dramatic flowers

Ever dreamed about vacationing in Australia? I know I have. Well here, at least, you can take a trip through its most beautiful site (aside from the 'roos, sand, sun, surf and Sydney Opera House, of course) – the Melbourne International Flower & Garden Show. Spend a few minutes down under and enjoy some dramatic flowers and fantastic foliage with this guest post from Phillip Townshend, global operations director for Tesselaar Plants.

With the chocolate coma starting to fade and the Easter Break well and truly over, I thought it time to send a quick update on the Melbourne International Flower & Garden Show, which was held just prior to Easter from the 24^th through the 28^th of March. This internationally famous show, held for the past 15 years at Melbourne’s Royal Exhibition Building and Carlton Garden (below), is still an explosion of color and design. It's also the biggest annual flower garden show in the Southern Hemisphere!

Highlighting the creativity and passion of Australia's top floral and landscape designers, the Melbourne show is the horticultural industry’s premier showcase for a stunning array of inspirational displays and environmentally friendly ideas. As always, highlights included the floral spectacular inside the Great Hall of Flowers, the Children's Garden with its animal petting zoo and numerous show gardens created by some of Australia's most lauded landscape designers (all of which left me wondering why I never see the design opportunities the professionals do when working in my own garden).

Particularly inspirational for me was the outdoor exhibition of garden sculptures (below) organized by the Association of Sculptors of Victoria. All sculptures are for sale and range in price from a few hundred dollars to several thousand. I really like the huge metal sculpture of a rose. The next time someone asks me how tough Flower Carpet^® roses are, I'm going to show them this picture!

Of course, we were at the show on business, too. And as always, Tesselaar was actively involved, hosting the media tent and celebrating our wildly popular new plant introduction, Fairy Magnolias (below) with cupcakes and pink bubbly.

One thing that really surprised all of us was the absolute interest in the new Fairy Magnolias. Everyone loved the versatility of the plant (suitable for specimens, hedging or espalier (see second image, below) and how floriferous it was, with a bud at every leaf axil.

In a nutshell, the main points that people liked were the flower, light fragrance, the fact that it was a flowering bush that could be used for hedging, the year-round lush green foliage and rapid growth.

And Tropicanna® Canna (which will soon appear in stores in the Northern Hemisphere) continues to wow garden designers, with its inclusion in many of the show's displays.

 Here I am with Tropicanna Black (its purple-black leaves soon to be topped by a coral bloom with bright-yellow edging) and Tropicanna Gold (its green, yellow and golden leaves soon to showcase a sunny, yellow-gold flower). And below that, you can see the original Tropicanna Canna that started it all in a garden setting, soon to show off its bright tangerine bloom.

Anyway, should you be planning a trip to Australia any time in the future, try to visit during the Melbourne International Flower & Garden show. It is truly a spectacular celebration of the Australian lifestyle and our great outdoors, with some of the world’s leading floral and landscape designers, all in the beautiful Carlton Gardens with great food and lots of family fun!

This year, as always, I visited GardenScape – an annual flower and garden show where I live in Rochester, NY (Upstate New York). This year’s exhibit featured 20 gardens artistically landscaped in an "Eye of the Garden" theme (inspired by trompe l’oeil, an art genre that involves creating two-dimensional images that look 3D). And as always, the show was full of dramatic flowers, fantastic foliage and tons of easy-care gardening ideas.

Here are some of my favorite pics. (Click here to see more on my Flickr account).

Anthurium, Phoenix palm and foxtail lilies – part of an ikebana (Japanese flower arranging) exhibit on the way in:

Some vintage-style seed packets from Rochester, NY’s oldest retail store, Crosman Seeds. With folks returning to veggies, it would be nice to see seed companies like this have their day in the sun again …

Monochromatic gardens can be stunning, as is the case with the red echoes in these tulips, geraniums, holly berries, gladiolus and framed garden "art."

Close-up of a velvety, red orchid - I think it’s a cattleya? - part of an exhibit by the Genesee Region Orchid Society.

Natural stone sculptor D.A. Spencer hand carves glacier rocks into these natural waterfalls for landscapes.

Chinese quince bonsai … That’s so cool when the plant’s been trained and pruned to stay small, but the fruit is large because it’s really a mature shrub or tree …

Chinese wisteria bonsai:

Loved the texture of this Japanese plum yew … I’d never seen one before and it didn’t even occur to me this could be a yew.The green-yellow contrasts nicely with the blue-grey, too …

Wow … loved the phormium (New Zealand flax) sitting in a bed of black Mondo grass! This would be stunning in my garden with the new burgundy-black Black Adder^TM Phormium I’m going to be planting!

This mammoth water feature had a digital image projected onto it … Is this the future of outdoor rooms?

