SprottHaus: A Gardener's Journey

I just came into the cool after two hours of (sweating) vigorous soil amending (sweating) and planting (sweating) in the garden.  (Did I mention sweating?)  It feels really good in here.  I might have to stay in the rest of the day.  Oh, who am I kidding?!  The flit of a butterfly's wings, a zipping bee in flight, or the glint of sun off a flower or leaf will catch my couch-bound eye, and I'll have to head back out. One thing I was thinking about while I was out there (sweating), was a plant that has become one of my favorites, Tinantia pringlei .   In our garden, Tinantia pringlei grows happily in full sun and almost as happily in darn near full shade. I acquired mine in 2011 from Big Bloomers Flower Farm in Sanford, NC.  Back then the common name was "speckled wandering jew".  Now it's listed as "spotted widow's tears" and "Mexican perennial dayflower".  (This is why I prefer using botanical nomenclature.)  It's native to the mo...

 In my last post , I talked about daylilies.  More specifically, I talked about hybridizing daylilies.   The act of hybridizing is super easy.  What follows in the coming years sometimes isn't. One of the best pieces of advice I got from a local hybridizer was to be brutal.  Don't save every seedling; few will be truly worth keeping.  Are you KIDDING ME?!  After all the waiting--about three years--to even get to see what you've got... and now I should maybe throw it away?!   Absolutely. Much like a good writer, one of the greatest lessons any gardener can learn is to edit.  As Elizabeth Lawrence once said, seeking out good plant material is as important as getting rid of the bad (super duper paraphrasing; sorry, Libba).  When a friend of hers was lamenting a poorly performing plant in their garden, Libba asked, "Are you cruel enough to be a gardener?"   I think about that quote so, so often.  When my seedlings bl...

Our back yard in 2001.  Meh. When we moved to our property 23 years ago (holy moly, has it already been THAT LONG?!), the landscape was... fine.  The overall design and plant list wasn't horrible .  But as a neophyte plant collector, it bored me to tears.  Although the first full truckload of stuff we moved from our old place was nearly entirely plants, I knew that I needed to wait and watch before making too many wholesale changes to the "new" place.  It's always smarter to understand what's extant and work with that. The same view 23 years later.  At least it's not boring! The previous owners were daylily fans.  I was most definitely NOT a daylily fan.   Who in their right mind would want to grow a plant whose flowers only bloom for a day?! , I thought.  Oh, silly, silly Past Me.  I had no idea how alluring the world of Hemerocallis could be.   That first spring and summer, I watched a couple dozen cultivars bloom in th...