THOSE “OTHER” RASPBERRIES
Two Eye-Catching Raspberries
Some raspberries are for eating; others are mostly for looking at — the plants, that is. Although you might not want to pluck fruits from these lookers, you might want to plant them in your flower garden. Two different kinds of good looking raspberry plants were recently staring out at me from the woods along a roadside.
The first of these, flowering raspberry (Rubus odoratus), also known as thimbleberry, could be mistaken for a wild rose.
Flowering raspberry
Its large flowers, however, have broader petals than those of a wild rose, and while the rose’s petals are — well — rose colored, a purple tinge makes the petals of flowering raspberry downright lurid. Read more
WHAT GAVE SUSAN HER BLACK EYE?
It’s All Botanical
What gave Susan her black eye? Her central florets, that’s what. Black-eyed Susan flowers, blooming now and for the next few weeks, are actually made up of two kinds of florets, or small flowers. In the center of each flower are small, tubular flowers called disk florets. Those tubular petals are dark. Hence the black eye.
Black-eyed Susan disk flowers
Florets around the outside edge of the eye are called ray florets, and each one has one petal, large and orange-yellow. The petals point outward around the black eye, like a sunburst. The disk flowers and the ray flowers give black-eyed Susans the characteristic look of a daisy, “day’s eye,” which is the origin of the word. Read more
DINNERPLATE DAHLIAS, AND MORE
Flowers are the ephemerals of the garden. The plants vanish without a trace at the end of each season, so you would hardly think them worth pruning during their brief stay. Still, pruning can help make more flowers, as well as either make the plants bushier or increase the size of individual flowers. So grab your hand shears and sharpen your thumbnail and let’s go for a stroll among the flowers.
Dahlia, Kelvin Floodlight
A Single Pinch’ll Do It
Pinching out the tips of growing stems stops, at least temporarily, their growth, in so doing coaxing growth of side shoots. The result: bushier plants. Even though plants Read more
