Southern Gardening

Have you been bored, restless, or even irritable because you can't get into the garden this winter? Well my friend you have cabin fever. Cabin fever is also called seasonal affective disorder because of the short and cloudy days of winter, and can impact many gardeners during the winter months. And for the active gardener it only gets worse when all those catalogs start arriving. But there is a simple cure until spring arrives. You need to grow an indoor microgreens garden. Microgreens are colorful, nutritious, and a delicious way to brighten any winter mood.

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.

You unlock this door with the key of curiosity, and you enter another dimension. A dimension of sight, a dimension of smells, a dimension of textures. You move into a land of both nature and permutations. You've just crossed over into....the Garden Zone. Its winter and cold outside and today we're at Pine Hills Nursery checking out a couple of very unusual plants. Our first botanical oddity is the citron plant. You may know citron as one of those candied fruits used in the holiday fruitcakes that you always throw away.

Everybody loves a garden party. But in our Southern Gardens, we often have invited guests, along with some party crashers, especially when it comes to nature's critters. Some of these critters are easily seen, and are invited and honored guests. Hummingbirds absolutely love cigar plant cuphea, so they can be attracted to our gardens by design. The same is true of butterflies. These colorful orange fritillary seem to be attacking this Dallas red lantana. The black swallowtails love the nectar from these Mexican firecracker plants.

A garden event I look forward to every year is when the winter cassia begins blooming. Wherever it's planted in the landscape the tropical looking flowers are sure to create winter interest. Winter cassia is certainly one of those show-stopping plants, especially considering the prolific blooms in the winter season. This specimen is a fantastic example of the impact of winter cassia. Imagine sitting on the porch on a cool day and enjoying the mass of bright yellow flowers. Beginning in November the flowers are displayed in spike-like clusters, each having up to 12 individual blossoms.

Here on the coast we've just had several nights of below 30 degrees. I'm visiting my friends Lisa and Marty to see how their new landscape has withstood the cold temperatures. While some of the more tropical plants were sensitive to the cold, the bulk of Lisa and Marty's landscape are plants that are appropriate for their planting zone. The primary groundcover plant is Chocolate Chip ajuga which has narrow foliage that is dark green with chocolaty-bronze highlights. This is an enthusiastic grower and it has been planted where the growth can be contained.

We are lucky to be gardening in Mississippi where we are able to use a combination of plants for winter color. Combining shrubs, trees, flowers and edible plants can make the cool season exciting and beautiful. Today Southern Gardening is back visiting our friend Catherine and her beautiful landscape. Creating the background for the winter color are the foundation plantings of Japanese cleyera. The foliage is thick and leathery with bright red petioles. The new leaves emerge reddish bronze and mature to a lustrous, dark green.

Our mission at Southern Gardening is to show you many beautiful scenes from the garden. These exquisite flowers require a lot of hard work from the home gardener. But there's another gardening enthusiast whose work we often forget about, the bumblebee. Bumblebees are busy little insects that constantly buzz from flower to flower, collecting pollen, and in the process, providing pollination for the eventual production of fruit and seeds. Bumblebees are attracted to many flowering plants. Just look at how many bumblebees are on these Victoria Purple salvia.

In the winter months gardeners need to rely on plant features besides flowers for color interest. Homeowners can use plants that produce bright and vibrant berries to add needed color to the winter landscape. Pyracantha is a landscape plant that almost drips large numbers of orange berries that hang in heavy clusters on arching branches. The fruit clusters are prominent from the late fall all the way through to the spring season. The common name for pyracantha is firethorn, and it certainly lives up to this name with the sharp thorns on almost all of the branches.

There are some garden events that you can set your calendar on, and if it's June, then the vitex are blooming. Vitex are one those plants that that make gardeners and non-gardeners alike stop and take notice. Vitex, also known as Chastetree, makes an outstanding small tree for the landscape. It typically is produced as a multi-stem tree, and will eventually grow to 15 to 20 feet tall and wide. The flowering period begins around Memorial Day on the Gulf Coast and soon afterwards in north Mississippi.