plants, but they really extended that.

Margaret: And in some of her books, the Miss Marple character drew inferences from horticultural, so to speak, or botanical things as well.

Marta: Absolutely, so Miss Marple can sling around botanical Latin, and she has very definite feelings about plants, which most gardeners do. It’s like, she liked flowers, not vegetables; I like them both. And I think maybe Christie can be credited with sort of setting that standard for the village murder mystery that includes a cottage garden, and there are a lot of them. I think that the grayer I get, the more Miss Marple appeals to me.

Margaret: Well, Nathaniel Hawthorne—and there’s that last name, Hawthorne, which is botanical—I mean, he had great gardens, as well, yes?

Marta: Yes. Yeah, those people that hung out in Concord, Massachusetts, I think there must’ve been something about the water there. It’s kind of like the Bloomsbury group. And Henry David Thoreau dug Nathaniel Hawthorne’s garden for him [laughter].

Margaret: Oh my goodness, I had no idea.

Marta: Yeah. Yeah, really extraordinary, yeah, so Thoreau was Emerson’s gardener, too. You go like, this is really strange and wonderful. Anyway, Hawthorne wrote this wonderful story … And he is not your classic detective fiction writer, but mysterious, gothic kind of books. And one of his stories is called “Rappaccini’s Daughter.”

It’s set in Padua, and Padua has the world’s oldest continually operating, I should say, botanic garden, at least in Europe. And so, he sets the garden in Padua, I think for that reason, because the owner of this garden is an apothecary, and it’s a very mysterious garden and a very potent garden. Not to give it away, but it’s sort of like, if you wanted to look at poison gardens, definitely have “Rappaccini’s Daughter” on your list.

Margaret: And in his real life, isn’t Tanglewood, the music center in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, was that a home of his, Tanglewood? Did I make that up?

Marta: He had a home called Tanglewood, and I think it’s near the Berkshires.

Margaret: O.K., so it’s in that area, it’s just not that actual property, but it’s near there somewhere. But he was from there.

Marta: It is, and it’s a little, almost cabin, you can imagine, yeah, Hawthorne-

Margaret: Oh, interesting.

Marta: … and Sophia … Nathaniel and Sophia out there. And he was trying to write. He wrote these great letters to Melville. Again, they all knew one another.

Margaret: Yeah, fantastic. I loved coming upon Rex Stout in the book, and that might be a less familiar name to some. He was in Connecticut, and he was the author of this series of mysteries, the “Nero Wolfe” mysteries.

But I’m a lifelong fan of his sister, Ruth Stout, which, she was like the original lasagna gardener; one of her books was called “The No-Work Garden,” ha ha, as if there is. But she kind of used everything as mulch and no-till, and I mean, really fascinating. And I think this was back in the ’50s or something.

So I knew about him because I knew about her, not because I knew his mysteries. But in real life, I think he was obsessed with houseplants, and outdoors, he had quite an iris collection or something, yes?

Marta: Yes, he loved tall, bearded irises, and he was that quintessential garden geek who kept really detailed records on every iris variety, and he would rate them and track them from year to year. I wonder if somebody has his garden notebooks, because I think they’d be absolutely fascinating to look through. As far as I know, the property that he gardened on in Danbury is no longer there. The few pictures I found of it looked really, really interesting. I couldn’t travel for this book to do research, because we were having this little thing called a global pandemic.

Margaret: Oh, I remember that, yeah.

Marta: Oh, yeah, and so, I did this whole book from the comfort of my home, looking out my office window at my garden and my neighbor’s garden, and making many, many trips to the library, because God bless librarians, they were in there, I guess in isolation, bagging our books that they got from through the system, and leaving them in little brown paper bags in the back hallway of our library.

Margaret: [Laughter.] Oh, my. So I mean, the “Nero Wolfe” series, I think those mysteries have, over decades, had a couple, or even maybe a few incarnations as TV series, I think including … One version starred Timothy Hutton, but I think Timothy Hutton wasn’t Nero Wolfe, the detective, but his sidekick.

