Southern Gardening

Valentine’s Day…….the season of LOVE. Don’t limit your affections for that special someone to just a single day. As a gardener, your love can bloom all year long. Planting gomphrena in the landscape symbolizes an unfading love. If you want to set off fireworks of love in your garden, then try Fireworks gomphrena, a 2010 Mississippi Medallion winner. The flowers are produced in prodigious numbers and are a long lasting hot iridescent pink that are sure to create colorful explosions all season long. A perfect love can seem like paradise.

One of the joys of our Mississippi winter landscapes are the gorgeous camellias. Growing up in the north I’ve always marveled at these evergreen shrubs blooming like this in the winter months. If you would like my recommendation of a shrub you should have in your landscape, then you need to try Shishi Gashira camellia. Shishi Gashira camellia is an outstanding flowering shrub and was a Mississippi Medallion award winner in 2002 and is still a winner in my book. It is very similar in leaf and flowering to our Sasanqua camellias and is often marketed as such.