Southern Gardening

Are you looking for some cold weather color besides pansies? I’ve got the answer for you. Voila! The viola. Pansy and viola are close cousins. The pansy flower is bigger, but the viola certainly matches the pansy in color. So why plant viola instead of pansy? One good reason is in my experience, the viola is more cold tolerant. The viola can easily thrive from Thanksgiving all of the way through Easter. Violas come in many colors. Check out this sea of color with sorbet yellow. Like colorful sunsets? Try sorbet orange. Need to brighten up your entire bed?

The Southern Gardening crew likes to highlight curious plants for our Mississippi landscapes. Today we’re at the South Mississippi Branch Station in Poplarville with some unusual options. King Tut papyrus will easily grow to 6 feet tall and features triangular green stems. Each stem is topped by an umbellate inflorescence with 100’s of thread-like rays. The flower clusters appear at the ends of the rays. King Tut isn’t hardy below Zone 9, but when grown as an annual, it will reach impressive size. Another interesting specimen is the root beer plant, known botanically as Piper auritum.

Washington had Mount Vernon. Jefferson had Monticello. Bachman has Heritage Cottage. My garden is an idea incubator for home gardeners trying to make it easy to enjoy the gardening experience. My main growing system are EarthBoxes, in fact I have 135 in my garden. Let me say that again, 135! Living in coastal Mississippi I’m able to have two tomato seasons. Soon these fall grown heirlooms will have vine fresh fruit to enjoy. I also grow a variety of flowers to brighten the garden. In the spring I grew colorful impatiens, then transitioned to purslane for the summer heat.

This time of year, many gardeners are doing double takes as the naked ladies start parading around. Now you may be thinking that I’m just a dirty old man, but that’s not the point. The nekkid ladies, which is really fun to say, are really good landscape plants. The most common variety I see is Lycoris radiata. Lycoris also has other common names like surprise lily or resurrection lily. These names refer to what may seem like an odd way of growing. In the late summer and through the fall, Lycoris produces tall flower stalks without any foliage; hence the naked reference.