Marta: Right, he was Archie … Yeah, he was Archie Goodwin, right? So again, from really early on, there’s been this kind of, there’s the detective, and then, there’s the sidekick, a la Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. It helps with the narration and the action to have more than one person. So yes, Archie Goodwin, in fact, William Shatner very briefly played Archie Goodwin, as well. Of course, I think of him as Captain Kirk.

Margaret: Of course, of course. “Beam me up, Scotty.” But yeah, and I think that Nero Wolfe, the fictional detective, was like an orchid fancier, so there was a lot of botanical stuff going on in there, which is interesting.

Marta: Yeah, and beyond fancier, orchids were his life. He was a private sleuth with very high fees so that he could afford his orchid habit and his New York City brownstone. If you’re on West 35th Street, and I forget the actual number, but on the brownstone at the address that the fictional Nero Wolfe lived at, there is a plaque for Nero Wolfe.

Margaret: That’s funny.

Marta: But lots of orchids.

Margaret: I want to talk about some of those poison plants, because that is always fun [laughter]. And you have a number of them in the book, including a couple that you and I both love, we both love opium poppies, the breadseed or opium poppy. And so, that’s one that I think is commonly grown, and is in many seed catalogs, and so forth. But that sort of has also been featured as an element in some of these mysteries over time, yes?

Marta: Yes, opium, both as a sedative, it appears in various Sherlock Holmes stories, and as a poison, certainly in Cadfael, you have poisons with poppies. And opium poppies are potent, and like many potent plants, they have been pharmaceuticals, beneficial pharmaceuticals, less beneficial pharmaceuticals, and poison, all rolled up into one. And then, also, opium also lent that kind of smoky, opium-den character to many Victorian novels and historic mysteries now.

Margaret: And not to mention that it lent seed to a poppy-seed bagel, which is my favorite version of bagel.

Marta: You bet. You bet. In the book, I tell the story, a true story, I went for a job interview, I was getting a job at the time for a county park system. My county has some lovely gardens, and you had to go for this really extensive physical to get this job. And the nurse practitioner who was doing the physical … Oh, I guess it was, “Go pee in a cup.” And she said, have you had a poppy seed bagel over the past two days? And I went, “What?” I said, “No, why?” And she said, “Well, because your drug test will show up positive.” I was like, “Really?”

Margaret: Right, right, right. But I can’t imagine not having them in the garden, just the way they self-sow around, and they’re just so delicate in flower. And then, the pods are so almost indestructible, they’re so strong, and they open up like little shakers. I just love them, I just love them in all their moments.

Marta: Yes, and the pods are all in little containers all over my mantle piece, because-

Margaret: Me, too. Here, too.

Marta: … I love the way they look. It’s a great pass along plant, so if you have friends, you can give them seeds, and you’ll still have plenty. You can ask them for their varieties. Just don’t go chewing on the pods, right?

Margaret: No, probably not. One that I don’t grow, and I’m sure you don’t grow either, but it has sort of become a wild thing in many areas of the country, I think it was originally European, is poison hemlock [Conium maculatum], which is not a hemlock tree or a relative. It’s a relative of the carrot, I think, yes?

Marta: Yes. And I do love umbels; I love flowers with that shape, like a classic Queen Anne’s lace kind of shape. But I grow, maybe by now, too much Zizia, which is a native plant that really loves my garden, and has started to romp around with some level of aggression. But it is a beautiful plant, and blooms for a long time, and then, when it’s done blooming, even now, because we’re right on the verge of everything dying down to the ground, but even now, it still looks really nice in my garden, so the foliage holds up, as well. But you don’t want poison hemlock in your garden.

Margaret: No.

