Passion Flowers are some of my absolute favorite plants, and I thought that, it would be fitting to talk about them in honor of the early Easter.  The name for these unique flowers does not refer to romantic love, as the word "passion" is generally used in modern times.  The name for these flowers comes from the 1500's when Christian missionaries named the plant after the Passion of Christ because of its interesting Cross-shaped physical structures.  In much of the world these beautiful plants are called Clock-Flowers or Clock-Faced Flowers.

Almost all Passion Vines are tropical or nearly tropical plants.  Most cannot survive a hard freeze.  Because of this, there is a great demand for Passion Vines that thrive in containers.  When growing Passion Vine in a container, I usually recommend planting in Spring.  This give the plant time to establish itself before being cut back for winter.  Cut the vine back to about six to eight inches when bringing it inside for the cold season, and be sure to get it indoors before the first hard frost.  Keep it in a sunny window (they serve as a cheery little houseplant in the cold months) until the risk of frost is past.  A well-drained container is essential for Passion Flowers, as they can be susceptible to root-rot.

Our Passiflora 'Coral Sea' and Passiflora 'Sherry' were both chosen by Wayside Gardens not only because they are unusually beautiful Passion Flowers and bloom heavily, but also because they do exceptionally well grown in containers in Northern climates.  The brilliant deep red of the 'Sherry' can't be beat for intense color.  Grow this plant in some evening shade to allow the color to appear especially deep.  The 'Coral Sea' is an interesting pink shade that you won't often find on other flowers.  Try this one against a dark backdrop for greater contrast, to make the blooms really pop.

If you're looking for a plant to add interest to your landscape in the winter, you can't do much better than Corylus 'Contorta.'  This interesting shrub takes its unusual common name, Harry Lauder's Walking Stick, from the crooked cane that the legendary Scottish entertainer, Sir Harry Lauder, often used as a performance prop in the early 1900's.  It's a well-deserved moniker, as the Contorta produces some of the most interestingly twisted, corkscrew-like branches of any shrub I've ever seen.  It is an interesting and unusual shrub when it's wearing its leaves in the warm months whose berries are very attractive to birds, but it really comes into its own when it sheds the leaves in the cool part of the year, and those pig's-tail branches are unveiled.  The Contorta looks its best when featured as a specimen, especially when its silhouette is contrasted strongly by a backdrop of snow.  It's a good thing, then, that this unusual shrub is cold-hardy all the way to Zone 3, where the snow is plentiful and the need for winter landscape interest is greatest.  This shrub is a quick-grower, too, that will generally reach a height of around seven feet tall. 

I get asked from time to time what exactly makes Kordes Roses so special, that they get mentioned so often.  There are three very simple answers to that.  The first is that the Kordes Rose lines are some of the most beautiful roses you’ll ever find.  They tend toward the more elegant, simple colors, and many gardeners really appreciate the more subtle, traditional beauty that they represent.  The second reason is that W. Kordes & Sons is one of the oldest rose breeding groups in the world.  They’ve been hybridizing roses for more than a century.  Rose gardening is a culture that is very deeply steeped in tradition, and Kordes represents one of the most entrenched traditions in the world of roses for good reason.  Wilhelm Kordes II was often referred to as "the Grand Old Man of Rose Breeding."  He and his family developed many of the methods that are still dominant in modern rose breeding, and no small amount of the breeding stock used by rose breeders around the world came from varieties originally cultivated by the Kordes family.  No rose breeders have won more European awards than Kordes Roses have.

The third reason that Kordes Roses are so special is probably the most important to the average rose grower.  Kordes Roses are some of the toughest roses you’ll ever find.  They’re bred in Northern Germany, which yields very cold-hardy roses that thrive in much of North America (some are even completely hardy to zone 4).  They are also bred specifically to be resistant to diseases, pests, and fungus, and grown in the those harsh regions without artificial chemicals or growth enhancers.  This yields an incredibly robust rose plant that many rosarians claim is rivaled in toughness only by the Knock Out Roses.  Kordes Roses really are bred to be not just tougher than other roses, but to be some of the toughest plants in your garden.  Wayside Gardens is proud to be one of the only retail sources of Kordes Roses in the United States.