These carnivorous pitcher plants are using their beauty to catch their next meal …

Here are some good companion plants for pink hydrangeas in containers – Wandering Jew and purple heuchera …

Ahhh… my favorite underused garden plant – heather – with white hyacinths, white-and-green coleus, copper-burgundy heuchera, yellow tulips and hot-pink-flowered rhododendron.

What a great idea for a patio – a grouping of the same pot, in a rainbow of colors. (If I had to choose one, though, I’d go with the turquoise one in the middle. Turquoise is, after all, the Pantone Color Institute’s "Color of the Year" for 2010, and it always makes me feel like I’m on vacation next to the blue waters of the Caribbean).

Mixing ornamentals with edibles is a hot trend right now – hence this display of conifers, lavender, tomatoes, daisies and lettuce by the Monroe County Master Gardeners Program.

And awww … who could ever pass up this perfect gerbera daisy?

Hope you enjoyed the pics! See you back here next time for more easy-care gardening!

Happy New Year!

And happy National Mailorder Gardening Month (at least according to the Mailorder Gardening Association, which offers great information on gardening by mail).

Check out the catalogs

That’s right. Those mailorder catalogs – full of the latest dramatic flowers and fantastic foliage — should be filling up your mailbox any day now. So grab your Snuggie and a cup of coffee – it’s time for a trip to Catalog Land.

Getting to these catalogs and ordering from them early is especially important if you want one of those hot, new introductions that’s in limited supply. And since this blog’s about easy-care gardening, you might also want to add to this year’s shopping list plants described as "low-maintenance," "disease resistant," "pest resistant," "easy to grow," "self-cleaning," or "drought tolerant."

Plan, dream…have fun!

While you’re at it, now’s the time to sketch new garden layouts, plan additions or renovations and play with different plant combinations for your beds and container gardens. Just get out that stack of gardening magazines and 1/4-inch graph paper or your laptop (and try the free, online Plan-A-Garden feature at BHG.com).

Keep those houseplants alive

In addition to the houseplant care tips I provided in my Dec. 15, 2009 post on December garden chores, you’re going to want to think about increasing the humidity. “A lot of plants will benefit just from a misting – once a day, or once every other day,” says Dave Epstein, founder of GrowingWisdom, an online video website for homeowner-gardeners and landscape professionals. “It creates a miniature, more humid environment around it – kind of like a microclimate.”

Schedule tree service

“If you have a tree that’s dead, this is a great time of year to have it removed,” says Epstein. “Contact an aborist, since this is a slow time of year for them. Plus, your ground is probably frozen, so they can bring big equipment onto your lawn without doing any damage.”

Another reason to call them now is to set up a spring health maintenance program for your trees.

Regional roundup

If you live in a wamer climate, check out the fantastic, region-specific "Gardening To Do List - January in the Garden" post by About.com gardening guide Marie Iannotti. And wherever you live, she adds, don’t forget to feed the birds and provide them with fresh, unfrozen water.

As those mailorder gardening catalogs start flooding in over the next few weeks, it’s easy to get caught up in the beauty shots of each new plant, all by itself.

What’s difficult, however, is visualing how to use these new introductions as part of drought-tolerant plant combinations that give you dramatic flowers, fantastic foliage AND a low-maintenance garden.

That’s where this series of posts comes in, on Tesselaar’s new plant introductions for 2010. I’ve hunted down some fantastic companion plants for each of them, along with a few design ideas in general, all with easy-care, as well as design ideas, for each new plant - all of them designed with easy-care gardening in mind.

Today, the focus is Ceanothus Tuxedo^® (far left image and lower right corner in collage, at right).

The first-ever black-leaved ceanothus, or California lilac, Tuxedo’s fall-blooming shrub’s lavender-blue flowers absolutely pop out at you from from their dark, dramatic backdrop of purplish-black foliage. The extremely drought-tolerant selection, which grows 8’ high by 6’ wide, is also able to handle a windy slope and well-behaved when it comes to pruning.

Drought-tolerant design idea

Here’s a drought-tolerant fall combo (left) suggested in an Oct. 13, 2009 post on the “Daily Dirt” blog (at http://ow.ly/uliN) by Pacific Coast Home & Garden, the premier garden, home décor and hardware store on the Central Coast. In the image above, in the top right corner, are the following plants, clockwise from the top right corner: ‘Helena’s Blush’, Flax Lily ‘Little Rev’, Correa ‘Wyn’s Wonder’ and Ceanothus Tuxedo.   

Perfect color companions

Amplify the black-and blue theme with other blue fall bloomers like Tesselaar’s Agapanthus Bluestorm™ or any of the 10 blue fall bloomers suggested by About.com garden guide Marie Iannotti. Or, create a complementary color scheme by pairing the lavender-blue Tuxedo blooms with yellow fall bloomers like helenium, beautifully featured by Monica Milla in her Sept. 19, 2008 post titled "Favorite Fall Bloomers" on her gardening blog, Full Bloom (at http://mlive.com/fullbloom).