Marta: And even if you grow poison plants, like today, I was relocating foxglove seedlings out of my vegetable boxes, because I have these raised-bed boxes where I grow salad greens and herbs and some cherry tomatoes and things. I was relocating them out of there, because sometimes, someone else in my household will go out to pick the salad greens, and that someone else isn’t a gardener, and I don’t want them accidentally getting foxglove leaves mixed up with the arugula [laughter].

Margaret: Exactly, exactly. So that’s another one, and you write about castor bean [Ricinus communis], which has ricin, the poison ricin, in certain parts of the plant, I guess, and that’s quite a fierce one. I loved that you noted in the book that Harry Truman’s daughter, who was a mystery writer, incorporated castor bean into one of her plots, and so did various other writers. I didn’t even know that little anecdote.

Marta: Yes, yes, Margaret Truman wrote a “Capital Crimes” series. I think she had some help with a ghost writer. But they’re fun to read, and obviously, of the period. And yes, she absolutely uses that as the murder weapon in one of her stories.

Margaret: Yeah, it’s a great plant, I mean, it’s a majestic, kind of crazy plant. I was talking to a writer, essayist and poet Ross Gay, recently, on the occasion of his newest book. And he’s a keen gardener, and he has it kind of self-sowing around his place, he and his partner do, and they have to pull some of them out, because I mean, the leaves are gargantuan, also, and it almost can create shade, it’s such a big … Yeah, yeah, it almost looks tropical.

Marta: And in one season. Yeah, in one season. That’s the astounding thing. So I mean, when you get the seeds, you go like, O.K., well, this is going to be some kind of plant, because the seeds are really big. And I see it in community gardens, which always surprises me a bit, because most people are growing edibles in community gardens, and it always makes me wonder if they know. I see in the garden centers, always right around October, they’ll start bringing out the monkshood, and you go, that’s really toxic.

Margaret: The Aconitum, yes. But they’re so beautiful, I mean, in the fall, to have that sort of … Well, the beautiful dark purple. I mean, they come in different colors, I guess, different shades, but they’re gorgeous, the aconitums.

Marta: They are absolutely gorgeous, and yet, I do think maybe they ought to have some little warning. There’s a nonprofit website called poison.org, and on it, it has: This really happened. And you do see plant poisons showing up in accidental and deliberate poisonings.

Margaret: Yeah. Well, Agatha Christie used the monkshood, I think, in at least one of her plot twists, yeah?

Marta: Yep, absolutely, and even one of the Brother Cadfael’s is called “Monk’s Hood,” for obvious reasons, yes.

Margaret: Oh, boy, I’ve stepped right into that one. There’s a couple of others… I mean, Taxus, the yews, you give an anecdote in the book that your mother reminded you as a child not to eat the little red berries, right?

Marta: That’s right, although, actually, the red part is not toxic, the aril, but the seed inside is, so she was right. I mean, I wasn’t likely to go chewing on the yew bushes in front of the house, but she knew that.

Margaret: No, but it can be attractive. It’s gleaming and colorful, and stands out, so a child might go and pick one and think it’s like a strawberry or a raspberry or something.

Marta: You bet. You bet.

Margaret: So do you read mysteries? Are you a mystery reader? I’m not. As I said in the beginning, I do watch series.

Marta: Yeah, I’m a really eclectic reader, so I often reach for a mystery as a kind of brain candy. I’ll read fiction and nonfiction, but then, I’ll feel like reading a murder mystery; they’re usually fun. I don’t like stalker mysteries, I’m not crazy about these really intense thrillers, although I read them sometimes. Ruth Ware, I’m always at the edge of my seat, and I never guess the ending. But you know everybody’s different, and some people love those.

And this was just a lot of fun to put together, I found lots of different mystery writers that I didn’t know. And it was strangely crowdsourced, because every time I would mention to a group, at the time, I was doing them all on Zoom, but I’d mentioned to a group, oh, I’m working on this book about crime fiction and horticultural themes, someone would get in touch with me and go, well, here are a dozen that I really enjoy [laughter].