We don’t all have the good fortune to live in Florida or Southern California.  Some of us have to get our limes, lemons, and avocados the hard way: from the grocery store.  However, there is another option for growing warm-climate fruits in not-so-warm areas.  Some smaller varieties of fruit trees do very well in containers, and even produce fruit.  Just because you live in zone 4 doesn’t mean you can’t have a little zone 10 fun.

I love avocados.  They’re extraordinarily healthy, full of all sorts of amazing good-for-you fats and nutrients and such.  But really, it comes down to the very simple fact that they’re absolutely delicious.  I love avocado on just about anything (except for cake), and I’ll rarely turn down guacamole.  The problem is that avocados are pretty expensive, and the ones you find in the store are often second-rate.  Nothing compares to fresh, home-grown avocados, and that’s why the Avocado Don Gillogly is such a great plant.  It doesn’t just survive when grown indoors, it thrives and produces amazing avocados year-round in two crops, right there in your living room.  It will produce its first crop in around a year, which is unusually quick for a fruit tree.  It’s a beautiful, easy to grow plant even without the fruit, and can be left on the patio in warmer months to liven up your garden.

Mexican Thornless Lime

Of course, you wouldn’t want to have those fresh avocados around all the time and not make some great Mexican food, and no Mexican feast can be complete without limes.  The Mexican Thornless Lime tree is another fruit tree that does fantastically indoors, is easy to grow, and produces lots of fruit.  Even better, the blossoms that precede the fruit are both beautiful and carry a lovely fragrance.  The fruit ripens from late summer to early winter, but the evergreen foliage makes this citrus tree a wonderful houseplant year round.

Lemon Meyer Improved

The Meyer Improved lemon tree is a prize as an ornamental houseplant.  A prize that just happens to produce armloads of fantastic, juicy lemons.  The lemons grow in huge clusters of six lemons, which are best thinned to three per cluster, to allow them plenty of room to get big (though those early lemons that you thin can certainly be used in your cooking, too).  Check out my friend (and Master Gardener) Anne Moore’s article for tips on growing Limon ‘Meyer Improved’.

Around here many of us tend to think of Azaleas as a feature primarily of Southern gardens.  Maybe that's because Azaleas are so closely associated with the Masters Golf Tournament (which is played just sixty miles from our Greenwood, South Carolina home), or it could be that many Southerners occasionally assume that anything that they really like must come from the South.  Either way, one thing that I can tell you for sure is that hardy Azaleas are becoming a more and more popular choice outside of the Deep South, and for good reason.  They're the perfect low-maintenance flowering shrub for just about any part-shade area that isn't exposed to harsh winds.  They flower heavily for weeks, usually only need one deep watering a week in drought, and require no pruning to flower.  Many are evergreen, and some, such as the Azalea 'Golden Lights,' thrive all the way to zone 4.

Plant your Azalea bushes shallow.  Their root structures are shallow, and they won't do well too deep.  A good rule of thumb is to just plant them to the same depth as the nursery had them.  They like loose, well-drained soil, so if you're planting them in clay or hard-pack, dig some of that up and add compost, peat, or sand to the soil.  Because the roots are shallow, give them some room without competition. 
Azaleas prefer acidic soil, so if your soil is neutral or alkaline, you would do well to add a bit of sulfer to it to bring that pH up (you're looking for a little over 4.5).  Also, if you're planting them next to a lot of cement, keep an eye on your pH from time to time, as the cement breaking down can add lime to the soil.  Azaleas do best with mulch down to protect them from the cold in winter and to retain some moisture in the summer.  Around here pine straw is the most common mulch used with Azaleas.  It provides great protection, it's inexpensive, it looks natural, and it breaks down enough that it will usually do all the fertilizing that your Azalea bushes need.  You shouldn't need to prune your Azaleas except to shape it to your liking or if it happens to get a dead branch, but if you do prune it do so in the middle or late summer, after the shrub is done flowering.  July is probably best for most areas.  Do not prune later than the end of July unless you have to, as once the weather starts to cool the shrub starts producing its buds for next year's flowers. 

With all the interesting new choices we're getting this year, I find that I keep coming back to flowering vines as a topic.  Between my love of flowering vines and my almost compulsive fascination with unusual blooms, I don't see how I could not write often about some of these great new flowers.

Take these two new roses, for instance.  The Rose Climbing Night Owl is an amazing rich violet, the likes of which you rarely get to see in full sun.  However, this rose has an amazing resistance to fading, so you'll get to enjoy that color even in the hottest of areas.  The deep purple will just keep on coming, too, as this heartily disease-resistant rose is a strong rebloomer that will keep your trellis or fence in those interesting flowers all summer long. 