Margaret: Oh my goodness, O.K. I see you got people going.

Marta: Yes, so there are people who just read them nonstop. My sister reads every series and every book in the series.

Margaret: Well, Marta McDowell, the author, most recently, of “Gardening Can Be Murder,” I’m always glad to talk to you and get some reading suggestions. But this is a funny one, this surprised me. Like I said, I thought it was about how I feel after a hard day of gardening [laughter].

Marta: Yeah, a friend of mine did the illustration, Yolanda Fundora, and I think they’re fantastic.

Margaret: Yeah, they’re adorable, so we’ll put some of those with the transcript. And I’ll talk to you again soon, I hope. Thanks.

more with marta mcdowell

All our previous conversations, including Emily Dickinson and more

(Illustrations from the book are by Yolanda Fundora. Author photo by Sarma Ozols.)

enter to win a copy of ‘gardening can be murder’

I’LL BUY A COPY of “Gardening Can Be Murder” for one lucky reader. All you have to do to enter is answer this question in the comments box below:

Any mysteries on the bedside table over there, or poison plants in the garden? Tell us more.

No answer, or feeling shy? Just say something like “count me in” and I will, but a reply is even better. I’ll select a random winner after entries close Tuesday November 28, 2023 at midnight. Good luck to all.

(Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)

prefer the podcast version of the show?

MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 14th year in March 2023. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the Nov. 20, 2023 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

Source: awaytogarden.com

Whether you’re a “Swiftie” or just a gardener looking for inspiration, Taylor Swift’s favorite flowers will be music to your ears.

Source: birdsandblooms.com

Flowers are a must-have for any garden. From classic roses to exotic orchids, this article covers the most popular types of flowers that you can grow in your own garden.

Annuals: Seed-grown plants that complete their life cycle in a single growing season, such as marigolds, zinnias, and impatiens. Good for containers and shady gardens.

Bring a bit of your fall garden indoors. Many of your fall flowering perennials make great cut flowers to enjoy in arrangements for your home and bouquets to share with others.

Harvest your flowers early in the morning whenever possible. This is when they are fully hydrated, helping to extend their vase life. Early evening is the next best time, but any time you need to cut your flowers will work.

Take along a clean bucket of water and a sharp pair of bypass pruners or snips to the garden. Immediately place the flowers in the water to help prolong their vase life.

Picking flowers at the right stage for the variety you are cutting is important to ensure the flowers showcase their best display and will last the longest in your arrangements. In general, spike-type flowers should be harvested when one-fourth to one-half of the individual flowers on the spike are open. Daisy-type flowers like rudbeckias, coneflowers, Heliopsis and Helenium are harvested when the flowers are fully open.

Asters and golden rods make a great combination in the garden as well as a vase. Harvest the golden rod as soon as the flower color is visible with half of the individual flowers in the cluster open. Look for and pick asters when one-fourth of the flowers in the cluster are open to enjoy them for as many as 7 to 12 days.

The native Agastache, you may know as lavender or anise hyssop, is a pollinator favorite and makes an excellent addition to flower arrangements. Wait for one-half to two-thirds of the flowers on the spike to open before picking. With proper harvesting and care, these flowers can last 6 to 10 days in your arrangement.

Watch as the individual flowers on the Liatris spike open from the top down. Harvest these when less than half of the flowers at the top of the spike are open and the remainder are in bud.

Once rudbeckias and coneflowers shed their petals, which are actually non-fertile ray flowers, the remaining seed heads still make an attractive addition to fall bouquets. Don’t overlook the wispy seed heads and foliage of ornamental and native grasses growing in the garden. These can be harvested at any time after the seed head emerges and last about a week.

Consider adding a few seed pods for added fall flare in your bouquets. The pods of native baptisia and milkweed as well as Siberian iris are a few to try.

Condition fresh flowers before arranging to further extend their vase life. Set the flowers in tepid water and place them in a cool place out of direct sunlight for at least several hours and preferably overnight before arranging.

Recut the stems on a 45-degree angle to the desired length when creating your arrangements. The angled cut prevents stems from sitting flat on the bottom of the vase, exposing more surface area to absorb water. Remove the lower leaves that would otherwise end up submerged in the water in the vase. Foliage in the water encourages microbial growth that can shorten the vase life of your cut flowers.

Always use a clean vase filled with fresh water. Add a floral preservative to the water to further extend the vase life of your flowers. Change the water often to keep flowers looking good for as long as possible. Remove individual flower stems as they fade and rearrange the remaining ones that still look fresh. Recut the stems as needed to keep the flowers absorbing water and lasting longer.

Add your own perennial flower favorites and evaluate how they perform as cut flowers. Make a few notes on those that worked well and do a bit of research to improve the vase life of those that did not. Even a short-lived arrangement will generate a smile and brighten your mood when bringing a bit of your garden indoors.

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Source: minotdailynews.com

Popular Flower Types

With thousands of shapes, colors and varieties, flowers offer a versatile way to establish a garden’s style. Some blossoms, such as orchids, mean thoughtfulness, refinement and love.

Periwinkle, with its bluish purple or white blooms, is a hardy ground cover. It thrives in cool, sheltered locations with good drainage. Plant seeds in spring or fall.

As the autumn season progresses, many of our annual and perennial flowers are sporting seed heads or fruit.

If you examine the tops of spent flower spikes, you will usually see a nice seed head with lots of seeds — plenty for next year’s crop of flowers. Collecting flower seeds from your favorite plants is a fun and rewarding pastime, and growing plants from seed is not only easy, but economical.

It is not difficult to collect and save seeds from your garden. Many annuals and perennials like cockscomb, zinnias, black-eyed Susans, cleome (Spider flower) and hollyhocks can simply be harvested and dried to use next year.

You can also save seeds from vegetables like pumpkins and squash, but be sure not to save hybrid varieties, as they are often patented. Also, you may not get what you expect when and if the hybrid seeds bear fruit.

Knowing when to harvest garden seeds is the first step to saving plants for future use.

Once flowers begin to fade at the close of the season, most flower seeds are ripe for picking. Seed harvesting should be done on a dry and sunny day. Once seedpods have changed from green to brown and can be easily split, you can begin collecting flower seeds. Many people choose to gather seeds while deadheading plants in the garden bag for easy planting next year.

There are many specialty boxes and containers available for sorting and organizing your collections, but it is also very easy just to store your seeds in their paper bags in a cool, dry place for the winter. Use a closet or cabinet somewhere in your home, making sure the humidity is low.

If you have the room, another alternative is to store your seeds in the refrigerator. However, never freeze them. Many seeds will stay viable for a couple of years, even if you don’t put them in the refrigerator.

Usually, the older seeds get, the fewer will germinate, but you may still get a few plants from very old seeds. One way to check seeds’ viability is to wet a paper towel and fold seeds between layers of wet towel. In a few days, those seeds still viable will sprout and can be planted. Be sure not to let the towel dry out, but don’t keep it too wet either, or the seeds will rot.

When you get ready to clean your seeds in preparation for planting, remove them from their storage bags, being sure to handle them carefully. Sort and clean one variety at a time so you don’t mix them up.

Place them on a large sheet of paper or smooth cardboard; be sure to retrieve any seeds that may have fallen to the bottom of your bags. Gently rub seed heads between your fingers to separate the seeds from the chaff, stems and old flower heads. Clearing this debris will keep it from decaying when you sow the seeds.

Once you’ve separated your seeds from the chaff, gently tilt the paper or cardboard so the seeds will run down to one end. Collect them and store in a small envelope or plastic storage bag.

Many gardens and parks will let you harvest seeds from their gardens now as well. Simply ask a caretaker or ranger if it is okay to gather seeds, and where you might find them.