On nearly the other end of the spectrum is the bright, fun Rose Climbing Candy Land.  While it's just as disease-resistant and profusely blooming, the Candy Land is
certainly a far cry from the Night Owl in color.  These bright pink roses feature interesting white streaks that bring a double-take from anyone that sees them.  The overall effect makes the flowers look, frankly, delicious.  I can easily imagine a confectioner producing a candy that looks nearly like these blooms, though it seems unlikely that even the best candy-maker could produce anything so consistently perfect of form as this plant does.  Maybe the best thing about these new roses is how easy they are.  Rose gardening isn't just for gardeners with all the time in the world anymore, and these two incredibly easy to grow climbing roses are certainly no exception to that trend.  The only question for me this spring is which of these two will be going on my archway.

Several of my coworkers and I were given planted Amaryllis bulbs last week.  The stalks on each were just beginning to make their way into the world.  The obvious move for us was to agree to race, to see whose Amaryllis grew the fastest.  However, the problem with having several Amaryllis plants in the same office led inevitably to an argument: what is the proper plural form of the word "Amaryllis?"
This seems like a question that a group of employees of Wayside Gardens would know, especially garden writers.  However, with questions about plant names, there often isn’t a single simple answer.  The plant names are often either Anglicized Latin or Greek, or Latinized English.  Also, they are usually created by botanists, who are rarely too concerned with the grammar questions they may be creating.  In the case of the plural for Amaryllis, there are four possibilities that we are considering: Amaryllii, Amaryllides, Amaryllises, and Amaryllis.

Amaryllii seems like it could be right, as many words that end with a similar sound are pluralized that way (Fungus, fungi, etc.).  However, words that are pluralized that way generally end in a "us" rather than "is," so I think that it’s safe to count this one out.  Amaryllides makes use of another form of Greek pluralization, and some botanists do use this.  I haven’t actually met any of these botanists, though, and I really don’t think that this is a very common form of the word (interesting fact, though: the word Amaryllis is Greek, and comes from a common girl’s name in Ancient Greece).  Which brings us to Amaryllises or Amaryllis.  The basic question here is: should the word be changed at all in its plural form?  Amaryllis is a genus name, and the general rule in botany is that the genus name is never pluralized, even when it is being used in the collective.  However, this may be an exception to this rule, because the plants that we’re usually referring to when we say "Amaryllis" are not
actually in the genus Amaryllis, which consists of a single species, Amaryllis belladonna, a South African plant more commonly called "Naked Ladies" or "Belladonna Lilies."  The plants more commonly called Amaryllis in the United States is actually of the genus Hippeastrum (which should definitely not be pluralized).  Thus, I think that it is safe to pluralize the word (unless you’re referring to Naked Ladies), and that we should use the English plural form, Amaryllises (or just always call them "Amaryllis bulbs" or "Amaryllis flowers").  Plus, my spell-checker likes that form better.
As to the Great Amaryllis Race of 2008?  I’m winning.

It hasn’t felt much like Spring is coming around here lately, but this morning I noticed that my patch of daffodils next to my driveway is starting to come up.  That was very heartening for me.  Of course, I still have a lot to do in my garden before the weather starts to turn, but I can’t wait for the growing season to get rolling.  The worst part about a gardening hobby (addiction?) is not being able to do it part of the year.  Planning your upcoming plantings helps a great deal, and looking through garden pictures helps some with that seasonal impatience, I find.  Of course I’ve looked through most of my own garden pictures several times already this winter, and I’ve just about worn through my gardening catalogs and magazines.  I find myself searching online for pictures.  I love finding pics of gardens from other parts of the world, but one of my favorite online picture collections is from quite a bit closer to home.  It’s our Wayside Gardens Flickr collection, where several members of our team here at our Greenwood nursery post garden pictures that we’ve taken.  Some of these great pictures are from our gardens at home, but most of them are from our showcase garden, which is just about fifty feet from my office.  It’s open to the public, and during the spring and summer it’s one of the most spectacular gardens in the Southeast.  If you get a chance to visit us in Greenwood, South Carolina, we’d love to have you come stroll through our gardens and garden center.  Until then, cruise over to our little collection of garden photos at Flickr.