Next spring, you can sow your seeds either outdoors or indoors for a whole new crop of plants.

Source: normantranscript.com

Popular Flower Types

From classic roses to exotic orchids, there are many different types of flowers to choose from. Each bloom has its own unique meaning, but some of the most popular flowers symbolize purity, fecundity, and love.

Hemerocallis, or daylilies, are perennial plants with daisy-like flowers in a range of colors. These hardy spring bloomers grow well in most USDA Zones.

I recently came across an article in my wife’s The English Garden magazine (September 2023 edition) in which the author was regaling the many attributes of one of my favorite perennials: Persicaria amplexicaulis, or fleece flower, as it is known more commonly. Turns out the Brits like them just as much as this Yank.

The truth is that I have enjoyed several species of fleece flowers for many years. Some I have grown for their colorful foliage, like Painter’s Palette and Brush Strokes; others for their ground-hugging qualities, like Dimity; and still others for their outsized presence in the garden, like Persicaria polymorpha, Giant Fleece Flower. The varieties grown for their floral production mostly hail from China and the Himalayas, whereas the ones that produce the most interesting foliage are derived from a variety native to the southeast United States called Persicaria virginiana.

Fleece flowers are also known as knotweeds, which might put the fear of God into any self-respecting gardener. The good news is that most of them are easily managed and, while vigorous, are not invasive. The one exception, unfortunately, is Japanese knotweed, which was introduced to the United States a couple hundred years ago and is now in almost all 48 states and several regions of Canada. Sometimes referred to as Japanese bamboo, it is actually somewhat attractive and gives a tropical feeling to a garden, but oh my gosh, it is a thug that is difficult to control and will choke out everything in its path. Needless to say, it is on the noxious weed list in almost every state in the nation and cannot be sold, so there is no need to worry about accidentally purchasing it, unless it sneaks into one of those plant sales by the many well-intended gardening groups, who don’t always realize what they are selling.

Getting back to the varieties I love, I currently have five different ones in my new garden, three of which I propagated and brought from my old garden and two that I recently purchased from my favorite garden center. Painter’s Palette boasts leaves that are “marbled and splashed with creamy white, yellow and a touch of pink, with each leaf having a large central chocolate-red chevron,” according to the Missouri Botanical Garden. It prefers some afternoon shade to look its best and will throw out a few seedlings every year, but it is not problematic. Brushstrokes is another one I grow for its foliage, which is velvety-green with a dark chevron in the middle. Sadly, both of the above varieties have become hard to find in the industry.

As for flowers, Persicaria a. Firetail was the standard-bearer for years but has now been surpassed by varieties like Tarus with blood-red flowers, Orange Field with glowing coral flowers (this is the one I currently have), Fat Domino (recent Award of Garden Merit winner from Wisley in England) and several others that will eventually find their way into garden centers. Be patient.

Probably my current favorite is one called Golden Arrow, which has dark red flowers that persist for four months (that pollinators flock to) atop golden-yellow foliage that appears chartreuse in afternoon shade. I have yet to meet a yellow-leafed plant that I didn’t like.

Finally, for a fabulous, easy-to-grow ground cover, you can’t beat Dimity with its glossy, green leaves that hug the ground and form a dense mat that is punctuated with 12-inch-tall spikes of pink flowers, which eventually fade to a rusty red and persist all winter. The foliage also takes on a reddish tone in the winter. All it requires is consistent moisture to be happy.

So, there you have it, a brief introduction to fleece flowers — easy to grow, long-blooming, carefree perennials that will add interest to any perennial bed. Let the hunt begin!

Free event

The current free gardening event at Sunnyside Nursery in Marysville is its annual Customer Appreciation Week, which runs through Sunday, Sept. 24. For more information, go to www.sunnysidenursery.net/classes.

Steve Smith represents Sunnyside Nursery in Marysville and can be reached at sunnysidenursery@msn.com.

Source: heraldnet.com